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The Failings Of A Panel About Storytelling In Games

Last Thursday, October 2nd, a couple of friends of mine and I went to Utrecht to witness a panel supposedly about storytelling, cinematography and Hollywood in games. It was set up by Control Magazine in collaboration with Improvive and co-hosted by Zoomin TV during the NFF, the Netherlands Film Festival. A noble endeavour, especially since storytelling is still somewhat lacking in games, a lot of times falling back on tropes and other clichés, or generally pushing out a story so devoid of actual story that you're left wondering who came up with it. In those cases, it's the production team itself or a gamedesigner, with no feeling for narrative design, or scriptwriting or any part remotely close to actually delivering a compelling story. For over ten years I've written about games, most of the time decrying the lack of a cohesive story or the detachment of story and gameplay making for a messy endeavour. Granted, storytelling in games has gotten better, but even today we're still dealing with certain issues that could've gone better if only they had a good writer with a feeling for gameplay onboard, who could work well with the gameplay designer. Destiny, Bungie's recently released online MMOFPS (although you will never see thousands of others in your portion of the worlds), shows that a seperation of gameplay and story can be devastating for your game. They're in luck the game has great gameplaydesign and people like to play together, otherwise this title would be getting even lower grades than Risen 3: Titan Lords. And I say that kindly, because reducing your story to grimoire cards you can't even read within the game itself but through your internetbrowser or an app on your phone is simply a bad design decision. You want people to feel connected to your world, you want to make them feel part of something big, you want them to wonder at the vast universe you've put them in. Instead, we get short badly written "quotes" that were acted out even worse by otherwise high-quality actors who should have no trouble with sci-fi, fantasy, and geek-lore in most cases. But I digress, we were attending the Control created Game Café at the Netherlands Film Festival in Utrecht. The moment I read about it, I had some questions concerning the panelmembers, although I was happy I was wrong about one of them. They were, Jan-Bart van Beek, Jeroen de Cloe and Joost van Dongen. Three very much Dutch sounding names, but none of them were storytellers. Jan-Bart is the art director at Guerrilla Games, responsible for the style and consistency of the art used for the Killzone game-series. He came packed with a short video about the change of creating cut-scenes between the first Killzone game and the latest, Shadow Fall. An interesting video, accompanied by some interesting background information, but mostly centered on the changes in technology. Of course, technology has always had a very important role to play when it comes to cinematography, but this was still lacking somewhat. I mean, I've been in a Digital Film Making course at the SAE for a year now (currently on hiatus as I try to rebuild myself) and that's not really what I learned about cinematography. The second panelmember was Jeroen de Cloe, founder of Sticky Studios who collaborate on small games based on films created purely for marketing purposes. Those games are loosely based on the script for said movie, without telling the plot, and are quick to make. At least, that's what I took away from it. One of the games shown was based on the 300: Rise of an Empire movie and looked a little like a poor-man's God of War. Not the kind of epic, Hollywood-like game you would expect in a panel about storytelling. If anything, it started to look a little more like a marketing panel than what was the perceived notion for this Game Café. Joost van Dongen was there to provide a counterpoint, although I'm not really sure why. His company, Ronimo Games, favour gameplay more than story and they're doing a great job at that. They provide a minimal story and then let you blast away in their 80s cartoon-based Awesomenauts. A great game (I refuse to use the word awesomefor abvious reasons although it's still one of my favourite go-to words ever, next to Cowabunga) which is very good at what it does. Suddenly, the focus shifted to something else entirely and had absolutely nothing to do with what we were there to hear about. The panel hosts, and Joost, started talking about how other people created short video's where they've played out Awesomenauts and started doing voice overs creating a small story. Sure, you could see that it might be connected to the talk, but as soon as they went to people making video's of themselves playing or discussing a game, they lost me and many others. Several people left, and I would've done too because I wasn't there to listen to an Irish vlogger who practically always yells in his microphone, talk about how to create Youtube video's. Or a blond model doing the exact same thing, for that matter. So yes, I was extremely disappointed in the event, and got bored after Jan-Bart's way more interesting video and explanation ended. A sentiment he seemingly agreed with as I saw him slowly sagging back into the couch they were sitting on during Jeroen and Joosts' "informative" talks about storytelling and the link to Hollywood in games. It's a shame that this panel didn't fulfill it's own promise but instead focussed more on the business standpoint and on something that has absolutely nothing to do with narrative design, scriptwriting, and cinematography. But, I may have an idea for a better panel. Actually invite people involved with that whole process. Maybe, I don't know, someone like the current writer for Guerilla Games. You already seem to have direct access to the studio, so why not him? Maybe ask someone like Rhianna Pratchett who worked with the Dutch Triumph Studios on the Overlord games, and has experience writing for games like Mirror's Edge, the Tomb Raider reboot and the Divine Divinity series? Perhaps ask some people involved in the gameplay aspect who has some ideas and can tell us about how to incorporate the story and deal with certain pitfalls. Maybe talk about schools, especially those teaching people how to develop and design games, and how they're severely lacking in teaching students how to create a design document and/or script. I've been asked by several students to provide a voice for their project, and they were still working on the design and the script. But, I shouldn't expect much as they didn't know how to write a decent script and even a story. I'm not saying it's all that important, it depends on the game you're trying to make, but you should at least have learned some basic elements in how to bring a story to life through gameplay and other narration. This is something I'm still working on with my own design documents, and I can tell you it's not easy, but I know of a few people who are doing the same thing. Storytelling in games has always been an afterthought and that has hardly changed in the last fifteen years. It's time to turn that around. Bioware can do it, Kojima can do it, Yager did it with writers Walt Williams and Richard Pearsey in Spec Ops: The Line, so why can't the rest? Why is writing for games still so underdeveloped at most studios? On another note; If we want our games to be taken more serious, why can't we deal with certain subjects? For example; The attack on Fallujah game. If it was made a movie, no one would have a problem with it. But as a game? Oh no, we can't have a game based around that. This panel did not help us get rid of the perception that story is less important than gameplay, but maybe it is time for a panel that does help us get more coherent and wonderful stories in games claiming they have that. PS: I grew up with point & click adventures, filled with story, and more gameplay filled titles like Sonic The Hedgehog. I am well aware of the limitations put on studios. A story has to fit the gameplay, and vice versa. Just don't let story be an afterthought, because it could seriously hamper a game.