[aynsof]

I remember all the press praising the original Half Life for its story. I was really surprised - it was the same story as all first person shooters going back to Doom:

Bad guys spawn across an inter-dimensional portal and start wreaking havoc. Protagonist has to kill them all, crossing the portal in the process to go destroy the alien leader.

There were some cool extra details - the G Man, the marines entering as a third force, the diversions to do things like launch a missile into space - but all of those things were additional to that same, basic story.

This author has it spot on: our standards for story telling in video games are really low.

[namdnay]

I think the praise for Half Life was the story telling. The story itself is pretty generic scifi action, but the fact that you discovered it through the player rather than a paragraph of exposition or a cutscene was pretty novel for that genre

[eterm]

Absolutely this. In half-life you were exposed to a world and left to figure out what was going on from that. You were rarely directly told to do anything.

For the first hour or two you were implored to, "Get to the surface" because it was your and your fellow scientists hope of being rescued.

When you run into the marines you aren't told they're bad, they just start trying to kill you and you figure out that you're not getting a rescue.

World-building wise it was leaps ahead of anything that came before it and the in-game (rather than FMV) dialogue was fantastic and immersive.

It didn't have "level screens", the level transitions were natural rather than forced with loading screen hints and title cards.

While that's all completely standard now, the other competitor titles at the time were games like Quake 2 and half-life's predecessors were games like Duke Nukem 3D and Quake, which while both ground-breaking in their own way weren't a touch on the visceral world of half-life.

The only other FPS games that came close to lore was rainbow six, but that was the "set pieces" style of choosing levels and going through rehearsed action rather than what felt like an emergent world in half-life.

While replaying half-life now it feels far more linear and scripted, that's because we have nearly 15 years of gameplay improvements built on top of where it lay the foundations.

For players at the time, going from games like quake to half-life it really did feel like it was genre defining.

[MomoXenosaga]

Half-life opening tram ride and test chamber were revolutionary. Nobody else had done something quite like that. Other games gave you the backstory in the manual and dropped you straight into the action.

[gary_0]

Half-Life is the "Seinfeld is unfunny" of FPS games.

[watwut]

> When you run into the marines you aren't told they're bad, they just start trying to kill you and you figure out that you're not getting a rescue.

That is not exactly subtle nor needs much figuring. Them trying to kill you is game telling you they are bad in very straightforward way.

[freeflight]

Let's be a bit more specific here: The first scene where the player encounters the marines is one where a scientist runs up to one of them, and gets gunned down by the marine.

That kind of scripted event, and environmental story-telling, was extremely novel in a FPS game back then.

It's easy to nowadays handwave that away as merely "Marines shoot player, player realizes Marines are enemy" like that kind of heavy scripting is just something mundane. But back then it wasn't mundane, it was quite revolutionary.

Before that the norm in the genre was mostly maze shooters with very limited NPC interactions, like certain Doom enemies fighting each other or some wall or another blowing up in Quake, Half-Life took all of that and brought it to a whole new level.

[watwut]

To be clear, I did played the game back then. I did not perceived it as subtle or indirect or needing to figure out. Back then years ago, that in the moment game moment was "ah, OK, soldiers are supposed to be bad guys and I am supposed to kill them".

Back then, half life was one of the games that made me think about how linear games are evolving to be. At one place, you could decide to go left or right and it joined back together quickly. It was straightforwardly prescripted, which is something we discussed with friends a lot.

I did not needed hindsight of years and my current experience. If anything now I have less experience as I spend significantly less time playing games like this.

[bsanr2]

Games have always been pretty linear, though. The ones that had a notable degree of "freedom" found that freedom in

a) Choosing which enemies to go and kill with your chosen color of pixel burst.

or

b) Choosing which set of text and vaguely representational spritework the game would expose to you.

Many "linear" games offer tactical rather than strategic freedom. There is a sort of conservation of experiential depth, limited by the players' ability/inclination to absorb new interaction concepts, and the availability of developer resources to build them.

[nkrisc]

That’s the game showing you they’re bad with gameplay instead of telling you with a cutscene or text.

[mcphage]

That sounds like it’s still a cut-scene, just one done in-engine. Does the player have any control over the encounter, like shooting the marine or the scientist, before the scene begins?

[crtasm]

Here's the moment, unclear if you have full control but I don't think it locked you in to watching..? https://youtu.be/nHXtv11ZAH4?t=184

yes here's a clip of someone saving the scientist: https://youtu.be/e_l84_7jDoU?t=163

[watwut]

Games were showing rather then telling long before half life. That was not something special. I don't know whether people here did not played games other then half life back then or half life is only thing they remember.

And the difference between full cit scene and what happened in half life was really really minor.

[crtasm]

But not in first person, you-are-present-in-a-3D-world games? At least I'm not remembering any that felt like Half Life 1 did.

The difference between a cut scene and embodying a character while things happen around you isn't a minor thing for many of us.

[hypertele-Xii]

You're gonna have to list some pre-Half-Life games that did a better job.

[ChrisKnott]

Yes but even this was revolutionary at the time - to reveal that information through gameplay rather than cutscene or text.

[mkotowski]

> This author has it spot on: our standards for story telling in video games are really low.

Are they? I would say that they are, but not for video games, but for all things in general.

Sturgeon's law [0] states that "ninety percent of everything is crap." And it was supposedly originally about sci-fi novels! “Fifty Shades of Grey” was completely criticized on all fronts by reviewers, but still became one of the top bestsellers.

If you look at ancient myths, we have things like a series of myths with a central plot resolving around a god raping humans of all genders (significant chunk of Zeus-related mythology), Loki changing into a mare and getting impregnated, because gods wanted to prevent a builder from getting rightfully earned reward [1].

Most of the stories created today are low-quality ones. And that was always so. Only when we look at the past creations, we can only experience those that were good enough to be preserved. The same will probably happen with video games if various DRMs will not prevent that.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon's_law [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sva%C3%B0ilfari

[Sebb767]

> “Fifty Shades of Grey” was completely criticized on all fronts by reviewers, but still became one of the top bestsellers. > [...] > Most of the stories created today are low-quality ones. And that was always so. Only when we look at the past creations, we can only experience those that were good enough to be preserved.

I'm pretty sure that Fifty Shades of Grey wasn't successful for its story, but for discussing sex and specifically BDSM in a more open way than what was previously seen in "mainstream" movies.

Overall, a lot of works that, on the surface, aren't very impressive by current standards, but still managed to stand out in a novel way. Fifty shades and Half Life are two examples, but you could say exactly the same thing about Minecraft, DOOM, most of the classical movies, most of the old "legendary" cars and a lot more. Things don't become classics by standing the test of time - if you discount nostalgia, a lot of "classical" stuff is crap by todays standard -, but by founding the genre they're later beaten in.

[slightwinder]

> I'm pretty sure that Fifty Shades of Grey wasn't successful for its story, but for discussing sex and specifically BDSM in a more open way than what was previously seen in "mainstream" movies.

And because it feeded from the Twilight-Hype, on which it was a juicy twist. For itself it probably would never have become such a success.

> but you could say exactly the same thing about Minecraft, DOOM

Can we? Minecraft feeds mainly on its powerful sandboxing and modability, which other games still can't really match today, while also still getting regular updates. And doom as a franchise continued to move forward and created new games. They don't remain successful just because their first versions were awesome at the time, but because they continued to output awesome successors.

This is very different from classics which are usually frozen in time and stay classics despite getting no updates at all.

[taeric]

Mentioning ancient myths, I'm struck by how surprisingly good the story telling in the new God of War games is.

[mbrodersen]

A clear example of reviewers not getting it. And yet another reason why you should ignore reviewers.

[Zababa]

I find it really weird to judge a story on what it boils down to instead of on how it's delivered. Imagine you have two versions of a game. The first delivers its story by long cutscenes and a omniscient narrator. The second delivers its story with the environement and dialogues with the characters, with the playing having to piece everything together. Even if the "story" is the same, the second game has a better story. Storytelling is a essential part of the quality of a story.

[losvedir]

What the story is, and how it's told, are both important aspects to varying degrees to different people. This is the case with novels, too. For example, I love a good mindbending plot, and barely care how it's told. I can tolerate / enjoy hard scifi or fantasy with detailed magic systems, even if the writing is considered not great. To me, the Ciuxin Liu Three Body Problem series is one of the greatest of all time because it has some absolutely wild ideas, even though it was translated from Chinese by different translators, and some people say not well.

On the other hand, a lot of people enjoy the art of literary composition. Grand scenes with precisely chosen words, "show don't tell" (which has little bearing on the underlying plot ideas, to me), and lots of rich description. I don't care for that sort of stuff, probably because I don't visualize things in my head much while reading, but I know a lot of people who judge books and authors on it.

[Zababa]

I agree with you, what I was opposing was more the reductivist view of things like "Half life is just ...". You could do the same with the Three Body Problem series and it would absolutely fail to explain what's great about the series. First book: detective story mixed with historical events. Second book: smart guy vs other smart guy. Third book: history through the eyes of one person that was here at pivotal events.

The comment I replied to mentionned:

> There were some cool extra details - the G Man, the marines entering as a third force, the diversions to do things like launch a missile into space - but all of those things were additional to that same, basic story.

I think it's wrong to separate a story between "a story" and "the details", all stories are the same if you boils them down enough.

[hairofadog]

Thanks for that perspective! I think about this all the time, and though my tastes are different I think you're exactly right.

I think of narrative as a combination of several elements: character, plot, world-building, execution (word choice, visual choices and performance for film or games), concepts and ideas. I tend to be drawn to strong characters first, but not always. Some examples off the top of my head:

Clerks: strong characters, mediocre almost everything else

Reservoir Dogs: strong characters, strong execution, minimal plot and world-building

Portal: strong characters, plot, world building, concepts, and execution

Brazil (the Terry Gilliam movie): strong world-building and execution, weak characters and plot

Lolita (the book): strong execution and characters

Harry Potter: strong characters, world-building, and concepts, goofy plot and execution

Primer: mind-bending concepts, good execution, weak characters and plot

Don’t know why, but I could go on and on thinking about it.

Edit: this list would imply I have pretty narrow tastes but really I like a little bit of everything; these are just some notable examples that came to mind as being particularly strong or weak in certain areas.

[fullshark]

Nah it was actually a big deal, Doom was basically: Get to the exit, in some illogically defined alien maze designed to maximize fun for the player. In Half-Life simply having the game take place in a logical location was a big deal even. I remember people praising Half-life for stuff as simple as weapons drops were in places that made sense, instead of floating in the middle of a corridor. The story wasn't the main selling point for sure, but the fact that it took place in reality, and had some sort of logical progression of events was a big deal.

[II2II]

Somewhat related: I remember watching a segment on the Computer Chronicles in the mid to late 1990's where a developer was boasting about the puzzles in some sort of space themed shooter. He then proceeded to show an example. It involved toggling a switch in a control room to open a door in an adjacent room. Ever since then, I have taken claims about the sophistication of video games (may that be in puzzles or story telling) with a grain of salt since the standards are remarkably low. The only way to assess those claims is to play it yourself or, these days, to watch a walk-through.

Even then, I tend to gravitate towards open world games without stories since it is easier to imagine your own than dealing with expository interjections. The Long Dark is a good example of this. The developers are trying to make a narrative driven game with their Wintermute story mode, yet the reality is that survival mode is far more fun. Rather than dealing with criminals in an otherwise inexplicable desolate wasteland[1] while trying to find my ex (their story), I am trying to figure out what happened to the once sleepy community that I last visited in my childhood while trying to survive long enough to be rescued (my story).

(1) Technically, there is an explanation, but it is weak and not always consistent.

[MomoXenosaga]

As opposed to what? The average superhero story that Hollywood has been milking for 20 years now? Compare videogames not to great literature but to popular culture.

[danielvaughn]

Yep. Just think about all the latest Jurassic Park films. They're almost identical to video games in story-telling quality.

[stubish]

We have a new generation of script writers shaped by computer games rather than books, radio or cinema. We will look back in fondness once we get script writers shaped by social media.

[atoav]

While I think the bassic narrative skeleton of the story is important, what is equally important is the world building that comes with it.

If your game feels like traveling to an alternate dimension with vivid details and differences a lot about the story can be excused, because the player will eventually find their own story within your game.

If your story is great and the freefloating passages are dull and lifeless the story can be great but it will never a good game.

Why not both? A great gripping story in a believeable world.

[pdpi]

> While I think the bassic narrative skeleton of the story is important, what is equally important is the world building that comes with it.

Case in point: Children of Men is basically a two hour-long escort quest. It's also an absolutely amazing film with amazing storytelling.

[atoav]

Yeah this is my point, if the thing a part of the game conveys is interesting, it doesn't matter all that mutch if is technically very simple in other regards.

What I hate however is when games have the most inspiring world and fail to tell unique stories in it. E.g. the game plays in South America, yet I learn nothing about the reginal culture when I play it, because all Characters are very generic.

This is something that made Witcher 3 great: nearly every quest managed to convey some feeling about how it must have been to live in the medival ages (or some fantasy version of it).

I like it when games take their own world seriously and root every character, story and object deeply within the history of that world. And yes, sometimes that means telling the player things they can't understand immidiately, because they come from a different culture and world.

If you could exchange the world just like that without changing a lot about the quests, you are doing it wrong.

[DeathArrow]

There are some games with good world building but meh stories. Many RPG can be fitted in this category, for example The Elder Scrolls series.

[danielvaughn]

> our standards for story telling in video games are really low.

At the same time, the upcoming Uncharted movie is looking to be substantially less interesting than Uncharted 4.

[MomoXenosaga]

I find it interesting that there are a lot of articles bashing videogame stories yet nobody is making these points about the movie industry.

The fact that the movie studios are now looking at videogames for inspiration is very telling IMO.

[slightwinder]

> I find it interesting that there are a lot of articles bashing videogame stories yet nobody is making these points about the movie industry.

What do you mean? People complain about movies all the time. Even Blockbusters, or especially braindead blockbusters, are being trashed everywhere. Marvel-Movies, as beloved as they are, are often bashed for how bad and generic they are. Hollywood for many people is synonymous for bad storytelling.

> The fact that the movie studios are now looking at videogames for inspiration is very telling IMO.

Because that's where the customers are. Gaming is primary a thing of younger people, and to bait them you need stuff that they know and love.

[swat535]

You can marginalize all stories this way because that’s the core of story writing.

There is always a villain , a protagonist and he goes through challenges to eventually defeat the villain. Finally he is a transformed man and returns home with the riches for society.

Sure there are some that deviate from the traditional plot but only very few of them succeed because to pull that off you have to be a master in story writing.

What makes a story great isn’t its uniqueness regarding the plot but having great character development, dialogue, depth and breadth of the environment, the correct use of things like midpoint, flashbacks, rising action and other devices to keep the audience engaged.

Making sure secondary characters contribute equally and help the protagonist grow is also important.

The truth is that making a great video game is an incredible effort as there needs to be a balance of everything such as great AI, graphics, etc and as I described above good story telling is already a massive undertaking.

Given the above , I’m not surprised many publishers cut corners because they are limited by time and budget

[ajuc]

> our standards for story telling in video games are really low.

Nah, the standards are just different because of the medium. Just like you wouldn't write a book where people sing for 10 minutes every time they talk, and you wouldn't write opera that lasts for 40 hours and has realistic acting and dialogs - you can't compare stories between different media ignoring the differences. And the difference that interactivity makes is bigger than the different constrains between novels and opera.

The more detailed and intricate a story of a game is - the less freedom of choice the player has. In the extreme case you have so called "visual novels" which let you make 10-20 choices the whole game at predefined places. They barely qualify as games and they are very niche genre in gaming because they don't play to the strengths of the medium. At that point you might as well read a "choose your own adventure" book. The most common emotion they cause in players is frustration because they wanted the protagonist to do something else, but they can't influence the story in any way at the moment.

On another end of the spectrum you have games like minecraft - where the story is your struggle vs the mechanics of the game, and there's no need for any pre-defined plot because you create the plot with every keyboard input you do every second. Freedom of choice = 100%, plot = 0%. Most gamers prefer these kinds of games because they can only be realized as games.

The plot in minecraft can be "night was coming and I forgot the close the doors to the mines, then a creeper came and blew up my bed and pushed me into a chasm near a river of lava - I had 5% hitpoints left and if I died then I would get respawned in random place on the map cause no bed - I would maybe have to spend hours trying to find my base again so I had to think hard how to get out of there alive". It's a great story that forces the player to feel strong emotions. And it won't happen to any other player the exact same way which makes it even better. If you add traditional plot to Minecraft you make it worse.

No matter if a story in art is detailed and intricate, or barely there - what matters is how it makes people feel. Novels have 100s of pages, poems might have 4 lines, but you won't say "stories in poetry suck".

In Opera the main point is music, so the story is designed around that (and the time and place constraints). In games the tradeoffs are different, but it doesn't mean that it's somehow "low standards".

Most games tend to prefer less plot and more freedom because it plays to the strengths of the medium. It's a trade-off.

> it was the same story as all first person shooters going back to Doom: Bad guys spawn across an inter-dimensional portal and start wreaking havoc

almost every book is Hero's Journey if we look from high enough. Details matter. You can take the same central conflict and write 1000 books that make you feel 1000 different emotions.

[hypertele-Xii]

> The more detailed and intricate a story of a game is - the less freedom of choice the player has.

That's merely an economic decision by the industry. You can make a game with detailed and intricate stories while simultaneously allowing full player freedom. It's just difficult and expensive to do so!

Consider something like Dwarf Fortress. It's detailed down to the alcohol content of the dirt under the cat's third left front paw nail. And the cat has its own will and you are permitted to do pretty much anything to the cat. But it's taken two people years to make it without much/any profit.

The state of affairs is simply that we are limited only by our imaginations and our economic utilities. We carry supercomputers in our pockets. Few have any idea what to do with them.

[SamoyedFurFluff]

I think there’s a bit where stories can be extremely complex but still have interactivity from the player. Bioware produces games like this where decisions made from previous games can be inherited to affect future games, and the overall storylines are complex and nuanced, albeit mostly in what BioWare can control (world building, npcs making decisions and having their own agendas, etc.)

[ajuc]

Yes, that's the hybrid model used by most RPGs:

- visual novel mode for dialogues and plot choices where player freedom is very restricted by story can be detailed

- game mode for mechanics and combat that have barely any influence on the story (besides "survive this challenge to continue") but players have freedom to express themselves

It is very formulaic in structure, I'd argue more formulaic than ancient theater, and it limits the possible plots a lot (for example you won't find any RPG where the hero gets weaker with time). But all these conventions are accepted as necessary evil by the intended audience, so that's fine.

[drdeca]

Not sure quite how much is required for something to count as an an rpg, but I have seen a couple experimental games where the way the difficulty ramps up is that after each level, the player has to choose which skill to lose / level down.

Didn’t have much of a plot though.

Just “you are fleeing a deep cavern or something after stealing a great deal of arcane power (more than you have the mental capacity to hold onto)”. Never saw how it ended. I imagine it is either meant to inevitably end in defeat, or it ends with the character having lost all the power they stole , escaping with only their life, or perhaps, having lost all of it, being unable to continue to evade capture.

[bujak300]

And now that lame video game storytelling style is bleeding into cinema

[djmips]

I feel that's been present in cinema for as long as it's been around. B movies, cheap horror, serials for example.

[hypertele-Xii]

I think it's the other way around. Lame cinema bleeding into video games. How many games are just glorified movies? With more cutscenes than gameplay?

Print bleeds into video games and movies as well. How many movies start with a text blurb? How many games literally just tell you what happened, instead of showing, instead of doing.

[apownx]

Its low because MOST the chimp troupe is incapable of doing harder cognitive work or for longer periods of time no matter what reward is dangled in front of them.

It doesnt matter which writer, author, musician, artist, game designer, movie maker you pick they all hit an upper bound of how many chimps in the the whole troupe they can connect with.

But if we are targeting specific niches rather than the whole population its a great time to be a story teller. The kind of engagement you can get is historically of the charts.