> And let me also reject the implicit notion that stories are entertainment but not, academically speaking, fun.
Stories are obviously fun, otherwise no-one would read books, but a story that you interact with meaningfully, that you can change significantly, really hard to do well.
Like every game where you can do good thing or bad thing, and the game punishes you for doing bad thing. It's really hard to write a compelling story where a nasty piece of shit still somehow saves the Fantasy Kingdom from the Prophesised Doom and becomes the hero.
I honestly cant't think of any good examples where game mechanics and stories interacted in a way that gave you significant agency while still being fun. I'd love to be given contra-examples though.
I think of the Mass Effect games and their attempts at this, "Oh you were only 92% Paragon, so now we're at the end, _this_ crew-member has to die for some reason, if only you'd known that 30 hours of gameplay ago when you punched that grifter in the Citadel!"
Or one I still bear a massive, MASSIVE grudge against, Fable III, where if you didn't massively grind for resources before the bit you thought was the end-game - where you fought and defeated the evil oppressive king, you found yourself making ridiculously stupid binary decisions like "Should this multi-storey building be used as an orphanage? Or as a whore-house?" That's literally one of the decisions you had to make. Oh, and the game made sure to tell you "Btw, because you didn't grind enough, if you choose the way that earns less money, EVERY ONE DIES BECAUSE YOU WANTED TO HELP THE ORPHANS."
It was an interesting attempt, to be sure, a brave experiment but I resented the game so much for the heel turn it pulled - "Actually, the evil oppressive money grubbing king you overthrew was RIGHT! Now you have to do what he was doing! Mwahahaha! Irony!"
Worst of all, it never let me make nuanced choices - why can't it be orphans downstairs, sex workers upstairs, and during the daytime, I pay the sex-workers to look after the orphans? Nope, it was either "look after the innocent children" or "four floors of whores". Complete with animations of crying children if you chose sex-workers. Or crying sex-workers if you chose the children. Once again, not kidding.
Once you knew the heel-turn twist, you could game it massively beforehand, one of the best strategies was to buy properties, become an incredibly oppressive landlord by demanding extortionate rents, so when it came time for the "orphans/whores" decisions, you had so much money you could could choose the good path and everyone declared you a saint.
But I felt so disrespected by the game that I didn't even bother.
That's the problem - good stories need direction towards a satisfying end, and it's really hard to give a player agency in a good narrative, and so I felt railroaded into comically absurd black/white choices.
Honestly, I think the only games that have ever done the good/evil choices in a story well were the Knights of The Old Republic series, but once again, it stopped being so much fun when I had to keep on being evil because I'd chosen evil stuff prior.
Can't I just be evil today, and maybe a bit nice tomorrow? After all, the best villains are the mercurial ones.
“"I asked Professor Quirrell why he'd laughed," the boy said evenly, "after he awarded Hermione those hundred points. And Professor Quirrell said, these aren't his exact words, but it's pretty much what he said, that he'd found it tremendously amusing that the great and good Albus Dumbledore had been sitting there doing nothing as this poor innocent girl begged for help, while he had been the one to defend her. And he told me then that by the time good and moral people were done tying themselves up in knots, what they usually did was nothing; or, if they did act, you could hardly tell them apart from the people called bad. Whereas he could help innocent girls any time he felt like it, because he wasn't a good person. And that I ought to remember that, any time I considered growing up to be good."”
--hpmor
I'm not quite sure what point quoting that was supposed to make.
Perhaps that Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (that's what the hpmor at the end means) is such an appallingly written piece of... I hesitate to use the word literature... that you wanted to demonstrate how not to write?
> I honestly cant't think of any good examples where game mechanics and stories interacted in a way that gave you significant agency while still being fun. I'd love to be given contra-examples though.
Rimworld and The Sims. Both are procedural story writers.
> I felt railroaded into comically absurd black/white choices
I agree: All these AAA titles essentially are movies where you get tons of "agency" in choices which are irrelevant to the story, but the main plot is hard scripted into a few predetermined paths.
Until we have full generative AI as game engine the only alternative remains the procedural approach mentioned in the beginning.
It's definitely hard to do and since I haven't played those games much I can't really answer accurately, but does Larian (Baldur's Gate 3) do a better job?
I think the main problem with Fable or Mass Effect was that the game wants to converge to one of a few endings, but definitely for ME there's a bajillion decisions you can make until you get there.
I don't know if you can get rid of this "definite" ending thing per se; some games say they have X amount of endings, but again, I can't really name any. It's probably more gratifying to have more self-contained sub-stories where the decisions made e.g. an hour ago have an effect on the progression and outcome, but not too much longer than that. You should have the choice as a player to switch from e.g. "good" to "evil" partway through your playthrough. References back to previous quests and their outcomes are nice but shouldn't be as heavy as "your one choice made 30 hours ago affect the ending of the game in a significant and irreversible way"
I enjoy the way Baldur's Gate 3 implements this- choices tend to align more along character axes than good/evil. There are indications for many small dialogue choices that say "Karlach approves" or "Astarion disapproves" to give you a sense of each character's values and personality, and they each have their own motivations. Some are more traditionally good or evil, but they all have reasons for doing what they do.
Choices occasionally feel fairly binary good/evil, but more often all choices have their pros & cons, and it's more about story and narrative in making my decisions.
Stories are obviously fun, otherwise no-one would read books, but a story that you interact with meaningfully, that you can change significantly, really hard to do well.
Like every game where you can do good thing or bad thing, and the game punishes you for doing bad thing. It's really hard to write a compelling story where a nasty piece of shit still somehow saves the Fantasy Kingdom from the Prophesised Doom and becomes the hero.
I honestly cant't think of any good examples where game mechanics and stories interacted in a way that gave you significant agency while still being fun. I'd love to be given contra-examples though.
I think of the Mass Effect games and their attempts at this, "Oh you were only 92% Paragon, so now we're at the end, _this_ crew-member has to die for some reason, if only you'd known that 30 hours of gameplay ago when you punched that grifter in the Citadel!"
Or one I still bear a massive, MASSIVE grudge against, Fable III, where if you didn't massively grind for resources before the bit you thought was the end-game - where you fought and defeated the evil oppressive king, you found yourself making ridiculously stupid binary decisions like "Should this multi-storey building be used as an orphanage? Or as a whore-house?" That's literally one of the decisions you had to make. Oh, and the game made sure to tell you "Btw, because you didn't grind enough, if you choose the way that earns less money, EVERY ONE DIES BECAUSE YOU WANTED TO HELP THE ORPHANS."
It was an interesting attempt, to be sure, a brave experiment but I resented the game so much for the heel turn it pulled - "Actually, the evil oppressive money grubbing king you overthrew was RIGHT! Now you have to do what he was doing! Mwahahaha! Irony!"
Worst of all, it never let me make nuanced choices - why can't it be orphans downstairs, sex workers upstairs, and during the daytime, I pay the sex-workers to look after the orphans? Nope, it was either "look after the innocent children" or "four floors of whores". Complete with animations of crying children if you chose sex-workers. Or crying sex-workers if you chose the children. Once again, not kidding.
Once you knew the heel-turn twist, you could game it massively beforehand, one of the best strategies was to buy properties, become an incredibly oppressive landlord by demanding extortionate rents, so when it came time for the "orphans/whores" decisions, you had so much money you could could choose the good path and everyone declared you a saint.
But I felt so disrespected by the game that I didn't even bother.
That's the problem - good stories need direction towards a satisfying end, and it's really hard to give a player agency in a good narrative, and so I felt railroaded into comically absurd black/white choices.
Honestly, I think the only games that have ever done the good/evil choices in a story well were the Knights of The Old Republic series, but once again, it stopped being so much fun when I had to keep on being evil because I'd chosen evil stuff prior.
Can't I just be evil today, and maybe a bit nice tomorrow? After all, the best villains are the mercurial ones.