So, first of all, story isn’t one thing. In video games, it’s at least composed of setting, character, and plot, and while they interact, they’re kind of independent. Games can have good settings without good characters, and maybe there’s even a game someplace with a decent plot, although I never played one.

I’ve been playing Merchwarrior 4 Mercenaries lately, because it’s free. It has its share of problems, but for a free game, it’s pretty good. One of its strengths is the character that sort of administers your company, a sort of super-secretary who never pilots a mech, and it made me think about why this is such a strong, likeable character.

1) She is distinctive. She is the only character with an English accent. So you can keep track of her. This is easy to overdo. Overly distinctive characters get annoying.

2) She is unfailingly polite. I think this is really important. If you want a character to be liked, it is pretty much impossible to make a character too polite. Players have zero tolerance for rudeness from video game characters.

3) She only ever gives, never takes. She’s portrayed as the reason for for several unexpected arrivals of allies. At the same time, she never asks for anything from you. And when I say she never takes, I mean something that’s easy to miss: she doesn’t even take your time or attention. When she speaks, it’s because she has useful information, and she delivers it concisely.

If your likeable character is going to make demands, those demands have to be late in the game, and your character needs to have earned the right to make those demands.

4) She has next to zero attitude. I think most game designers err on the side of over-characterization, which is really just the use of stereotypes as shorthand for characterization. Your player is meeting the characters in your game for the very first time– they expect those characters to be as deferential and reserved as any other people we meet for the first time. You can be sassy or whatever, but only after we’ve had a few hours to get to know each other first!

5) This is one where this particular example (MW4) fails, but it’s important. To be likeable, a character shouldn’t lie to you about game mechanics. I will blame the game developer when a character tells me, “Hurry, we don’t have much time!”, because I know it’s bullshit, and we have as much time as I want, but I will also blame the particular character that is lying to me on that front.

It’s easy to miss that most gamers will like your characters by default. You don’t have to make them likeable, and efforts to do so can backfire. But there is very little tolerance for any unlikeable behavior (just as there is little for a RL stranger!) If you make a character, and I play a game next to them for a few hours and they don’t irritate me, I will have found them likeable, and I will probably have ascribed character and motivation even where none exists or is intended. So if you’re going to err, err on the side of subtlety.

A medieval game world that’s richly simulated and atmospheric, where I have to sneak about, eavesdropping, stealing, and occasionally getting into a bit of biffo if I’m in a tight spot.

It has a tight, focussed vision, and all the elements of the game support that vision.

I love the Thief series because Garrett’s voice has a great tone. He is a smarmy anti-hero playing outside the factions that exist in the game (something that many gamers probably identify with – perhaps a generally endearing human quality?)

He introduces the missions with his great voice, and machinates about the state of the upcoming mission, what the main challenges will be, and how it might implicate the different factions and players in the story moving forwards.

The missions are simple enough to just have one key core goal, and a little “dressing” to spice up the description, and then you’re GO!

It gave you such a sense of involvement through action as much, if not more than, through traditional story telling. Though actually this is more traditional than many realize when looking at it from a written novel perspective, it is just that this particular writers device has not been too well incorporated in a lot of video games. There is also the issue of a great many modern day authors, even many very successful, well known authors, having either forgotten, abandoned, or maybe simply never learning about this particular writers device, and instead relying completely on exhaustive description.

See, there is an old saying for writers, “show, don’t tell”. This saying stresses the importance of telling a story through action rather than description. A good example can be found in the introduction of a new character in a novel. Rather than giving the reader a long detailed description (which is what a lot of authors are prone to doing these days), instead fill in a few details about the character through action (the man’s thin frame was silhouetted in the doorway as the flickering candle light glinted off his wire rim spectacles). That is not going to tell the reader exactly what this guy looks like but you can flesh out more details, through action, as the story progresses.

You can also leave plenty to the reader’s imagination anyway. If presented with an easy to read account which engages and suspends disbelief then the human mind will naturally fill in many details without consciously even realizing it is doing it – leaving plenty of room for this helps create a story that appeals to the reader personally as well, because subconsciously, they helped write the story, and the characters looked exactly the way they imagined.

If you give a description readers will tend to have to consciously think about your description and then try to picture it in their head. But if you present details through action, the reader will have an effortlessly visual sense that the author is conjuring images in the reader’s mind.

In games, we don’t have to worry about any of that, because we have detailed visuals to show the audience. No need to describe the people or the places, we can just show them. But I think “show, don’t tell” still very much applies to video games. We don’t need to ask the audience to read long explanations, or have the story spelled out through dialogues.

a couple defining moments in the original Deus Ex:
The first time I was at my brothers apartment, I climbed down the fire escape to leave. The next time, authorities were busting down the door, but I had new leg implants so I didn’t need to climb down the fire escape. I just jumped, and the bum in the alley below said something (I forget what exactly) which punctuated the uncanny nature of what I’d just done.

On the way to HongKong we got sidetracked and wound up stuck in some facility for a short time. I had a cool sword at that point and I was hiding in vents, using a silenced gun and my sword to kill everyone in the place stealthily from the shadows. I’d hear the guards saying things like, “where the hell is he?”, “he’s like a ghost!”.

We often here about how great this game was, but usually the praise is about the plot as related through dialogues, which was fairly involved, and more intelligently crafted and presented than in most games. Or it is about the freedom to approach objectives from many different angles. Or it is about the scope of the game mechanics, being an action FPS with RPG elements (we have heard of plenty of those but few, if any, pulled it off so well). All of these are praiseworthy, but without that masterful pacing and active involvement in each of these elements to bring it all together it just wouldn’t have had that same feel, that sense of immersion, that level of suspension of disbelief that all conspired to give the deeply engaging sense that you were your character.

The story unfolded gradually, filling in details as you made your way through the world, at times you knew who you were and what you were doing – you were just going along with the story. Then you weren’t so sure, so you had to find out – you wanted to know the truth, so then you were chasing the story. Then, at times, the tables were turned and the story was chasing you.

Ultimately, even for all the games non-linearity, it was a mostly linear story, a linear plot, with a few choices along the way, that would ultimately lead you back onto the linear story sooner than later. But it didn’t feel linear. It felt like you were involved. It felt like your character was not following a predefined path.

It also took you to many different locations, giving that potent sense of global intrigue. Here again, lots of games take you to many diverse locations. But more often than not it feels like more of the same, just using a different color palette. A part of what made the first deus ex so immersive was that there was plenty of breathing room. There were plenty of subdued parts of the game, where you could walk around and talk with people, buy some stuff, but you still had direction, you still always had a motivating force and were never left wondering what to do next. You had reason to talk to NPCs and usually were rewarded with actually useful information, not empty small talk, and not long winded descriptions of NPCs back stories in order to create some context for some irrelevant side missions that you couldn’t care less about but that you still don’t choose the “do it yourself, I’m not your errand boy!” response to even though that’s what you want to say, because you need the XP and you don’t want to miss out on some good reward.

The downtime between battles, the exploration and dialogues with NPCs, as well as the believable story-related puzzles gave you the chance and plenty of time to really get a strong sense of place. You had the time for it to sink in that you were in this city and this city was distinctly different and felt far away from that city. Yet that time didn’t feel forced as it does in most RPGs where they desperately want you to spend many hours playing errand boy and doing boring stuff to get the feel of each new central location.

In those RPGs – more often than not each location has distinctly different cultures, politics, ettiquette, technology, etc. (though usually you would only know about these differences by being “told” by NPCs. Almost trying too hard to make sure you get that this is a different location. But your time is spent doing essentially the same things in these different locales, so despite the fact that NPCs will drone on and on about the social details that set this location apart, it doesn’t really feel like a different place. There are basically two locations in most RPGs, friendly areas, and dangerous areas (though you may occasionally run into some danger in otherwise friendly areas, and vice versa).

In the end, I think it all mostly comes down to very traditional, tried and true, story telling devices, which have been helping authors write engaging novels for ages. Things like pacing, repetition of form, metaphor, subtlety, contrast, etc. It is just that for video games these devices must be re-purposed.

I also think that a big part of the problem with todays games is that the big publishers think games must be accessible. Was Deus Ex accessible. I think it was far from it. Dumbing down games to get a larger audience is the wrong move. The reason why games don’t have a larger audience is because many people don’t take them seriously. Maybe you can pull a few more people in by making the game simpler so its can be approached more casually, and won’t intimidate. But games will gain a much larger audience when they are taken seriously as a real artform and a powerful medium for story telling, dumbing down games does the opposite to general public perception. The point here is that many may fully grasp the tenets of good engaging fiction, but they don’t believe that the audience of video games will find it appealing, they think it will go right over our heads.

On this website, in your posts, and in your readers comments, I see people dying of thirst – so desperate for deeper, more engaging, more meaningful games witch have more internally consist, well thought out, thought provoking stories and greater attention to detail in the game mechanics. So desperate that your picking apart the socio-political meanings of games like Hitman, and FarCry. Someone give these people some water!

Empathy, empathy, empathy. Extend empathy even to the bad-guys. Its easy as a writer to just like the good guys and hate the bad-guys, but that is your audience’s job. Its your job to be merciless in your depiction of their humanity, even if it hurts to show compassion to a rapist. Empathy is a powerful tool, and as human beings, we are kind of hard wired for it. Take that wonderful trait and use it to twist a knife in your player’s guts.

Because of the ability of a FPS to submerge the player in an environment, the “ambient narrative” of their surrounds is a powerful method of communicating story. Body language, visual juxtapositions, overheard conversations, subtle mise en scene and interactive tableau. Sure, you may miss some minor details, but the organic nature of discovery makes up for any amount of exposition. Your investment stems from your natural curiosity and empathy.

A more detached RPG, particularly of the older hex-based style, ropes you in by offering up relationships to the player. Our choice of whom we connect to based upon our own personal preferences is what builds investment, and develop organically on the part of the player. Actual conversations, deep pasts, complex motivations and no judgement on the part of the game in regards to our choice of companions. Don’t punish me for hanging out with slave traders with a universally applied binary morality. Do be courageous in confronting me with the honest consequences of slavery.

The further you step away from the character you control, the more powerful dramatic irony becomes. You are able to grant more player-independent personality to the character, because the game becomes more of a cinematic experience, where you rely less upon gameplay to hold attention, and more upon narrative tension.

Tension does not arise from uncertainty in regards to the story will end. (SPOILER) We know that we will kill Andrew Ryan at the end of Bioshock. We know it within the first half hour. There is never any doubt throughout the entire game. What holds us on the edges of our seats is not knowing what it will cost us. Not our lives (we can reload a saved game,) but the lives of our friends, our humanity, our freedom, the affections of a lover, our job, whatever. Establish early on, through whatever means are available to you, what is at stake. Games that fail to do this, either fail because they mistake uncertainty for stakes, or because they misplace what is at stake. I don’t give two shits about Dad in Fallout 3, and have nothing else to hold onto because he is the sole narrative stake provided to me. Dad buggered off, and now because of an imposed familial bond I am expected to go after him. I can choose whether or not to care about my slowly water-starved Vault in the original Fallout, because am not expected to have an emotional attachment to it. The Vault is not what is really at stake – what is at stake is my humanity. Will I let thousands of people die of thirst? (Not that the game actually lets you play it out like that, but at first glance that’s how it looks.)

With a 2d platformer based game with some conversational cutscenes, I think you’ve got ample opportunity for some neat mise en scene going on during the game. Little set pieces that you can’t miss because you’ve got a godlike sectional view of the building, but still create ambient narrative. You also have opportunity to distance your player a bit from the character, and implement some dramatic irony. Knowing what is going on behind the scenes creates that wonderful slow dawning horror of watching your character stumble into it. If you don’t interview characters in-game, its no loss, because whether or not you allow conversations with the bad-guys and civilians, you can still listen in on their conversations, and if you do that with recurring characters, it would be relatively easy for the player to become attached to certain ones and make choices around those characters, even if they never really interact with them directly. Voyeurism is a powerful tool. Just be sure to clearly differentiate between what your character is able to view, and what you the player are able to view, if you are going to do some player/character splitting.

Anyways. I’ve said too much.

One of the main problems games have with narrative is pacing, if you give the player any freedom at all you lose the ability to control the pacing of the game. Thus non-linear games are often at their best when they deliver bite sized episodic narrative rather than grand story arcs. Everyone can name a well done sidequest in an RPG, naming a good main story is harder.

Well as I said I love Bioware games and I love their writing, but story isn’t necessarily the best part, so what does have good story?

Well not a lot really, it often gets let down by the plotting, having a big padded gameplay section kind of messes up your narrative flow. However here’s some ones that work in some way:

I think Alpha Protocol really shows you how to do a flexible interactive story that responds to your choices if you like that sort of thing (and I do).

I think CoD4, despite being the fratboy multiplayer game of choice, actually did some really good things with the single player narrative. It added a note of bleakness and pessimism that made it feel real and traumatic in an arena of military bravado shooters, it felt like news footage of war, not a war movie, and wasn’t afraid to take a downbeat tack for narrative reasons (games tend to go for a win condition, which can sometimes feel like a tacked on happy ending). The sequel completely failed to realise what the first game did right and did the exact opposite.

Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, is a prime example of how good characters and their interactions can lift mean an oft used story is perceived as ‘classic’ rather than ‘overused’.

For instance, I think you’re right that Mass Effect has a better story than Mass Effect 2 if by story you mean the main arc of the plot, however I think ME2 has much better writing overall. There characters were generally better, and there were more of them, their personal narratives were better, the sidequests were better crafted and more original and the dialogue itself generally worked better and it had really strong dramatic turning points at each end (The attack on the Normandy and the Suicide Mission). However it was so character dominated (no bad thing in my book) that the main narrative was a bit withered. Aside from these two big events it was mostly episodic, it lacked the grand narrative of the original (I for one actually really liked the conduit thing, the Protheans are the real heroes) and, as has been mentioned, had trundle through some ludicrous plot holes regarding Cerberus and the Spectres to justify the changeover from the first game.

So Mass Effect has a better story, but Mass Effect 2 has better writing (and is a better game) in my book.

I really love Bioware games, but they’re often held up as the gold standard for Story in Games, and I’m not sure that’s true, I think they’re the gold standard for Characterisation in Games, Dialogue in Games, maybe even Writing in Games overall, but story is actually one of their weaker aspects. Again this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, it’s down to the freedom they like to give you in the middle section.

One thing I’ll say I’m not actually a fan of, despite it’s popularity, is the HL2 narrative method.

Basically, it’s not very good,

I mean, it’s all very well talking about ‘show, don’t tell’, and ‘interactivity based narrative’, it’s the kind of thing that sounds fantastically arty when you write about it, but it has a lot of serious problems, namely, it’s ludicrously easy to skip right past it.

If you’ve not been briefed before on how narrative works in HL2 (as I wasn’t) there’s a fair chance you’ll not look at the newspaper clipping for the requisite amount of time or somesuch and simply not trigger the explanation. I usually consider myself very good at following and remembering details of even poorly explained plots, but I played most of HL2 without the foggiest idea what any of the back story was. If you have to be told how to play the game in a certain way to actually get any exposition, then you have failed at exposition. You’re supposed to communicate your information clearly and discretely to the audience, HL2 absolutely fails at this.

In short, I really, really hope that the Valve method isn’t the future of narrative in games, because I’d take a sumptuously delivered, fully interactive Mass Effect conversation over running around staring at bits of wall in the hopes people will act as if I asked them a question any day of the week and twice on Tuesdays.

Good dialogue is really important. I thought Alpha protocols was realistic and genuinely funny. I liked how if you just constantly picked the sarcastic option people got pissed off pretty quickly.

Dragon age was more surreal but I thought the conversations between characters while travelling were one of the highlights of the game and drew me into the characters. Mass effect never quite emulated this charm to me.

Someone else mentioned it but wildly different storylines I love as well. Me and my brother both played Alpha Protocol but we found completely different things. Rather than finding it annoying I’d missed out on the game I wanted to go replay it.

*SPOILERS* (DRAGON AGE 2) Unlike Dragon Age 2 which gave you decisions and then made you watch while it shoved the same result down your throat anyway….. Damn you Merril and Anders why wouldn’t you LISTEN! *SPOILERS*

Lastly consequences of your actions. Dragon Age, Alpha Protocol, Dragon Age 2, all failed on this in my opinion. I’ve sunk 60 hours into a game (DA:O) I want personalised clips, I want to bump into people I’ve saved and have them invite me to dinner, I want elves to run screaming away from me and hate me because I killed or insulted every elf I met. I need mini resolutions through a game which feel personal (at a basic level characters in AP would refer to your actions) and I need an exciting summary at the end with personalised clips. Hmm now I’m ranting.

TL:DR
– Needs good dialogue, engaging dialogue system (AP)
– Wildly varying plotlines
– Good resolution at the end.

It’s Mass Effect 2 that has a great story. Perhaps not a great plot, but it’s pretty much a character piece with explosions. It put my Sheppard in interesting places and gripped me like nothing else. Shame about the terminator-goliath at the end.

Sorry for posting twice,
groovymann.

And then i cared. I looked through the victim’s stuff, listened to the tapes and… dammit Bioware. It’s almost cheap in its intensity. Crying parent, cheerful naive messages, room with vestiges of childhood. Yeah, yeah, i’ve seen it all before, and why are my eyes suddenly watering? I went from genuine sadness to sudden anger. The most emotion a game has ever made me feel, the most emotion any piece of media has made me feel: this girl was never on screen, but i cared about her more than Eli Vance, more than Saren, more than any of the galaxies i’d saved. Aeris? Screw her. I role-played a strictly lawful good Shepard, but had the option come up, i’d have shot the Ardat-Yakhsi myself. I cared for that never onscreen girl more than anything else in any game ever.

That’s how you make me care. Cheap tricks. Hitting a BIT too close to the reality bone. And i dunno, maybe she had a really good voice actor.

thanks,
groovymann

Ultimately a lot of game stories fail because they don’t focus on characters, they focus on events: Insurgents have gained access to a nuclear weapon and they’re threatening to detonate it on American soil unless your special forces unit can kill a bunch of people. <— That type of thing.

It's far more interesting if you take that same story and focus it on the people. Perhaps the insurgents are members of your old unit. On your last mission, your unit was captured, you escaped, managed to reach a radio, and were ordered to leave the men behind and complete your mission alone. It's been tough for you since then; racked with guilt, you've hit bottom, your relationships have suffered and you've taken to the bottle. When your unit returns seemingly from the dead, angry at the nation that abandoned them, you're plucked from the gutter to go deal with them, after all, you know these men best. You're still have a sense of duty to the mission, but you're conflicted about taking these guys out, after all, they used to be your friends and you did abandon them.

Ok, so that's pretty cliché, but you get the idea: Focussing on the characters is more interesting than focussing on the events.

I think the difference between Mass Effect 1 and 2 is that the villains care about massively different things, and how much we know about them is different. In ME1, Saren CARED about saving the galaxy in his own way, and I think that helped motivate him. It made his betrayals punch, his sliminess succeed, because at the end there was something he wanted.

In ME2, you’re just fighting the nameless, faceless reapers–which is really just Space Cthulhu–we don’t know quite what they want or why they want it–it’s so nebulous it doesn’t motivate. I think we do get a better grasp of the side characters in ME2 like the Illusive Man and all of the ship’s crew, because you spend so much more time delving into their wants and needs—but at the expense of the villain’s. Suspect this will be compensated for in ME3 though.

Video games have the interesting possibility to play with what the PLAYER wants though–think that’s what can separate them from films, books, etc. Bioshock has done a fantastic job with this, with the player’s motivation being focused to align with the character’s, so that when the big twist hits, the PLAYER is the one who wants to see things through, not just the character.

What really grabs me the most is a story that unfolds “naturally”, where I’m not given a full background in to who my character is, where I am etc as I start… Cave Story springs to mind. It keeps the mystery, it keeps me wanting to know more.

I think most games mess up their story, not because the plot is terrible or the characters are terrible, it’s because players don’t get what’s going on. You, the writer gets what’s going on, because you wrote it and you care about it, and you have context for it, but the player won’t absorb everything because there’s a good chance they won’t care (at least not to start with). Some simple rules to avoid this…

1. Show don’t tell: If you have a bad guy, don’t just tell someone he’s the bad guy, show him doing something bad. If you have two guys who are friends, don’t just tell people they’re friends, show them going through trials together that forms the bonds of friendship. If your setting is meant to be a dystopia, don’t just tell people it’s a dystopia, show elements of control and repression in the environment (oppressive security, propaganda, repressed civilians, queueing for rations, etc).

2. Keep the number of main characters low and use easy to understand archetypes. Too many games go for big casts of characters, or introduce tons of villains (usually so they can have a bunch of boss fights), but give lip service to each. The player needs a lot of screen time to really invest and care in a character, so it’s better to limit the number of characters and really give them the time they deserve.

3. Only FORCE the absolute basics of the story on the player. Just basic motivations like: Escape the city. Make everything else optional (audio logs, environmental narrative, etc). If you keep pausing gameplay to deliver lengthy dialogue explaining every detail about your story, players are gonna skip it and miss even the basic motivations that might have given them some context for what they’re doing.

For more info, I’d really recommend Creating Emotion in Games, by David Freeman (http://amzn.to/hn9miC). Also check out Ken Levine’s GDC talk on Storytelling in Bioshock (http://bit.ly/i9I9vc), and finally, Red Letter Media’s Star Wars reviews are actually a great 101 on common storytelling mistakes (http://bit.ly/hVvLWF).

And it blows my mind how it has moral ambiguity and completely justified actions regardless of how much of a baby killer you are. There is one path where you can side with terrorists in Saudi Arabia (as a US agent burn noticed) because the reason behind the whole conflict is due to an American company desiring to sell weapons to both sides in effectively a cold war scenario.

This level of intelligent writing and lack thereof in mainstream gaming is disappointing, because if anything Mass Effect has effectively told me that your actions are either good or radiating a aura of red and puppy-kicking.

A great story, but I imagine a majority has overlooked it due to the mediocre reviews it got on release (which more likely than not didn’t finish it/witness the shades of grey due to insane work schedules). A flawed game but darn, did it raise my standards of game writing. I actually chuckled when people discussed the choices in paths you can undertake in ME2 (“Wow, you chose what I chose?”) after playing AP.

In regards to stuff that I think would be applicable to your own game, I’d suggest you look into / play Uplink. Although I imagine you’re a big fan already as you love you’re a massive Introversion fan.

The good thing about Uplink is that the majority of the story is done through text, you can just stop playing at any time, yet it still feels like it has forward momentum and tension.

I think some of the greatest moments in games are when an old environment is turned into a new environment / challenge. For example, Deus Ex, where UNATCO HQ is a friendly hub at the start, but later you end up there and you have to escape.

The opportunity for you to do this in your own game is obviously there. You could possibly have a friendly level, where you get your missions from at the start. Only to later have to go back to that friendly level later in the game to break in and steal something.

Once you’re done, spice up the just developed story with sub-stories to increase the depth level of the overall story and disabling other people from understanding it just by looking at it. The idea is to make them play the game to figure out the whole story.

An example is Matrix 1, one of my most favorite movies. Someone with no idea wouldn’t understand the whole movie just by watching some 1 minute clip from somewhere within. Also, the movie involves the marriage of 2 main different fields (i) man vs machine – war & (ii) virtual reality, an example which shows how the depth level in a story can be increased by merging different fields, ideas, etc.

Hope my words help.

To be honest, I wouldn’t start judging a game based on its story immediately starting it. I’d try it out further if the gameplay is good enough. Anyways, I’ve categorically provided the names of some games further down. Some of them take some time investment, some of them don’t. Hope my words help.

I don’t think stories in video games can be made to work like in movies or books. Because most of the stories in games, in some ways get diluted by the gameplay, mission objectives, etc halfway through. And the ones that become exceptional, become so by staying cohesive till the end and keeping the player hooked from start to finish. (More on this a bit later.)

So, this is where presentation (including soundtracks) come in to make sure that everything stays cohesive and to the point. That is, the story, gameplay and presentation all work together to deliver the designer’s true vision as much as possible!

Sounds like Gunpoint’s going to follow a main personal story and a secondary story involving clients. This is fine. Reminds me of Burn Notice.

My first suggestion for Gunpoint is – try to keep as much angles open as possible for the future so that you if want to take things to a new direction, everything still makes sense. For example, Max Payne 1 was outstanding even with its cliched story(I mean the Payne family tragedy and the following revenge by Max). What it couldn’t do with its story made up for, through its presentation. But when Max Payne 2 came out, the story in it lacked the smooth cohesion like its predecessor and lacked the same kind of driving force. This is because the devs didn’t think about the sequel until they started working on it.

A successful example of this is Assassin’s Creed 2 and it’s follow-up Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood. The following was clearly in the devs’ minds while ACII was being developed.

What I like in a story are twists not seen before and cannot be predicted. If I can predict, then it’s a problem for me.

From a gaming perspective, this can be constantly rewarding for the player. Like, I finish a level, the story unfolds a little and a part of my brain explodes. Why? Because something happens I didn’t see coming. Then, what can I do to find out what happens next? Simple. Finish the next level of course! Thus, a solid story with solid twists can work like a driving force for the player to play the game.

This isn’t very different from what happens in The Dark Knight. Joker is always ahead of his game and the audience has no way of knowing what he’s going to do next. And the only way to find out is to sit patiently and continue watching the movie.

In terms of twist in stories, the first game I liked was BioWare’s Knights of the Old Republic. The twist was based on the identity revealation of the game’s protagonist and is such that a lot of people never saw coming. And it happens when over half the game is over.

I’ve also loved stories taking place in the protagonists’ lives; protagonists, whom and whose overwhelming worlds I’ve gotten attached to. Garrett and his medieval + sci fi themed world acted very powerfully for me behind liking the Thief series’ story.

Another example is Half Life and Half Life 2. I don’t really see the Half Life series having much of a story but whatever story they had worked for me. Also, the Longest Journey: Dreamfall. Awesome, powerful, female lead and the game’s over the top world.

The other kinda stories I love are personal stories. Examples include Max Payne 1, Hitman 2: Silent Assassin and Assassin’s Creed 2.

Although the story in Max Payne 1 is one seen before elsewhere but the writer and devs made sure that we understand and experience his pain psychologically by going through his nightmares, seeing as to how and why he couldn’t save his family, his guilt because of holding himself responsible for the death of his loved ones and how he sees the world around him dying along with him. This game, I tell you, was too ahead of its time.

We are what we are. I love Hitman 2’s story because 47 gets his chance to live a normal, peaceful life denied and soon finds himself pursued by the life he once chose to leave behind. What is remarkable about the story is stone-cold 47 who is known not to care about anyone ends up saving someone voluntarily in the game’s grand finale. The ending was just too overpowering. In general, as a character what I found so inspirational about 47 is this guy doesn’t have a life and yet he lives his life without complaining and doing what he’s good at.

There are a lot of things to say about Assassin’s Creed 2’s story but I’m only including this here because of the part involving what happens in Ezio’s early life. This game was a celebration for me from start to finish. Because I really loved each of the Ezio’s family members and wanted justice for what followed. I fell in love with each of the family members because of their innocence, the believability of their characters, their innocent accent and Jesper Kyd’s soundtracks. I’ve never in my life felt so emotionally connected to any other video game characters like this.

Above, the characters I’ve mentioned are also my favourites and I think I’ve explained why.

In general, I love rated-R stories. Stories that have psychological and emotional aspects with characters that can be hated, loved or cared for.

Gunpoint crazy, crazy story angles:
– The superhero/savior
– The morally ambiguous, rated-R – antihero
– The rated-R, for the greater good – antihero
– Self-centered lone wolf
– Enemy Doublecross-er
– Secretly schizophrenic
– The spy with the fake license to kill

All I can think of right now.

Basically, split all the information you want to give the player into three categories: crucial, pertinent, and fluff. Crucial information is what the player has to do, and it should always be available (preferably flashed in giant letters across the screen to begin with and then available in a menu screen from then on). Pertinent is what the player’s options are for how to do it, and it can be more or less obvious – you can put NPC’s in the player’s way who talk about it when the player comes close, or you can secret it away in an email in some corner of the map, depending on just how important it is for the player to know. The rest is fluff and should always be opt-in – something that the player has to actively seek out and something they can skip through if they change their mind. It can be useful to tie each narrative mechanic in your game to a certain information priority level, eg. info ticker at the top of the screen is for objectives, NPC dialogue is for pertinent dialogue, e-mails and newspapers and wall decals are for fluff.

You seem to regard characters as very important, and that’s absolutely an admirable attitude, but one of the hardest things to get right is the balance between gameplay-relevant information and character development in dialogue. Ideally NPCs should deliver gameplay-relevant information in a way that gives the player an idea of who they are and what they want, but I think you’ll always be better off with too little character development than too much. If the player has a way to initiate conversation with characters, you can do what Deus Ex did: have their first conversation with gameplay-relevant information fire when you get close to them, then give them an extra conversation or two for all the fluff, or even just a set of one-liners, which only plays if the player clicks on them after the first conversation is finished.

But yeah… squeezing personality into your average “The code to the basement is ‘wildebeest'”-type conversations is super difficult and I don’t think I’ve mastered it myself (yet?)

I’ll have my desk cleared by the afternoon and my resignation notice on your desk in an hour.

Character death should never end the game.

Don’t force a reload if an important character dies, the people’s stories wouldn’t just end there, I want to see the impact and fallout of someone important dying. If lots, or every, character dies then the game becomes a tragedy, potentially resulting in the mental breakdown of the main character as everything he touches turns to dust. Or if people live it is an epic tale of survival against the odds. Both are games I want to play.

In the same vain, I don’t like a character death being completely out of my control. At the time of death it might be, but there should be events in the past that would have changed that; so I can wonder, what if I’d done this or done that.
But don’t make the choices obvious, make them subtle (i.e. don’t highlight ‘THIS IS A CHOICE’, but reserve opaque choices for a real gut punch (otherwise they can be frustrating).

I also reckon that an enforced ‘no-loads’ option (i.e. you stick with the choices you make, for better or worse) should be available in more games (I want to play no-loads, but don’t always have the willpower. I’d prefer it if past me made the choice for me, it’s also great for adding tension, see Uplink. I’d still allow for a reload on death unless you’re in ‘Super-Iron-mode’), in addition to any normal loading system, that way you’d cater for both crowds.

I mutter to myself in a faux noir manner all the time! It’s how I know I’m not underwater.

Mass Effect (&ME2) Spoilers ahead.

Major issues stem from games that put you into a role but rather than building on the fiction and drawing you into the story, instead do things that are completely ridiculous for the character they’re trying to portray.

Mass Effect (and by association ME2 & 3) suffer from this problem. They imbue you with this amazing title as Specter that is touted as one of the highest authorities that there is in citadel space, and it makes you feel like you’re going to go into space and kick ass – and yet the first planet I tried to visit was Noveria at which point the local security starts giving me attitude and telling me to holster my weapons.

That made me want to kill them all on the spot – and I’m they guy who always does the angelic approach in games like ME or Fallout.

This isn’t even going into the whole “THERE’S REAPERS!” “We don’t Believe you” issue that while I understand is a necessary plot device, is just plain stupid. Maybe it would make sense if the council all had Reaper brain slugs.

Another example is the lack of choice to join Cerberus or not – these are bad dudes who have killed me numerous times before, and given the choice I would have planned a daring escape and killed the guards and stolen the Normandy, which would have actually been awesome.

I’ve said too much.

Darwinia
Dr. Sepulveda, who I liked because of both his fluff and his well-balanced terse, put-upon, unwelcoming initial contact, told me he cared about the Darwinians. Therefore I immediately cared about the Darwinians.
Crimson Skies
Newsreel about your gang. Your gang talks about how they found out about the gold, and who else is on their way to it. Then you’re in the air. Bam.
ICO
The only other person in the world, and the goal of your first puzzle. Then you hold her hand. Making the first goal to make/earn contact with a stranger, rather than seeking the approval of a stranger the chracter already knows: Probably a great general starting technique.
Command and Conquer 1 and Red Alert 1
Installer cleverness and good high-budget cutscenes. Irrelevant to you.
Mirror’s Edge
Pure brute-force visual art. The opposite of what you need to aim for.
Grim Fandango
How else could this have started than with a sales pitch and bawling-out? So he’s a skeleton but he wears a suit, has a job and a lousy boss. Sold.
Homeworld/Cataclysm
This actually probably has something to say. The Hiigarans find out their goal as we do. They manage orbital chemical rockets, send up their first radar satellite and holy shit! There’s a giant damn spaceship in the desert! Wait, it makes sense? It’s from us?! This could have easily been a horrible dispiriting start that would have tainted the whole game if Karan S’jet had simply told us ‘we were banished and want to go home epic quest time’.

New examples:
Beyond Good and Evil
Even the initial dialogue really never goes above ‘good’, and there’s plenty of poor stuff throughout the game, but I bought into Jade in seconds – http://www.brainygamer.com/the_brainy_gamer/2009/01/heres-jade.html – and bought into her world minutes later when A. I saw her house – She has a home! It has rooms! There’s no reason for it to have rooms except that it would be lame if it was a ‘functional’ savepoint hut – and B. I was told to take a picture of one of the animals in the beautiful world around me, making the animal and the world real instead of scenery, and promised that if I kept looking around there would be other animals going about their own business in complete irrelevance to anything else that happened in the game.
Flashback
I have been shot down off a hoverbike by a spaceship over a vertical jungle. My own face is telling me things I don’t know. I can do sweet acrobatics and have a gun that is loud and deadly and hitscan. OK, onward!
Out Of This World/Another World
Sort of unfair given that it’s only arguably even a game, but starting you off drowning in a tentacle-beast pit is a great way to make you press the up key like you’ve never pressed it before, and let you know that the place you’re in means business.

Good intention do not always equal good result.

Why? Because intention does not equal action. The NAZI final solution started off with good intentions. Good intentions do not always equate good intent.

I want to chance to do horrible things in the name of good intentions. Sacrificing babies in the fire to Ba’al is suppose to send them straight to the afterlife, so its a good thing, right? Also let me be an evil SOB who works towards a good cause.

This also applies to gameplay:

If you send me to rescue someone I want to be able to kill every hard working honest security guard between me and them leaving a trail of blood and orphans on my way to rescue one person. Or should I be sent into an evil corp, I want to option to bypass or just use non-lethal takedowns because I like the suits the guys wear.

When you start a new game in Planescape: Torment, a conversation begins. I was hooked by the end of this conversation.

Since that’s my all-words example, I guess I’ll give a no-words example: the beginning of Ico.

I really like it when games give lots of back-story to their world for me to sift through at my leisure, like Dragon Age and Mass Effect. After the game’s started, however, I prefer being left in an interesting world with interesting rules and mechanics to discover my own stories, rather than being dragged by the nose through somebody else’s regardless of my will or actions. Yeah, I know you wanted to be a film director, Mr. Game Designer, and you got lumbered with this job instead – but don’t take it out on me, OK? I’m not here, as Nathan said, just to press buttons. Give me a game to play.

A good way of making me not care about a character is to have their fate decided regardless of my actions. If you kill a character in a cut-scene and there’s nothing I can do about it? I won’t care. If I had to slog to keep them alive in order to get them to the cutscene you’re going to piss me off.
But if I get someone killed through my own stupidity, I’ll feel guilty and miss them as the game goes on. If I save someone who could be killed (without just going to Game Over) I’ll feel like a hero. This is probably why everyone was so fond of Dogmeat in Fallout 1.

Character-wise, I particularly liked Alistair, Morrigan and Leliana from Dragon Age. Alistair for the reasons mentioned before, Morrigan because I felt sorry for her despite her being genuinely powerful and witty (pathetic, miserable and whiny characters you’re supposed to feel sorry for – Woe-Is-Me-My-Wings-Have-Rotted-Off from Baldur’s gate 2, for instance – just annoy me), and Leliana… Mostly for her voice, I think, which isn’t helpful for you.

SHODAN, of course. For being everything a villain should be.

And maybe Dr. Breen from Half-Life 2, although for the wrong reasons. I didn’t get on with the game the first time I played it. I felt lost, confused, and didn’t know why I was doing what I didn’t have any choice but to do. So at the end, when Breen did his “I’d like to take a moment to address you directly, Dr. Freeman…” speech, I was agreeing with him. I was desperate for a “Sit down and have a paddy in the lift” button, but it wasn’t in the manual. So I killed him, after all his work protecting humanity from extermination, and the G-Man popped up again to whisk me away with a “Rather than offer you the illusion of free choice”.
Ironic that Half-Life 2 is hailed for never taking control away from the player, when really it never gives the player any control to start with.

I think that if you must have twists, try and have as few as possible but make them huge. KotOR is a good example of a single twist doing wonders for the game.

Also, PLEASE make your story gel with gameplay. Nico Bellic getting all angsty about his war crimes after he’s killed hundreds of people on the drive over is irritating to say the least.

If this is some flavour of noir, are there or have there been people on either side of SPINet who really should not have ever gotten on it? Maybe somebody has mistaken it for a place to hire a hitman, or starts waving around their access to a certain room. Do they ever realise that they’re out of their depth, and if so when? Would a character who is or has been in over their head a good contact point or focus for the initially ignorant player?

Does anyone troll or Rickroll a network full of potentially-lethal PI/spies and shadowy Powers That Be? What happens to someone that does? If they live, do their doors ever work properly again? How long might such a community hold a grudge?

Is the mission always to reach a terminal and get out? Do we ever try to set up state for a scenario that occurs later with the avatar offscreen (‘the next day’) or is carried out in the level by scripted AI? Driving the hacks for a heist? An extortion?

Otherwise, I tend to prefer minimalist show-don’t-tell over reams of exposition. Mass Effect’s universe is pretty generic, so it dwells too much on background in some cases. Half Life 2 is a masterpiece of teasing the player with bits of background information scattered around the place while overtly stating as little of it as possible as exposition. It’s also one of the most compelling alien invasion stories in a game, too. But still, I think exposition kills stories unless it’s handled with great care.

For specific examples, you can me to the group touting Portal 2, though some other notables are Bioshock (1 more than 2), Batman: Arkham Asylum, and Shadow of the Colossus. Heavy Rain is a great example of a good concept poorly executed – I thought the writing was absolutely amazing until I realized that your choices on the dialogue tree had little-to-no effect on anyone’s dialogue other than your own, and that the story was only effected by a few very obvious points in the game.

You should already know that to imply is better than to state, and that a single line of clever dialogue is better than three of mundane. (This does not apply when describing vital gameplay functions). Dialogue, however, is only going to get you so far, especially since I suspect yours is going to be purely textual. Powerful images, choice pacing, and ensuring that the player feels what you want them to, are all far more important. You’ve probably gone through all of Valve’s developer’s commentaries, you know what I’m getting at.

Do not go out of your way to make the protagonist “witty” – it will come off as affected, and he will seem more vain than personable. In fact, you should probably have the protagonist say as little as possible – or, rather, have him say plenty but speak infrequently. People do not talk to themselves, after all. When writing dialogue trees, cover as many bases as possible – if a player does not see an option he totally agrees with, he or she will lose immersion.

Finally, ensure that the player is always hooked, so to speak. Do not pose too many questions overtly, but ensure that questions are being posed, and often – even if they are just, “how does this thing work,” or “why does this building have no windows?” Work closely with your artists to make sure that their work reflects your story. I don’t want to give too much away, but the ending – and, really, the beginning, and also the middle – of Portal 2 was amazing for reasons that had nothing to do with dialog.

Writing character into a system or happenstance is something you’re demonstrably good at; in addition to EXPLODED, the GalCiv sagas are full of it and the tooltips in Scanno Domini and your contribution to Pride and Falls both make it ultra-explicit. If you don’t consider it typecasting yourself, the mission delivery system is not only your sole low-content means of story delivery but probably also your best character. Is the spy mission network aboveboard, and is that a meaningful word? Is it resented or opposed by anyone significant? Is the information it conveys to agents reliable? Consistently? Is the information it conveys from agents to employers reliable? Can the player lie to employers? If there are gaps in the network’s function, are they known or suspected by anyone we talk to? Are they systematic? Are they systematically in any party’s favour? I would start by thinking of the way the net filters the first ‘character’ as the first character.

Portal 2 also had a good story. It had a great technique of putting some small twists into it throughout. It continued to surprise me to the last scene.

Obviously, I need to mention Half Life 2 here (It’s a law were failure to comply is death by firing squad). It placed you after shit had gone down, leaving the player to fill in the gaps. It also had good pacing. It had gameplay as well but that’s less important.

As for any narrative technique for your game, I would recommend suspense. Suspense will keep the player going. Obviously I don’t mean that you should place questions here, there and everywhere, but instead have one underlining motive, and build it throughout the game. When you do reach the conclusion, I would not recommend giving a twist that could completely destroy everything the player has worked for, as this this will leave him or her feeling cheated.