The Game Designer's Dilemma

[Myke]

Then your definition of narrative elements is very vague. It just means 'things that happen'.

I just used the definition you laid down two posts above. "Story is events, dialogue." You exclude scenery, which I disagree with, but that's besides the point. If an 'event' is not 'a thing that happens' then I've completely lost my place in this argument altogether.

When someone talks about clearing rooms or killing enemies or recruiting allies, I would think they're talking about gameplay, not storyline. After all, these are things you are doing. However, your definition of narrative seems to include gameplay as part of it. I can't really argue with the importance of narrative, or how narrative is woven together with gameplay when you have specifically defined the word narrative to mean the same thing as gameplay.

These are things which, through gameplay, advance the story of the game. However, the specific mechanics that decide whether a blow lands and how much damage it deals, the fine-tuned calibrations that determines how closely your character's movements correspond to your inputs, the time spent selecting spells in menus or organising the party or selecting equipment: these things are part of the gameplay, but not part of the narrative. Hopefully, this clears up any misunderstandings you have about my position.

If everything in the game is the storyline, then it is not possible to have a non-story element and the word becomes meaningless.

As I intended to convey, everything that happens in the game is part of the storyline. The things that do not actually happen, which take place in the space between the player and the world, are exclusive to the gameplay.

EDIT: how do you know I'm not a politician?

Edited August 19, 2011 by miniBladez

[OriginalRaisins]

The most important aspect of any game is the gameplay. The other aspects (the graphics, the story, the music) should be there to supplement the gameplay. In rare cases (I.E. movie and book video games, or any video game based upon a set plot) the gameplay should supplement the story.

[zahlman]

Since this got revived, and since I have several years of professional experience in game development (including co-founding a startup):

0. Nintenlord has a very good point: there are a lot of ways to do it, and often a lot of possible audiences, even within a genre. Personally, I feel that a game is made more by a lack of weaknesses than by its strengths. Although no (explicit) story might be better than a bad story.

1. The "narrative through gameplay" thing. Narrative is like a piece of storyline that emerges through gameplay and fills the gaps. Because (despite what many modern game developers would like to believe, especially with the recent infiltration of so many people from the film industry) a game is not a movie. The story is interactive; you tell part of the story, and the player tells the rest by playing.

Example: The gameplay of SMB is running, jumping (, swimming, shooting fireballs, flying, whatever else they have in the newer ones...). The narrative that evolves is "And so, Mario avoided dying in the dangerous area, maybe got some power-ups along the way, pwned and/or outwitted Bowser, and rescued yet another toadstool. Where IS that darned princess anyway?" Notice how only the last part is expressed by in-game (or even in-manual) text. Failing to complete the game's objectives tells a (tragic) story, too, BTW.

It's actually hard not to imply a storyline (create narrative) in most genres of game. Pretty much as soon as you introduce a character - i.e. some graphical element on screen that is intended to represent either the player, or a sentient being under the player's control - you have a protagonist, and hence an antagonist (even if it's a Man vs. Nature situation, you can't avoid some kind of antagonist, because without a goal for your character(s), you don't have a game), and hence a story.

This narrative concept allows you to put the player in control of part of the story. This gets to be a big issue in game design in the west, because there's always this push to make things open-concept and non-linear and sandbox-y, but these things are hard to get right while (a) not creating logical inconsistencies and paradoxes; and (b) actually motivating the player to go through the whole "story mode". So you usually get very limited, "additions" to the story-line. Support conversations in FE are a good example of this: the player chooses who to support, and correspondingly chooses an additional piece of the story to reveal. Another good example is found in the Elibian Nights hack, where (spoiler?) there is a special cutscene accompanying the Jumping the Shark achievement (and others?). By meeting the conditions, you alter the story (literally, considering the setting of the hack).

2. About graphics. I feel like you guys are missing an important distinction. There's flashiness, which matters little, and polish, which matters a whole lot, and has been attended to by well-recognized games since approximately forever.

Polish is about taking care of the details, and making sure that nothing looks bad, as opposed to making sure that any particular thing looks awesome. Obviously, this is relative to the available technology. Artwork for NES games was designed to look good on 80s era TVs that would blur the shit out of things and produce somewhat unreliable colour, while working at a resolution that's not exactly native for the TV display. The good ones (IMO) paid attention to the sprite limit and avoided flickering by designing the UI to work within the limits.

In the GBA FE games, I notice rather quickly how certain map tiles don't fit together properly, and it detracts from the graphical experience for me. The individual river tiles all look fine (and the animation is a clever hack), but it all falls apart when a corner is misshapen. A lot of the backgrounds also come across as pretty cheap. On the other hand, I have to give them really high marks for the sprites: there's a consistent art style within each game, they could have punted on hair but they didn't (it's detailed for all the characters, typically with 3 colours reserved for hair), and in FE7, you get several sprites for each lord because they're needed to tell the story properly, not because they had a whole bunch of space left over in the ROM (which they did) or because they wanted to show off a bunch of alternate takes on those characters.

Consistency really is key. Palette swapping is not a cheap hack to get multiple sprites out of the same artwork - well, it is, but it also goes a long way towards achieving consistency. In the FE approach, a few specific colours are reserved as common, and get swapped according to the unit's team. The rest of the artwork has to be designed to look good with those colours being forced (and dominant), regardless of which set is used. It's not easy for the artists, but when you get it right, the result looks very well polished, because nothing is visually jarring - you have an expectation of what class X on team Y will look like, because of the palette consistency, and that expectation never gets broken.

This is all important because the eye is drawn naturally to things that look wrong. It's much harder to criticize a game for not being flashy enough, because there generally isn't a specific kind of flashiness that you're expecting to be there but isn't. Hackers and spriters can go back and say "I have an idea to make character X look more awesome", but nobody notices a character looking non-awesome on the first playthrough unless the character looks noticeably worse than others (lol Dorothy - but that's mostly intentional), or unless the lack of detail in characters in general is really obvious. Keep in mind that GBA FE sprites are 16 colours; you never look at them and think "gawd, these suck, there's totally no excuse for not doing these in 256 colours" (actually there kinda is, but that's beside the point) because they're full detail. Say we hacked around the limitations: you could use 255 colours on the skin tones and clothing/armor designs, and 1 on the hair, and it would really suck. Similarly, for hacks, you can sprite the most awesome OC ever, and then have the person doing the insertion mess up and get the blinking frames misaligned by a pixel and leaving a blinking white horizontal line over the eyes, and guess what people will notice?

[Rehab]

Arrrrgh, I really want to say something but I haven't read the whole topic yet, I'll compromise by not quoting anybody before I get all of it read

This is seriously a loaded topic, and I most like the way the a show called Extra Credits deals with it here (graphics versus aesthetics) and here ("art" focused games are not necessarily the opposite of "fun" focused games).

Edited November 8, 2011 by Rehab

[myraceislaguz]

Great Question! Form my viewpoint as a gamer gameplay is everything, followed by story and music. Atmosphere and graphic are important for certain cases and are good for getting the attention of the public. I find the idea of equal focus the best for a game. To experiment with your question try removing these aspects from a game. Is it more fun to watch or play? How much better do graphics make it? Breaking a game down into such small components and observing the difference with or without them allows you to find the fundamental parts of a game. Is Rez better in color? Is Fire Emblem as fun without reading the story? Does the music improve the gameplay experience of Bit. Trip? Work with these factors and figure out what makes it better.