Forget Linear Stories, Give Me More Immersion Storytelling | Extra Punctuation
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- čas přidán 4. 05. 2022
- This week on Extra Punctuation, Yahtzee looks at the different ways games tell stories and why he finds immersive narratives so interesting.
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#ExtraPunctuation - Hry
I love how over the 15 years ive been listening to Yatzee's voice he now sounds like some kind of grizzly veteran thats swallowed half of a gravel beach for breakfast.
So he has the voice of your average spunkgargleweewe protagonist? Not sure he'd be happy about that.
To be fair he sounds different in extra punctuation because he's talking with a more casual tone, In contrast to the more performative way he speaks in zp
Getting married and having kids will do that to ya
He's very enjoyable to listen to in his audiobooks!
plus a different mic
I would call this "The world doesn't give a f*** about you" kind of storytelling. What makes it immersive is that you're living in this world rather than the world revolving around you.
Oo, I like this phrase for the Dark-Souls/world-based style of storytelling. The story is the world, everything else, and you are but a speck of dust physically immersed in it.
Botw does this too ironically, proving you can still have a hero centric narrative. Thinking about it, the key is less "the world gives zero fucks" and more "this is a story about the player and how they interact with it".
I love games like Fallout 3 or New Vegas in the beginning when you're struggling to survive, but I quickly lose interest when the story tries to turn your character into the all powerful savior of the world.
The best example I know of this is Mount and Blade. You can literally do nothing and the game world will go on without you. Or you can join in and do whatever you want.
I like works that explore the relationship between characters and plot. Does the plot exist to serve the characters, or do the characters exist to serve the plot?
"but you know what genre I always think has been a spearhead for unconventional story telling? fighting games"
Well fuck me sideways never expected those words to come out of yahtzee's mouth
I'd rather not thanks.
Sounds like Gabe finally got to him hahaha
He's actually mentioned that before! I can't remember which video exactly, I believe it was the Injustice one, but he mentioned how fighting games can be good explorations of individual characters
@@DarkLordToturials Fighting games as character study, yes. This little bit here is just a further exposition of the concept.
He's right though. Even the gripe about the linear stories in modern fighters. But I disagree with that bc Injustice was a fine story mode to me. MK 11's was...fine ^^" but the real strength comes from having so many characters, each with their own agencies and stories within the setting.
"Like a big budget action movie being adapted for the stage."
To be fair (and stretching the idea of big budget), the evil dead musical is hilarious.
I'd say that one works because it takes advantage of the medium. In a similar way, the Princess Bride book is just as charming as the movie but if Goldman had tried to adapt it straight -- complete with asides about bits he'd cut from the fictional novel he was abridging and why they were boring even if they were brilliant satire of Florinese Renaissance society, or the realization that the comforting story he had learned only happened because of his father's effort curating it -- it would've been a mess. Far better to leave the movie as the initial story told to a sick kid and leave all that meta-framing to the book where the reader's able to take a breath and adjust their pace as necessary.
that's because the evil dead is "camp" which is a euphemism for being bad in a particular way that is acceptable for theater
A lot of movies benefit from being stage musicals, Heathers, legally blonde, Shrek. and Hairspray has gone back-and-forth repeatedly
There is actually a Die Hard the Musical as well, you can find it on CZcams.
The mediums have a lot of nuances to them. A movie can control the audience perspective, while theatre have that video game quality of allowing the audience to change their perspective with seating arrangement and putting in details in the corner that the audience member can pay attention to, should they choose. It's possible to adapt things to each other, but the adapter will have to play to that medium's strength, and often lose the strength of the other. Since it's such a waste, it's often just better to make original work in that medium instead, but cashing in on existing IP is really as old as time.
So in short: video games narratives work best when they're revealed through exploration rather than explanation, the video game equivalent of "show don't tell"
Hence why space is so tantalizing..🤩
@@mbrochh82 Exactly. Imagine how much narrative exploration would've improved Schindler's List or The Dairy of Anne Frank...... When will people accept that Netflix's Bundersnatch is the perfect movie?
No. Otherwise Disco Elysium would not be on this list. That game is built on the juicy dialogue between your fractured brain and an attempted resemblance of self. Your character tends to explain situations to themself based on how your psychological inventory ends up building itself, and the narrative changes for it. In the opposite direction, you have games like Inside or Little Nightmares that are categorically "show, don't tell", but the narrative is incredibly linear with some dollops of mystery to keep you guessing what the hell is going on.
What we are talking about is a story where your involvement has no comprehensive piece of all the beats. Where being dropped into the world leaves you guessing, because your character is fumbling about in someone else's story.
Dark Souls and Elden Ring do tons of telling. Entire CZcams channels are devoted to linking together the interwoven stories scattered between various consumables and pieces of gear. That is where most of the story comes from, not your character. Your character is just a pin in a corkboard keeping separate, almost missed, story threads together. These threads all seemingly attached to you, despite the fact that you being a "chosen undead" feels more like a dumb coincidence than an actual privilege. That is something you never get the answer to, why are you the protagonist? That is what makes it so immersive.
Agreed. Just take Disco Elysium. You walk a few steps, make a choice, listen to an hour of dialog interrupted by another multiple choice questionnaire, and repeat. Very "show, don't tell."
And that works really well in linear stories too. I remember that Warcraft 3’s story felt very much like what we did for the mission impacted character reactions and decisions in the next missions. It didn’t feel like the action was incidental to the story but a series of cause/effect chains that start on the premise “orcs are attacking humans and we should stop that”
When he mentioned time loops as a tool for learning more, all I could think of was The Outer Wilds, that concept is a huge part of the whole game
An emergent byproduct of the time loop I love in the outer wilds is when you see the sun’s going red giant and you don’t have much time left, so you decide where to explore based off how much time you have left, like “I wanted to test if x would work” or “I never fully explored y” - it’s like a constant motivator, to act depending on how long you have left to experiment
Came here to say the same thing. The theoretical game he is talking about in this video basically IS The Outer Wilds.
@@gukid Which makes it all the more surprising that he didn't really like The Outer Wilds all that much.
when i read or hear of Outer Wilds, i always think of Zelda: Majora's Mask. If that came out later, in the era of the internet, everyone would gush about it. Would help if it was on PC too tho...
@@zUJ7EjVD Except a lot of people including myself have clearly found that faffing about in the Ember Twin caves or on the ceiling of Brittle Hollow also fun to at least an extent, considering how beloved the game is. There's a puzzle solving and/or exploration logic to it. It's rather weird that people like you and Yahtzee don't.
I'm genuinely thankful for how Yahtzee has changed the way I think about interactive storytelling. Most people still seem stuck on the gameplay-narrative divide, while he is consistently on the forefront of writing about the integration of these elements and has turned me on to some amazing games in the process.
I totally agree. For a long time, I've been stuck viewing games as gameplay while someone reads me a book in the background. Its only after playing games like Dark Souls, and for me, Sekiro, that I realise that games truly shine when the narration is embedded in, and not separate from, the gameplay.
A well designed game should have gameplay that reinforces the storyline and world building and vice versa. The tighter it is, the better the experience.
It's why I find people "ranking" the elements of a game like art, story, gameplay or whatever really frustrating. Gameplay is a pretty stupid term when you look closer, too.
I did my masters in non-linear storytelling and I tend to use the term multi-linear for branching stories. Just in case you wanted some more terms to add to your vocabulary. It's nice to see someone talking about this stuff. It has been a long time since I immersed myself in that stuff (not a lot of jobs really need a specialist in Hyperfiction and non-linear storytelling. Unsurprisingly.)
Oh boy, I sense jumping into a rabbit-hole I can't really afford right now....
So, uhm, you have any sources I can check out on this topic? It sounds really interesting....
Don't worry. I hear once that history factory finally opens up, they'll make a decision about non-linear narrative next. Just gotta hope they don't get distracted or fall down a hole in the process. Makes ya wish it were just straight forward....
I have a master's in musicology for the semiotics of music in film so I feel you...
I'd also like to know what you studied to make the paper, and how many examples outside games alone are out there.
While Im on the train of non-linear and non roller coaster videogames, we got to remember that we spent the last 150,000 years telling stories in linear fashion. Every brilliant movie and every brilliant book will be using this method well into the future.
So I think we need to take it easy on the developers if they are unable to deliver a satisfying non linear story telling branch
It's interesting hearing Myst given as an example of a game that "almost" gets the style of immersion storytelling right, because right as you mentioned Myst I was already thinking of Riven, the second game in the Myst series. Compared to the first game, Riven basically has two puzzles total and the entire rest of the game is dedicated to figuring out the rules and intricacies of the world in order to know how those puzzles tick and what lets you manipulate them, and it's definitely a standout example to me of the type of nonlinear immersion storytelling you mentioned.
Overall, Riven was a great game. But "figure out where all the domes are on this topographical map of the islands" was a *terrible* idea for a puzzle (in a game which otherwise lacks a map UI altogether). Nobody wants to keep notes with the requisite level of detail for that sort of nonsense.
@@NYKevin100 Speak for yourself. [Slaps down a binder of meticulous game notes.]
Riven was my first exposure to immersive story telling. To this day I consider it a gold standard if only for how much work was put in to every lovingly rendered frame.
Everything from rotting fruit, to switch locations to how water works all serve the world/meta narrative in some way. You win the game by playing like an anthropologist, studying your location and why the people live as they do more than an adventure guy solving puzzles for puzzle's sake.
Riven really didn't work for me when I played it as a kid. I can look back now and see how everything fits together, but at the time it felt like I wasn't getting anywhere. I was, there are a lot of puzzles that hide the fact that they're puzzles, but they didn't register for me. I'd wander along a pathway and figure out how to navigate a rotating room with limited exit/entrance options, then come out the other side wondering when I was going to reach something I needed to solve. I don't think it would've taken much to clue young-me into what the game was actually presenting, but I didn't get it. Instead the feeling was akin to when you play an allegedly-good platformer but keep fighting the controls.
I can appreciate it these days, but the more obvious puzzle obstacle games like Myst and Exile (my personal favorite) appeal to me a lot more.
Oddly enough about this comment, it makes me think of The Talos Principle, which is all about the puzzles, but also happens to have some post-world story bits.
Xcom does something that few other games can do: Create war stories. Even if you played it before: I heartily recommend resisting save scumming. The stories you'll be able to remember about that soldier giving his life drawing the attention of the aliens while everyone else escaped, the sniper that saved the whole squad because you made a mistake, completely screwing up a mission and having to run with what remains of your squad. It's so much more immersive and intense instead of erasing every mistake and nailing every mission because you essentially decided that it "didn't count".
Well said! XCOM is a really special experience despite its sometimes bland appearance.
Have to agree! I still remember my team of soldiers who made it through the whole campaign with only 1 death, only to save Earth on Christmas Eve. Enemy Unknown on 360. What a game
Roguelikes, which I consider XCOM a zoomed out extension of, as a genre are a massive source of emergent narratives. The parts that grip the player, and that compel us to share are the parts where the systems have successfully produced a compelling narrative.
@@elsesome2707 But Roguelikes came first starting with its namesake - Rogue - as well as Nethack.
Yeah! And your recommendation to resist save-scumming points out something else about immersive storytelling: the game can resist your attempts to shape a narrative out of it. The margin between "heroic medic revives plucky ranger for mission-winning crit on last-ditch flanking move" and "everybody died, start over or give up" is pretty thin! Same thing with Crusader Kings: oh, you're planning an epic multi-generational takeover of the Holy Roman Empire? sure would suck if your heir fell out of a window in elementary school and never recovered.
Miyazaki said that the player's actions are the story of Elden Ring. That's indicative of his approach to narrative in games. This video is a good explanation of why Demon's Souls was so exciting to me in 2009. I have never liked cinematic narrative games that want to be movies, and that was the dominant trend at that time
lazy
The story of Elden Ring is incredibly linear, though?
@@aerthreepwood8021 I don't think it is
@@VoltaDoMar it is.
@@dpradis only if you don't know what linear means.
I've been playing through Outer Wilds recently, and I've been amazed at the game design. The most non-linear approach to a story I've experienced in a while, maybe ever.
TvTropes calls it Breadcrumb Storytelling, where it's your job to piece together the narrative with the crumbs the game gives you bit by bit.
All this reminds me of is how the first half of Halo 3: ODST was set up story wise. Being a dude who is piecing together what happened while he was KOed from the drop and everything else has happened. You go from point A to point B finding something. Granted, you play a mission to see what did happen, but the base idea was really cool and I think this is why ODST's campaign is fondly remembered by a lot of Halo, and non-Halo fans.
I'll just leave "Outer Wilds" mentioned here for immersion storytelling - time loop "just do what you want, you'll figure it out ... probably." with a very archeological feel to it all.
(the less explained, the more fun you'll have - this is a "knowledge" game, meaning if I say too much, you won't even truly get to enjoy it, dear reader, sorry)
I found it so weird that Yahtzee didn't really get into Outer Wilds.
Ya i think outer wildes is such a masterpiece in immersion storytelling
The real brilliance of outer wilds is that it's mechanics ARE the settings, ARE the gameplay and ARE the story, all in one. The whole game is the player character learning how the world works and how to navigate in it through trial and error and learning from example of others, which is very appropriate since the only description they are given is "hatchling".
@@robotnixon3453 he did in his “games I didn’t ZP because I didn’t have time” for 2018 (I think) he said that he really wanted to like outer wilds but he got bored and left
It still irks me he never got into the game, it solidly remains my favorite of all time
Outer Wilds is probably the best version of this I've played. After the 20 minute intro you're free to go anywhere you like in the solar system and start piecing things together in whatever order you happen to take. As you play more, you gradually start to fill in the overall pattern of what is happening. Everyone would have arrived at different realisations at completely different stages of their gameplay.
It's a bit like filling in a jigsaw by accurately placing one random piece at a time, until you start to see the overall picture.
Honestly came back here just to upvote anyone that brought up The Outer Wilds. I’m not sure if Yahtzee never played it, as I was sure he’d mention it in this video…
@@Evanz111 He mentioned not liking in some video, not sure if it was review or not.
@@mimicry5713 It was in the games he played but didn't fully review for whatever year it was. I was pretty surprised to hear Yahtzee didn't get much out of it
@@denny141196 agreed, it was definitely at the top of my mind for games that did this style of story-telling extremely well. Elden Ring may be nonlinear, but the story is just kind of vague gibberish by comparison.
@@denny141196 probably because the game is a clunky, tedious chore to actually play and the story isn't good enough to make up for it.
While i do agree that video games could explore this unique storytelling path way more, that by no way means for me that linear stories can't work. In fact, the stories i enjoy the most are often linear, yet still immersive because we aren't in them... We play as characters, sure, but it is their story they are telling and that is often shown through gameplay as well. We are just in for a ride, experiencing it all with them.
Now that i think about it, games which you brought up are clearly ambitious and difficult to pull off, so i doubt they will gain a massive branch, rather than a niche, as writing multiple stories and a huge, actually open and actually breathing world is very difficult.
I've been championing that viewpoint for years. Sometimes it can be fun an absorbing in its own way to just be allowed to peer into another world unlike our own for a while, technically bring actively involved in that we're essentially puppetting the main character but still ultimately more an observer than a participant. It doesn't always work, but it's not inherently something to avoid either.
Good example for a game with a linear story that's not based on immersion: Spec Ops: The Line
The games I have always found to be the most immersive are not mainly focused on environmental storytelling. It is still character-driven stories where our actions have consequences.
In the Devil Survivor series you get to spend your time between fights talking to a variety of characters who all have their own plotlines that they are experiencing independent from you. Who you talk to in your limited time decides who lives, who dies, what you discover, and who your allies are. It is a way to experience a story only video games can provide and it is vastly more compelling than any game like Dark Souls imo.
Thank you for saying this. I have heard several people dislike the soulsborne games specifically because of the way the games tell the story. I think it's because it's an experience first and a story second. Yahtzee's description of Obra Dinn brought one thing to mind: museum. There are plenty of people who like museums, but there are plenty who are bored witless with them. That level of separation helps some and hinders others. Also, immersion storytelling isn't unique to video games. Look at the interactive art installation Omega Mart in Vegas. All that being said, I whole-heartedly agree that they can and should coexist.
Yeah I'm with ya. I think his idea here discounts the basic fact that humans like to understand things through story. Obra Din made me happy not because I completed the bureaucratic puzzles, but rather because each puzzle gave me a piece of an enticing narrative.
The storytelling in Majora's Mask has always fascinated me. Under the time looping structure the player cannot effect any permanent change in the state of the game's world. Linear plots repeat themselves, in slightly different ways each time, but they are never resolved once and for all. Plot therefore does not advance the story, but becomes an aspect of setting, like imagery and music. For the most part the story does not "advance" at all, but is simply presented in the setting of a world where something is wrong and cannot be made right.
Yahtzee really needs to try Dwarf Fortress. If he can get past the inherent clunkiness, he'll get a game built entirely to create immersive stories.
And the tendencies towards self-flagellation it takes to love the Dark Souls genre would lend itself well to DF's concept of "FUN!".
It'd be interesting if he reviewed it when it released on Steam. Good idea to at least wait until then, it'll finally be more accessible.
I do think there's a distinction between _emergent_ as in 'all my cows got drunk and staged a coup because of a dev oversight lmao' and handcrafted _immersive_ as in 'here's how this murder mystery went down, we just expect you to experience it in gameplay.'
Or Rimworld
Rimworld would be an easier sell for the same payoff.
I thought for fighting games you were going to go into the meta-narrative for how they are nonlinear. How your character starts off at full power with everything they can possibly do theoretically able to be done as soon as the controller is picked up, but instead it's you the player who has to go through an IRL training montage to exploit the full potential of these characters and overcome the adversity of "everyone else in this entire world wants you to fail, because they are going through their own training montage and depending on when you meet them you're either just stumbling block on their journey, an easily trounced nameless mook showing off just how far THEY have come, or even the mountain that they are striving to overcome." The game isn't the story, you the player are the story. You start off as this clueless ape just slapping the buttons because buttons go brrr, and eventually you hit a wall where the people you're going against know how to easily stop your mashing, and it's up to you to determine how you deal with the wall. Whether its gitting gud, learning a few cheap tricks to cheese out the necessary victories against technically superior opponents, just running into the wall over and over because you are having fun mashing the buttons and don't care about winning, or just deciding this isn't for you and walking away. You are the story, the game is just the medium to tell it.
Now that I think about it, you could call this the 'story' of esports games, as well. It's a real-life story, featuring you, your growth to improvement, your highlights, your lowlights, and the friends you make along the way.
The same thing can be said about Twisted Metal into the 2012 game, and even then I would say that isn't really linear either
Something I’ll grant The Witcher is that the video game itself was being adapted from a book (as well as other movies, TV shows, etc.) and I think viewing that series specifically as something entirely separate from the video game is important because both the series and the game can stand alone as separate artistic entities. That being said, other video game to movie/TV show adaptations don’t have that lineage and because of that often can’t stand alone and do reduce the medium of video games to a stepping stone to film. The Uncharted movie and the Sonic movies spring to mind -.-
Sonic has had iterations on iterations of narrative-based media from cartoon to anime to comic and, now, film. Sonic 3D games have largely included linear narratives from DX to Heroes and probably the more recent ones, too, not that I've played much of them.
As a character-driven franchise it would be interesting if they did find a way to break into this type of narrative structure in a game. Donkey Kong 64 with it's large world full of numerous puzzles that can only be solved by specific characters comes to mind. I feel like that is a game with good ideas that should be reexplored.
Besides, Witcher Netflix is absolute dogshit. Comparing it to the games is an insult.
As a fan of both the Uncharted games and Sonic games, the difference between the two film adaptations is that the latter was more on point, more faithful to the source material. I haven't seen the Uncharted film, but from what I've heard, it doesn't have the same soul. You could've swapped out the names of Tom Holland and Mark Wahlberg's characters and had the same exact movie.
@@Vasilefs_Terranorum I liked it, I also have not read any of the books nor played the games.
@@K4RN4GE911 If they got the casting right, it would have been a much better movie. The fact they fucked up that simple task made the movie generic af
It's really sad to me that Yahtzee never liked Outer Wilds. It is a textbook example of immersion narrative, exploration and discovery in video games, and the ending will never not make me cry. It's essentially a modernized Myst
If only it hadn't taken its entire gameplay design inspiration from Lunar Lander
@@doconnell565 And if only its story wasn't primarily told through logs, a cliche that needed to die a long time ago.
@@yourgameisstupid To be fair, that is also the Dark Souls model. They just glued their logs to items and made them vague and hard enough to understand that people got excited about putting together cross referenced spread sheets
He included Outer Wilds gameplay footage in the "are open worlds dead?" extra punctuation, as an example of how indie open world games are still innovating and interesting. I don't think he seriously disliked it.
Outer Wilds definitely feels like a modern Myst, or in particular a modern Riven. It's less about the narrative itself (logs/journals) and more about how gameplay is directly tied to a contextual understanding of the world rater than to strict logical puzzles - so much so that gameplay and world design becomes indistinguishable. Advancing in Outer Wilds / Riven is done by understanding the world, and understanding the world can only be done by experiencing it.
I am a simple man, I see Lieutenant Double-Yefreitor Du Bois, I click, I get into fetal position and cry.
Very much so
Sunrise parabellum
When I hear “immersion storytelling”, I don’t think “non-linear narrative”. When I hear “immersion storytelling”, I’d think that this story has a really good setting and world-building and I could quickly understand how the setting operates.
I'm with you there. The whole video I was thinking, "is this only about non-linear narratives?" It feels like there's a lot more you could do or describe with the whole "immersion storytelling" concept.
The Escapist: Calls the Witcher by Netflix a videogame adaptation
The original book series: Fuck me I guess
I think at this point, more people are familar with the games then the books.
Would Her Story be another good example of Immersion Storytelling? It's a 'search engine simulator' for found footage so I've even wondered for a split second if it actually constitutes as a game the first time I experienced it, but that just goes to show how coddled I became from playing Linear Narratives. Her Story has all the signs Yahtzee spoke of, you can go through the story in whatever order you want and the game won't even care if you miss or misunderstand stuff, it even gives you the freedom to finish the game without learning the whole story just like Obra Dinn, it's still the most free I ever felt playing a game to date
This description reminds me of my experience playing The Forgotten City. The mystery and possibilities in both games seemed much greater than in other games, where unlike in the film "The Truman Show" the edges of artificial reality were nowhere to be seen.
Yeah Her Story came to my mind too when watching this. I've always thought with that game, great though it is, if you think about the eventual story a couple of days after finishing it, you realise it's actually kinda dumb, and it's all down to the way it's told that makes the game worthwhile
I think this has really interesting parallels to Old-School School Revival ttrpg movement/genre, as they strive their games and modules to focus on emergent player driven narratives. Instead of collections of events, it's collections of interesting rooms the PCs weave through at their own pace.
interesting essay, though I disagree with the framing that suggests that "immersion narrative" is superior to branching narratives or linear ones. there's nothing wrong with a good branching narrative (prime example would be Choice of Robots, or The Stanley Parable, if we're getting frisky) or a linear one that tells a good story (going back to P&C adventure games as the jumping off point, a recent example would be There Is No Game: Wrong Dimension). at the end of the day, the interactivity (even if that's just picking a dialogue option) greatly affects the experience. for instance, Firewatch would not work as a film or book without drastically altering the pacing or going very experimental, as so much of that game is soaking in its ambience. it may be a linear story, but you can just roam the forests and that affects how the game comes off in a big way (more than just running into meaningless bandit camps, etc. in a ScumbiSoft joint).
I think the best stories in games have nothing to do with structure and everything to do with how the mechanics reinforce the storytelling. a narrative with themes of escaping violence which decides to buttress them by having mechanics where you brutally murder strangers (**cough, cough** TLoU2) is absolute ludonarrative dissonance. the gameplay tells you that the violence is fun, but the story wags its finger at you and tells you how violence is ackshully bad, mmmkay. contrast that with Spec Ops: The Line, whose story is staunchly anti-imperialist, and whose shooting mechanics are not fun, as such. I don't feel _rewarded_ for shooting people in that game, even before the story pulls the rug out from under you, so when it DOES get to the most gruesome scenes, it doesn't feel like the narrative is shoveling my face in its pile of dogshit and telling me how wrong it is to enjoy mechanics on a visceral level that were designed to be enjoyed on a visceral level.
I think the medium is too expansive for linear storytelling, branching storytelling, or "immersion storytelling" to supersede any others structurally.
Does he ever suggest that, though? I didn't hear anything about superiority, only the remark that linear storytelling is overused and not enough games explore the medium's potential...
@@rgseves to be fair, Yahtzee does say that getting a netflix adaptation is a reduction.
That's probably a bit exaggerated. A really well-made show or film can still be a more enjoyable experience than even some good games, but games should be such a different medium, that they shouldn't even be comparable in a discourse on storytelling. It should be considered a nonsensical statement to suggest that a netflix adaptation is better or worse than a game. When movies came out like over a decade ago, cereal companies used to box cheap games with the cereal as a promotion for the movie, and we never thought of those games as comparable to the movies themselves. But games nowadays have so much potential for storytelling that would be left on the table if we made more of linear movies-ish (Firewatch likes) as opposed to more of non linear immersive games (Dark Souls likes). That's my take anyway
@@cupcake5478 It is a reduction in the sense that it's losing the interactivity and storytelling potential of the game medium, but I think something similar could be argued from other types of medium transitions.
Still, there is the context of the usual glorification of getting a Netflix adaptation, which I understand is what he's criticizing there.
Yahtzee as a critic wants to see his medium of choice explored to its fullest potential. With the magnitude of linear, worn out and samey narratives regurgitated to the players, a certain bias is to be expected. Maybe immersive narrative isn't superior, but it's something completely unique to video and tabletop games. Isn't it something worth exploring? Rather than slavishly aping storytelling techniques from other mediums, and trying to beat player creativity into submission (so that they don't accidentally break the intended experience!).
@@cupcake5478 it's also a reduction in the sense that not one of them is ever made with the idea of improving on the story in any way. all of them are retellings of stories we already know, but brought to tv or film. and 90% of the time turn the established canon on its head to make it more interesting for those who don't know the stories. the Witcher is a great example of this. most of what happens in the story does follow the books, but is conveyed in a way that jumps back and forth in time with absolutely no reference to go on as to where you are in the narrative unless you actually read the books. not to mention all the ret-conned story with Yennifer and the academy of mages. it was made to simply make money and does absolutely nothing for the story. only way I can even slightly enjoy the show is to think of it in its own canon with references to the books. the Witcher 3 game on the other hand made a great effort at continuing where the book series left off. and pulled it off with tremendous success.
“Eat 3 pot brownies and play guitar hero”
That’s sounds like a great Friday Night.
I feel like there are some people in this comment section who would know about shandification. If not it's an old Btongue that you can look up that I would recommend. I feel like what is brought up in that video, directly relates to this video and how New Vegas does what Yatzhee is looking for in video game narrative. New Vegas is not much of a beginning middle and end but a world that let's you explore and live in it and shandification is just making it so the world is internally consistent enough to support this. The what do they eat question is not just a nitpick but instead something that is actually really important to the characters who live in a post apacolypse and you get to learn about the factions in the game and how they solve problems of just that basic question.
Even then, you're always going to do the same things to get the endings of New Vegas, and only one of those endings isn't linear
Not to be contrary, but I'm just not sure this idea is as revolutionary as Yahtzee seems to think. Obra Dinn, for example, still has a linear narrative at its core; it's just that the plot has been chopped up like a jigsaw puzzle. And the game is simply to reassemble the plot. You could even argue that this is true of pretty much any detective\investigation game which allows for player-directed investigation.
And the other problem with that sort of "plot reassembly" game is that it greatly limits the player's agency. It's hard to feel like your actions matter or are actually having any impact, when your job is simply to piece together things that already happened before you showed up. Sure, such games can definitely be entertaining or tell a good story, but fundamentally it's just a kind of baroque plot obfuscation.
You're completely right. I had to re-watch the video like 2-3 times because my initial take-away was along the likes of; "In order for games to have the best story, games need to not have a story."
The idea of environmental storytelling, which heavily plays into Yahtzee's idea of Immersive Storytelling, is fantastic and I think that every game should make good use of it through it's medium unique blend of visuals, audio, and controller feedback. However, environmental storytelling is like cinnamon, it's great on a delicious bun, but if you have nothing but cinnamon then it's dry, tasteless, and kills you a little on the inside.
Yeah, the solution isn't to take a linear story and have the player discover it in bits and pieces, the solution is to create a story that can go in literally any direction.
I think linear storytelling is managed best when the gameplay is part of it. The issue with a lot of the gameplay-cutscene-gameplay-cutscene is when the game play is a break from the story.
Having the most powerful story beats when the gameplay is happening works wonders. I think a lot about those mettaton scenes from undertale where the humour is baked into the task, or the Celeste ending where it drums up excitement and anticipation for you beating the game and you personally drive that forward.
Likewise, in immersion story telling, you have to explore and actively find things which means that the story intrigues as part of the gameplay.
Yes absolutely!! Though it sounds pretentious, I love the term "ludonarrative" because it's precisely that: where gameplay *is* storytelling.
There's so much potential with the way games can engage that, so when one pops with a unique method, I get so excited.
Spec Ops: The Line seems like one example, and a personal favorite of mine, Puzzle Pirates, is an MMO with no set story, instead all the pirate tasks are skill-based minigames that evoke the actions you'd need to run a ship with your crewmates.
This is the actual answer for how to elevate games as a medium. A wiki with boss fights barring you from clicking the next link is neither storytelling nor is it meaningfully using the unique opportunities presented by an interactive medium. On the other hand, a meticulously curated linear experience that weaves the gameplay and game mechanics themselves in to telling the story is both. Dark souls itself does both of these things, and yet yahtzee seems to be praising it for the former rather than the latter. Without needing cutscenes or dialogue, the descent into the depths and then blighttown is able to create an intense sense of homesickness and being lost, like you're on an actual adventure. And it's all because the game's own mechanics support this with the way bloodstains and bonfires work and having an, up to that point, always nearby safe hub area now comparatively far away with no fast travel. Even annoying status effects like curse and toxic elevate this experience by directly, mechanically inflicting the overwhelming hostility of these areas on the player. But instead of talking about this sort of thing, yahtzee instead seems to be more interested in the game having item descriptions about things the player wasn't involved in.
The best game stories that have been the most memorable for me in my 30+ years of gaming, are mostly from Dwarf Fortress. Because these storeis were randomly generated of me, and will never re-occur, and because I had to go searching and investigate to find out what had happened.
Best game ever.
Take, for instance, a recent fort I was playing.
I got invaded by some Goblins....pretty standard stuff. I killed them all.
Only, the invasion was being led by a Female Elf General. That's a little uncommon. So I went into Legends mode and had a look at this Elf's history.
She was once an Elven Princess, daughter of an Elven King and Queen, who's settlement had been invaded while she was just a baby. The King was killed in the battle, and her mother and herself were taken captive and brought back to a Goblin pit.
When she was 10 years old, her and her mother managed to escape, and fled to a nearby settlement. 5 years later, when she was 15, this settlement was also raided by the same goblin faction, her mother was killed, and she was taken captive again - by the very same goblin who had captured her when she was a baby.
She was brought back to the Goblin pit, and this time assimilated into Goblin society. Over decades she rose through the ranks, to become a General in the Goblin army, and had led dozens upon dozens of battles, and killed hundreds.
Then she showed up at my Fort, and was slaughtered with the rest of the Goblins.
That was the history for just one historical figure who randomly popped onto my map.
One of my favourite Legends mode discoveries was vaguely similar. The elf queen gave birth during a battle against the dwarves (according to Legends Viewer) and was subsequently slain. The elves lost (predictably) and the dwarves ended up capturing/adopting her newborn son. He eventually became king of the dwarves, somehow.
It's funny, because older games did this fairly consistently just by giving the player very little in terms of concrete narrative. Not to pick the cool kid, but the first Legend of Zelda just dropped you into a world, and yes, there was a text crawl in the beginning that outlined your goal, but there was little to no story throughout almost the entire game. The example that always comes to mind is that gray area with the white trees at the western end of the map; the one with the graveyard and the ghinis. What even was that? Some strange wintry area? A dead wasteland? Some new biome yet to be conceived by humankind? You don't have any way of knowing, and if you cared enough to think about it, you came up with your own answer; you made your own story. The game spilled out events throughout the entire experience, but you, the player, were left to interpret them however you chose. The irony is that the more story our games got, the further it went from this.
"Adapting games to a TV series/movie/whatever is a reduction"
I thought literally everyone thought that was true.
the normative masses think cinimatic adaptation is the highest accolade something can achieve.
The game makers don't.
no, because coming to that concluion requires thorough artistic thought.
It don't think it's necessarily true. In the best case any conversion into a different medium removes something BUT also adds something. For example the Witcher used to be just a (mediocre) fantasy book series. The games added enough that it's own thing to make it a better story.
In the same way movies and TV shows could win something. For example good actors are usually better than video game cut scenes or they could just remove the 50hours of grind and making the games story accessible for people who don't want that.
I don't think transition from an interactive medium to a non-interactive medium is an inherent reduction, but I don't think it's a strength either. Like any transfer from one media to another, each has their different strengths and weaknesses and those need to be considered when making an adaptation.
This makes me think of coming out of the film Annihilation (which I LOVE for the record) and thinking that for as good as it was, it’d have been an even better video game. To give people the freedom to truly explore and dwell and try to unravel the deeply bizarre setting to their hearts content and piece together what’s happening in a way that could be truly immersive while the film had to do linearly.
You should read the book. It's far better at evoking the kind of atmosphere you're describing than the movie was.
I suppose, yeah but I wouldn't say this form of storytelling is definitively better than linear storytelling (including branching paths). Both of them have their places it's all situational and I wouldn't say any is particularly more versatile than the other.
There's a place for all 3 of them in this medium overall. In favour of immersion storytelling, it allows you to explore and expand the story at your own pace and can keep control over the pace and tension; in opposition of immersion storytelling, it allows you to explore and expand the story at your own pace and can keep control over the pace and tension and thus the game has much less control over the pace and tension.
Overall, I would say that although there is certainly a good place for immersion storytelling when it comes to immersing yourself in the world of the game, I feel that there is still a place for linear storytelling at times because control over pace and tension can sometimes (not always) be crucial for maximising a player's experience. I would say generally it is best to blend both of them together in games with one form of storytelling a bit more dominant than the other in some titles.
I think it's funny you talk about book to TV and then bring up Die Hard, which is based on a book.
I love this extra punctuation part of the channel
I love the zero escape series of games because of the way it uses branching paths. Certain characters have the ability to transfer their conciousness into different branches of the timeline, so the paths actually interact with each other and the series does some really interesting things with that concept.
There are other ways these games take great advantage of their medium but that's mostly reserved for major plot twists.
Different methods of storytelling are cool. Linear stories are also cool. I like reading and not worrying about branching paths and details/plot threads I might be missing
I recommend heavens vault as a non-linear story and it has an interesting gameplay concept of language translation and historical anthropology, no im not just saying that because I learned the alphabet of a fictional dead language maintained only in spoken form by broken robots and disjoined local patois.
I need to get back to my NG+ of that.
Its been a while now tho
I've probably forgotten half of what I knew of the language...
It also reminded me of the storytelling in Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri - there's no semblance of story campaign (save for a few intermedias for each faction), yet you see so much lore and story simply through playing skirmishes, experiencing different factions and reading short fluff bits
6:01 "Die Hard: The Musical"
Was that a Bob's Burgers reference? lol
I'm pretty sure it's an old Eddy Izzard bit.
A great sister to fighting games' form of interactive storytelling through characters is hero-based competitive games like Team Fortress 2, Overwatch, or Apex Legends. You can piece together character personalities through what they say and how they move, and maybe even understand more about the world, especially if the characters have contextual dialogues like when two champions in League of Legends meet on opposing teams.
I feel like this is what separates Morrowind from future iterations of the Elder Scrolls series. The interaction feels more immersive and part of how narrative unfolds. It shapes your strengths, and weaknesses and greatly changes how you move about that world and in turn how the plotline progresses (or is severed)
That bit about video games being adapted into movies being comparable to movies being adapted into stage plays hits the nail on the head.
this man's voice has more aggression then all the wars of history combined
I just played and finished The Outer Wilds for the first time. I’m so obsessed with how well it delivered its story, that now I’m vicariously living through other people’s playthrough like Joseph Anderson who just streamed the DLC. It’s easily the best narrative game I’ve ever played, and I strongly dislike hyperbole. Detroit: Become Human comes in second.
Someone described the game as an information Metroidvania (or a Metroidbrainia) with how you can complete the game easily as soon as you start, but the only tools you’re lacking are knowledge.
Holy shit that game is good. Although I will clarify that the name is "Outer Wilds" not "The Outer Wilds".
2:29 "You're not so much living heroic story in this game as showing up after all the heroic stories are over."
And this, I think, is the weakness of a narrative not so much portrayed as a series of events as something the player pieces together by exploring the game. It fundamentally means the story isn't something that the player is part of (how could it, if the story is designed to be something the player will only indirectly interact with) as much as it is something that they might take a gander at.
Shadow of the Colossus managed to have the player be a part of the story while still having most of the narrative be something the player pieces together by exploring the game.
That's the one thing that struck me about his description: almost every example given is a game where you're coming in after the fact. Practically required to be apocalyptic in tone, like a story memorial rather than a narrative you're personally engaged in
The point is that you make your own narrative. The 'story' you go through and the conclusions you come to will be entirely unique to you
Fez was another great example of that. You had your own semi linear story of "The world is in trouble, go to these places and save it" while also giving you clue to process the REAL story of the evolution of a race to beyond something the characters in game can even comprehend and gives us a kind of window into thinking about those same kind of concepts in our world. (Seeing a 3D world existing in 2D would be like us navigating through a 4th dimension in our 3D world).
The storytelling in the Zelda series as a whole is another interesting take on how games can immerse you in a story since you play different points in history of the same world. OoT is an entire world and story in and of itself but then in other games that also stand on their own as a complete world without that knowledge, also reference the events of another game you played as mythic events and different timelines remember those legends in different ways.
One last small example I can think of is the beginning of XCOM2 where there's a bit of metanarrative where it's revealed that every single person's playthrough of XCOM EU are all canon...because it was just simulations being run through the commander's head while in stasis. Super meta and really only works in video games where you'll experience the same story over and over but always slightly differently
Great video as always Yahtz. Someone else mentioned XCOM, but what about games like Rimworld, Surviving Mars, CIV etc. where you are directing the narrative, and stories naturally form from randomised events? Where do games like that fall?
The fact that gaming allows for storytelling in a way no other medium can is amazing considering there are still people out there saying "wElL, mAyBe OnE dAy tHeY cAn Be ArT."
People still trot out Roger Ebert saying games can't be art and he's been dead for nearly a whole decade by this point.
It seems to be the way that pretty much every newer medium, genre, and artform goes. People working with it make art, and then some critics come along with preconceived notions and say "Yeah, but is it _real_ art?!"
Someone who lives in my flat thinks that films and TV aren't "proper art". If there are still people (People in their early 20s I might add!) who think that films can't be art, video games don't have a chance.
I think a good example is some of the Vaults in the later Fallout games. You get sent to them on a macguffin hunt, or just wander in because you're curious, and details of what happened are scattered about for you to collect if you so choose. Vault 11 in Fallout: New Vegas is a brilliant sci-fi story akin to Shirley Jackson's The Lottery. You don't have to engage with it at all, you can just go grab the macguffin and get out, but as soon as you enter you see bizarre campaign signs and graffiti on the walls. Your natural curiosity compels you to read the documents and audio logs on the computers and gradually piece together the horror of what happened here.
I don't remember being as immersed as I was when I entered Vault 11. I don't think I was that immersed since Bioshock. And even more so than Bioshock because I found the logs in vault 11 to be somewhat easier to follow. As a bonus I'd say Vault 22 also comes close.
I love how Hades tells a story that didn't even start with Zagreus' attempt to escape Hell, it's just the way that Zag engages with his place in it and gives him an excuse to change the way he interacts with the people around him both when he's trying to possibly never see them again, and also when he inevitably gets sent back to the hub where they all pass their commentary on him and his situation. Even when the game is no longer about earnestly trying to escape Hell and instead sorta becomes this part-time job for Zagreus to do (because he's gotten so good at it by the end), it then becomes an excuse for everyone to treat him differently, like reconciled friends and coworkers! Im not usually a fan of rogue-likes, but the way Supergiant went about tying their narrative into the gameplay and making you feel invested in everything *through* Zagreus and everyone he meets/everything he does is just the kind of thing that made me take to it really well!! ❤
Well the zero escape series also did that back in the Nintendo DS era
Although the first game only tackled it at a surface level the second game really took it to new hights
Not to mention that the writing is fucking amazing
And the third went flat fucking bonkers with it. And I loved it. It was truly, like Yahtzee put it, reaching the center of the yarn ball. It was nuts to get to the true ending of Zero Time Dilemma, but after what an amazing, dimensionally boggling ride the whole trilogy was... damn. There could not have been a better ending than that.
The feeling of uncertainty in reality that it conveys... Chef's Kiss! 👌
I love the zero escape games! Although personally I think the first one is the best one. Second and third are cool but VLR kind of overbuilds itself and kind of collapses on the weight of its own ambition trying to tie up its 100000 plot points and twists at the end. 999 is one solid core mystery solved in a satisfying way at the end, very self contained (well, other than that one thing at the end but you can mostly ignore that and indeed they did in the sequel)
@@LOLquendoTV while I agree with you about 999 i think VLR actually does a pretty good job of pieacing all the plot points together although the pacing does take a big hit depending on the ending order you take
Like you can just reveal half of the mysterious in the first ending and then you'd have to go through other routs where the game thinks you're still not aware of what's going
But there's only one ending like that and you're unlikely to get it in the early game as for me it was literally the last ending i got before I started unlocking the locked routes
And time dilemma fixes that issue by going full fucking bonkers and having so many plot points that you can possibly ruin it with bad pacing because you have no idea what pace you're on
@@LOLquendoTV Mostly, what happens with the kind of stories that go "that extra mile" as the Zero Escape series, can be compared to what one can see when looking at classic Sci-fi vs modern Sci-fi. Especially the higher tier and top tier. AKA "Outward Complexity masking Inner Simplicity vs Simple Surface Hiding Vast Complexity".
That being said, the issue is, as the dilemma itself hints at, incredibly more complex. More so where Sci-fi is concerned, because...
(Takes a deep breath)
All works of fiction, science or otherwise, can be easily divided into three tiers:
Tier 3: Ye average tale that advertises itself as something grandiose, maybe even Sci-fi, but is at its core common fodder. A good example is Star Wars. Despite its claims, it is basically just Sword n' Sorcery, but in space. Down to its simple and recurrent "journey of the hero", its structure split neatly in a trilogy fashion (1st movie is the Setup, 2nd the Confrontation, 3rd the Conclusion). Themes are simple, easy-to-grasp, with any "sci-fi worldbuilding" merely an excuse to justify the plot in some manner. Pretty much all modern, Commercial (with particular emphasis in the word) sci-fi stories fall within this category.
Tier 2: Those tales that depart from the common tropes, even if their roots, characters, Setup/Confrontation/Conclusion still adhere to known formulas. Prime examples are the great classic works of the Golden Age of Sci-fi, like Asimov's Foundation Series, Clarke's 2001: Space Odyssey (and sequels), or Heinlein's Stanger in a Strange Land. They may push the envelope of their settings and hint at way bigger and complex things than what normal folks can grasp without some form of scientific and philosophical training. Still, at the end of the day, stories in this tier still find a way to "come back down" from their flights of fancy without asking truly mind bending feats of intuitive imagination. That feat is the exclusive realm of...
Tier 1: Stories that really challenge the reader/viewer with the sheer scope of what they can picture. I'm talking about the kind of stories that inspire the people that write the stuff on Tier 2. The few examples I know and have read are, in sci-fi, the works of Olaf Stappledon (incidentally, the guy that inspired the three great authors mentioned above), "Last and First Men", "Odd John" and "Starmaker", with particular emphasis on the last one (basically a concise account of the evolution of the Universe, from beginning to end and beyond, and in 339 pages, no less!!). These are the ones that can cohesively and elegantly summarize the entire content of a Tier 2 story in one chapter, and the entire bulk of a dozen-volume-long "modern sci-fi saga" into a paragraph. The kind of tales that explore in a logical fashion well beyond the theoretical limits of science, fiction, and even reality itself. Likewise, because of the... gargantuan feats of imagination they demand from the reader due to the sheer amount of information conveyed in each page, the average consumer, and even the not-so-average will struggle with them and often find them deceptively lacking. Hell, I still remember the actual headache I got reading "Last and First Men", and that one does not even skim the surface of what Stappledon goes into in his two later works (especially "Starmaker"), and I consider myself "well read". Imagine then what all the average players of "Ghost Train Rides" and "Jimminy Cockthroats" say about games like Tunic, Return of the Obra Din, or the whole Zero Escape trilogy... they won't even give them a chance, like you and me, on account of many "petty complains" (mostly the lack of the mental handholding in Yahtzee's favorite genre of game victims).
Zero Escape, as a whole, oscillates between Tier 2 and 1, and as such, it touches subjects about time, consciousness and reality that had me going to read Actual science works in order to grasp them. But once I managed to wrestle with the inherent logic of those concepts and how they work within the plot (especially in Time Dilemma)... it was such a ride!! Three games long!!! Yipee!!!!
Kotaro Uchikose is throwing real heavy metal at us in his uniquely interconnected plots, and on VIDEO GAMES nonetheless!! That trilogy is a true iceberg packed choke full of treasure.
But, like I myself can testify, it requires an extra wealth of knowledge and imagination from we, candidly hapless gamers, who know not of the stuff that inspired Uchikose to write his trilogy (wish I knew, I bet they are amazing reads).
Sorry for the rant. But when it comes to mind boggling tales like that, I can't help it.
@@zennvirus7980 really don't know the point you're trying to make there, I understood the plot of VLR perfectly, I just thought it was narratively unsatisfying in relation to it's pretty successful build up in the beginning of the game. I hope I'm misunderstanding your point here cause I don't think I'm "too stupid to get it" which seems to be what you're implying there
I used to think it was hard to have meaningful character moments with this type of story telling. Playing Disco Elysium and Elden Ring showed me I was sure as heck wrong about that. So yes bring on more of that please.
I think a lot of multiplayer games do the fighting game thing of telling the narrative through a mass of in-game dialogue. For example, almost nobody who plays dota 2 goes online and reads the game lore, but people still fall in love with the characters, their personalities, and their identities through the hundreds of dialogue bits that expose their personalities, motivation, and little snippets of lore. I also think that a central part of "immersive storytelling" that applies to the games Yahtzee described is integrating the narrative into the gameplay. In some games, story is something that happens between gameplay, but in Obra Dinn and Tunic, unraveling and progressing the narrative is the gameplay.
It's interesting, this video reminds me of some narrative theory essays I read back in college that were asking, essentially, whether games could be stories or if the concept of "play" inherently was at odds with the concept of "story." I believe the general argument was similar to Yahtzee's, that most attempts at story in a game were basically just transplanted bits of movie in the form of cutscenes, and that it was hard to say whether you could call gameplay "story" when player choice alters the actual elements of the experience (whereas in reading a book, everyone reads the same words but comes away with different impressions. Obviously excluding people who skip pages etc).
It also reminds me of the field of hypertext narrative, which is basically when the text of a narrative has embedded hyperlinks that lead to other snippets of writing (or indeed other art forms if you want). So at its most basic, a character knocks over a vase, you click on the word "vase" and now you're on a page describing where the vase came from, or detailed how to shatters, which might include links to another thing tangentially related. You may not ever find your way back to the original thread and sometimes that's the point. It was an experiment with text-based (usually) narrative that could be experienced out of order or with no sense of order at all as a kind of stream of consciousness, and in that regard I think fits with the immersion narrative idea.
As far as I know, hypertext never really caught on. It was a bit too out there for a lot of people, or maybe just never had enough buzz to gain an audience. The highest profile example I can think of is the Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern was originally an online hypertext... Thing before she adapted it to a novel which still has the strong sense of place and atmosphere taking precedence over plot, but does obviously have to be printed in a specific order.
I dunno, having gotten into fromsoft games starting with Sekiro I do sort of prefer that style of leaning closer to traditional narrative compared to elden ring, tho ER is undoubtedly an incredible game with a very rewarding sense of discovery to it. But I did also really enjoy Obra Dinn and that wouldn't have benefitted from structuring itself more traditionally at all.
I've seen a lot of games that break from the linear mold in the way Yahtzee describes (where the epic stuff has happened and you're exploring the aftermath) criticized, following the same logic of "if this isn't the most interesting part of this character/world/whatever, why aren't you showing us that?"
But I suppose the reason for that is they often still play out in a linear fashion on their own, just that you aren't a part of the exciting bits at this point.
I really like Elden Ring (I have over 200 hrs in it) but that is exactly how I feel when people praise the "story".
It feels like the most interesting bits of the linear story have already happened and would have been cooler to see on screen.
Instead you piece together the elaborate lore behind who your murder hobo just wordlessly killed.
His channel is about DnD, but Matt Colville has a good video about how lore doesn't equal story.
@@monstermoo4191 Hard agree. Being able to piece together the game's backstory and lore through item descriptions and environmental storytelling is great, but the game also needs to have a main plot to drive the player forward. The lore should _supplement_ the plot, not _supplant_ it.
Hot take: Dark Souls 2 is the closest FromSoft have come to getting this right (so far).
I mean, certainly stories/settings CAN work cross medium. It just needs to be adapted to the strengths and weaknesses of the medium in question. Almost all of the best movie adaptations of video games and video adaptations of movies realize this. And there ARE good examples of both. The fact that many people don't realize the difference between linear and immersive stories is definitely to blame on the general mediocrity of such ventures though.
I've previously worked in Immersive Theatre and Immersive Experiences (by creating playable cities through ubiquitous computing) and it's great to see those concepts crossing over. It was that work that lead me to create Augmented Reality.
For anyone interested, Punchdrunk Theatre spearheaded Immersive Theatre in the UK and you were often free to go wherever you liked in the (massive) space - they have a production on right now, in London, and many more in development (including with Niantic, the makers of Pokemon Go).
This is exactly something I have been thinking about myself, and exactly because I've played and loved Obra Dinn, Disco Elysium, and am now, (finally,) playing Dark Souls Remastered, and have watched Jacob Geller's videos talking about the emergence of theme through gameplay. I feel like Video Games have only JUST begun to scratch the surface of exploiting the intrinsic values of the medium to create narratives unique to this medium. I'm obsessed with it. It's all I want to play now. My life has been full of the Mass Effects and Final Fantasys. I want a million percent more Obra Dinn.
I feel like the problem with immersive narrative, and particularly looking at Dark Souls, is that the story is so easy to misconstrue or misunderstand. Something that probably haunts a story writer wanting to tell a specific story that their audience won't understand or take the wrong message. It presents an absence of control from the storytelling perspective, which may be very fitting for a medium that is all about giving control rather than taking it away.
I think this kind of muddled interpretation keeps stories alive longer through discussion. I haven't played as much Dark Souls as some people, but I think about shows like Serial Experiments Lain or the original Ghost in the Shell where trippy-ass things _happen intentionally_ but you don't have some peanut gallery dumping exposition like Dragonball Z to make the weirdness _less weird._ You just have to cope and ask each other, 'wtf did I just watch? What'd you get from that?'
And then I think about series like Kingdom Hearts that are _so up their asses_ about their exposition-dumps, when their raw imagery would be _mind-bending and debatable if they could just shut their mouths._ Nomura has said on-record that he came up with arbitrary twists in the plot, and teased them through cliffhangers, to generate _temporary buzz_ . . . but this goes away every time the new game drops and _exposits_ the correct answer. It's only a mystery for 2-3 years, instead of being a mystery _forever._
most people interpret stories differently than what may have been conceived by a writer.
Something neat to note: a major inspiration for Dark Souls was Miyazaki trying to read a fantasy novel in a language he didn't fully understand. He made many weird mistakes in his interpretation of the work but found those still interesting. He wanted the game to feel like that.
@@keltzar1 So its like reading a Wuxia Novel in Chinese?
That's a problem with stories in general. Even if you have a linear tale, different people will draw different conclusions anyway. No matter how explicit you are as an author, you can't tediously go over every reason and motivation; which leaves room for the reader to fill in the blanks themselves, potentially misconstruing entire actions.
Ask ten people why Anakin fell to the dark side, and you'll get eleven different answers.
so we have linear, multi-linear and immersion story telling. I personally like linear and immersion the best but I don't think anyone of these are particularly better then the other.
all of them are good to an extent, I think Execution is what usually makes or breaks it.
like you shit on multi-linear, but something like undertale, a game most people praise for its story, is technically multi-linear, but they combined that aspect with the story to basically tell the player that just because you can doesn't always mean you should.
Or hell he through Detroit Become Human under the bus even though for Multi Linear games, that is one of the best examples of Multi Linear storytelling within that genre, for most people no two playthroughs will be the same, and it's not like just the endings, no there are parts you will never see because you didn't do a thing
Outer Wilds springs to mind as a fantastic example of nonlinear storytelling. There is, of course, a linear story of what happened in the universe, but it's up to the player to explore and uncover what that story is. So you find bits and pieces of it in a pseudo-random order, depending on where you personally decided to put your attention. By the end, you've got a linear story, but the path you take to get there is, to steal a phrase, wibbly-wobbly.
It proves that such a thing _can_ be done extremely well! Though even the developer said something to the effect of it being a once-in-a-lifetime idea
This kind of story telling seems like its particularly well suited for stories not about the player. Stories about a place or an idea or an event. Rather than a story one particular person where I feel like this kind of story telling would struggle.
It hurts me so much that Yahtzee gave up on Outer Wilds before really getting into it cause based on how much he loves Obra Dinn, Outer Wilds could easily become one of his favorite games of all time
I feel the same with how he dismissed _Fallout: New Vegas_ before getting to anywhere of importance. 😑
Same. Came to the comments section of this video just to see how many people would mention Outer Wilds. It's a game of sublime genius and Yahtzee really should give it a second chance.
This is exactly why I love FromSoft-games. You just show up in the world, you're not the main character, you're just some guy, surrounded by shadows of some other guys running around doing essentially the same things you are. You're not unique, you're not special, and there is no master narrative that follows your specific story. You're cast into the world and then you have to rely on your own intuition and skill in order to figure out what's going on - if you even care about doing that. If you want, you can just go slay things, get paid, progress, win, without having any idea about the bigger picture. Which, y'know, is pretty much like life. There's an endless past behind your life and an endless future ahead of it and you're free to faff about as much as you like, you're free to care about everything or not care about anything. There's no clear good guys or bad guys, just a bunch of different ideologies which are all incredibly cryptic to figure out what they actually want, because everyone seems to have a different idea of what they're doing.
Everything about these games is carefully planned to enhance that feeling of loneliness and confusion. Of being alone and unimportant, and of having all the responsibility to figure everything out yourself. That's why all the criticism of Elden Ring not being player-friendly shows how many critics fail to understand this core concept of the game. (Of course there are legitimate criticism to raise at it, my main gripe being the endless catacombs and repeating bosses). It's not just about "git gud", it's about the fact that all the design choices help to create this immersion in the game world.
This is the most amazing thing about the games. It's not specifically that it uses immersive storytelling, but that *everything* in the game is constructed to enhance that immersion, to create a unified whole of an experience. And this experience is something that could only be done with an interactive medium like video games.
I agree with most of everything you said, to the extent that the strengths you mentioned do an excellent job of creating a very striking tone and an interesting setting to explore. However, I remain a horrible heretic in that I've never felt like those games benefit in any way from being so vague about everything, and that the vagueness to all the lore detracts from what narrative there is. I'm all for there being no clear good guys or bad guys, and the narrative itself never saying who was right or wrong, but moral nuance and individual interpretation don't require redacting half the story. It's entirely possible to get all the relevant details and still let the audience decide who they relate to more. Explaining what the heck the Puss of Man actually is, or how the Unkindled work, for example, would in no way detract from the story in my opinion, half-baked and/or explained ideas are not nuance. You could still journey through a dying world just as well armed with a thorough idea of the backstory rather than tiny bits and pieces, it's all in the past either way. In fact, I'd argue that deciding your own path would feel even more meaningful with clearer lore, because choices like burning the Painted World would have more impact if you had a better idea of what it was, and therefore what its loss means, or if it can even survive independently of the First Flame either way. And the feelings of loneliness and despair among the fading pieces a dying world would hit even harder if you had a clearer idea of what was lost in the first place. Everything the games do right, and they certainly do some things very right, would work even better with clearer lore as I see it.
And as long as I'm ranting, regarding lore and immersion, getting even vague lore from equipment and item flavor text never quite sat right with me either. What, is that text engraved into the sword's blade? Does everything have a little bonus story card attached like the toy surprise in a cereal box? It's pretty much the text equivalent of a narrator explaining the story, for as naturally as it fits into the internal presentation and is not at all immersive storytelling. Plus, that flavor text method of filling out the world - the source of most actual info - is the exact opposite of the otherwise vaunted "show, don't tell" that people are always saying those games do so well. And NPC dialogue is probably the second biggest source, which again is much more tell than show. The games do an absolute A+ job of showing that you're in the decaying remains of a formerly vibrant world, and that what's little is left probably wants to kill you. And if that's all the info you want, then yeah, resounding success. But if you want anything deeper than that, any more backstory, and lots of fans clearly do, it's all tell. Or at the very least, like the Profaned Capital, some show that only really means anything in the context of a heaping helping of tell, and even then probably has some gaps.
@@Alloveck You make some really good points, and I have to agree with a lot of it. I am generally on board with the vagueness, though, simply because really grasping the world around you does require a lot of work. And I actually really appreciate the whole social meta-aspect of the game as well; the fact that the community works together to figure out the lore and find all different endings and secrets brings back the feeling of my old school days playing SNES when rumors circulated about all sorts of secrets that people didn't know about. Just makes me kind of nostalgic for the days when there were still mysteries, and I enjoy that cryptic nature of the Soulsbornering games. But, you are entirely right: that whole concept is entirely opposed to immersion storytelling; the meta-aspect really takes you out of the world.
Same thing with the story-telling through item descriptions, there is absolutely no logical in-world explanation for it, it posits an all-knowing extradiegetic "narrator" existence that knows everything and imparts that knowledge directly to the player. And that really works against the feeling that you're just an unimportant nobody who happens to be there. The existence of a "narrator" with objective knowledge about everything in the world and their connection to it creates discord with the concept I was praising where the world can only be experienced subjectively, through the player's position as confused and unimportant.
I honestly don't mind it as a lore-explaining device simply because it lets you choose how invested you want to be in all the lore details, and it would, I think (though that may just be to my lack of imagination) be essentially impossible to give the lore as much depth as it has simply by in-game "showing". So I don't mind it, but you are entirely right that it goes against the concept of "show, don't tell" that is crucial to immersion storytelling. So yeah, good points, appreciate your thoughts; I concede that I was mistaken in saying that everything in the game works as a united whole, as the things you point out do quite the opposite.
@@viljamtheninja I gotta say, that's a pleasantly surprising reply. Seems like most people who are in deep enough to meaningfully discuss such matters think the overall presentation is perfect as it is, from what I've seen. In any case, it's nice to find some common ground, though agree or disagree, I appreciate the thoughtful response regardless.
Anyway, I accidentally trailed off the ultimate point I was trying to make the first time, so if you don't mind a little more rambling: I see an inherent problem in the full presentation the Soulsborne games are going for. People love the showing instead of telling, but they also love the whole "after the dust has settled" vibe, wandering the ruins of kingdoms already fallen and battles already fought. (And in all honesty I like that post-apocalyptic feeling of freedom as well. Why rush or worry? It's all ruined already. The complete desolation leads to a surprising sort of serenity.) But that destruction conflicts with a world developed via "show don't tell" because you can't show what has already been destroyed. If you want to flesh out the past and lore of such a setting - past characters, what their motives were, what they were fighting for, it's much harder to do via showing after they're dead. The more distant the past is, figuratively and literally, the harder it is to show. Thus the games end up with conflicting elements like the immersive world design and the unimmersive item text, and semi-explained aspects that confuse or conflict the player's sense of place in the world rather then enhance it. Conflicting fundamental design goals throw the whole thing off.
With that said, I'll admit I'm kinda backseat driving here in that I don't exactly have perfect solutions, though at the very least, I'd just try to make the games explain more things more clearly. Doesn't even have to be front and center, just there if the player cares to look for it. Maybe in the form of more item text, though a few more talkative NPCs couldn't hurt either. (At least then the telling has a logical in-universe justification.) Otherwise, I mostly just mean to say that as I see it, the Dark Souls style of "immersive storytelling" isn't quite as immersive as it's cracked up to be in its totality, and is far from the end all be all of game narrative delivery methods.
When he started talking about the structure of a story I was really hoping he'd mentioned Vonnegut. My lizard brain was happy when slaughterhouse 5 came up
Ok, I must say the ice skating analogy is maybe the most brilliantly poignant take on point-of-view I've ever heard in my life. I fear it will go forever unappreciated.
General reminder that Outer Wilds and its DLC are fantastic examples of this. Everyone go play them! And don't look anything up about the game.
I was going to reply this. As far as immersive story telling, this is one of the best examples ever. There is a story. Something IS happening. It's up to you to find out how and no 2 people will discover it the same way.
I'd rather play a game which actually has characters. Elden Ring would be dogshit if it had no npcs.
@@darkfool2000 I mean it does have NPCs. Sure they don't give you quests, but you can go talk to them, discuss your findings, some of them even provide hints towards absolutely critical information needed to beat the game. Your main tools has a frequency devoted entirely towards helping you meet up with your fellow travelers. And I don't really understand what your Elden Ring comment has to do with anything. Tons of great games have few or zero NPCs. That is hardly what separates great games from dogshit.
@@trevorleitner2146 There are a handful of NPCs in Outer Wilds and two of them are actually central to finishing the game. That said, you may be missing a lot of great games without a more open mind.
@@trevorleitner2146 I don't really like games that don't have npcs. They are not for me. When I imagine exploring an interesting world, that world is filled with living characters and their stories.
I haven't played the game; I'm surprised that the game has characters, because none of the things I've read about it imply that.
The steam page makes me imagine empty (no people) vistas to explore, and the numerous reviews I've read are absolutely not helpful. They either tell me nothing with bland platitudes, or they say I shouldn't even be reading reviews. It's so fucking obnoxious. People telling me it's a masterpiece while telling me jackshit about why I should want to play it.
2011's hottest take.
LOLed at the Pringles hands and breadbin joke at the end! XD
It’s interesting that you bring up fighting games as story telling, because it’s something the genre has been experimenting with for a while, to varying results. I’d recommend watching Sugarpunch Design Works video on “why don’t fighting games have good stories” for more on the subject but basically he argues that the versus mode itself could be considered a story, and we could layer our presentation around matches to be like that
I don't generally get the criticism of adapting media into different forms, other than it isn't always done well. Every form has its strengths and weaknesses, and sometimes you want to experience a plot a different way.
I find it funny that you use The Witcher as your example, since it started off as a book. To be honest, I have more experience with The Witcher in those mediums than in video games.
I still don't understand how some games still advertise "movie like experiences". If i wanted to watch a movie i would watch a movie.
The screen shoots and the mention of the 7th Guest, made me have a flashbacks to my childhood and the first pc game.
I'm surprised Yahtzee hasn't reviewed more crpgs given his interest in "immersive storytelling".
Most of them are too weaboo for him. 13 sentinels are too much for him.
@@TheGoukaruma I'm thinking of games like divinity OS2 or tyrrany tho.
@@hariharanjayashankar8932 Sorry. I had brainmelt. I've read JRPG for some reason.
Divinity Original Sins 2 blew me away with how immersive it was.
Lately I have been asking myself if what I so often called games even really were games. I know that conventionally anything with loosely defined rules and a fail state is a game. But so often there actually isn't any gaming elements in the AAA games. When I play Elden Ring, it's a game first, the goal is to play the game, and the story only comes as reward for playing the game. But thinking back, this is so commonly not the case. I've enjoyed plenty of these "experiences" for the story, but I don't know if I like this focus on story over gameplay, and I think Yahtzee is mistaking a good game that also has some story in it for an immersive story, which it really isn't (at least for me).
Ya that’s how dark souls got popular in the first place. Triple A games were getting too rail-roady
Viscera cleanup detail is a bit how you described. You clean up the violent aftermath of something, figuring out what happened and submitting your best guesses of causes of death (as well as personal opinions of the victims (yes really)) while it is also your job to cover it up. Not all of these things are manditory either. Regardless of what you learn you just return to your office and get rewarded/punished for the quality of your work. You also get the opportunity to find and keep souvenirs and store them in your office (which in turn also has it's own secrets.
I nearly yelled in joy when he mentioned Slaughterhouse Five. That book changed the way I think about Time as a concept and I always think of it when playing games like Dark Souls. Another great essay
I'd rather be a significant character in a story that's playing out, than be a secondary character purely on a path of discovery. Archaeology is nice and all, but I want some meat with my side dish.
That's one of my biggest gripe with his argument. You can't seriously expect to me to believe that walking over a frozen lake full of corpses is more interesting than experiencing firsthand whatever calamity caused so many people to die and end up in a frozen lake.
@@darkfool2000 Or more specifically be the one who lead to all those corpses being there. With your choices being whose corpses are left under the ice and who was around to see the devastation later. Hell, maybe even what led to the freezing process rather than the death if you wanted to preserve a visual representation of whatever happened.
Just exploring somewhere isn't all that compelling to me. Character interactions and decisions having visible/measurable reprocussions & consequences are.
A thing for me is he used both Elden Ring and Disco Elysium as examples. In both of those games your character *is* significant, or in Elden Ring's case *makes themselves signficiant* by literally killing all the demigods in the land lol, and in Disco Elysium's case your character is the focus of the story moreso than the world that cares little for him. Both games literally let you have your cake and eat it to in terms of being in interesting and mysterious worlds to explore and giving you interesting and significant characters to interact with and purpose to find.
That's what sets the two games apart for me and makes me believe at little more in this style.
What would work is if the nature of the story, the actual story being told, could be just about anything from adventure to romance to mystery in a single game based on what catches the player's fancy, and certain events could happen in any order, or not at all, with consequences for later events. Like, a game where you get isekai'd into a fantasy world and you *could* free it from the evil overlord (or become the evil overlord yourself), or you could just explore, uncover the history of the setting, try to get home without trying to change much, just attempt to live an ordinary life, or whatever you want. (Undertale attempts to take the isekai genre as a starting point for the player to take their own path, but it's really branching-paths taken up to eleven.)
@@MorganWick Such a thing is impossible. You could have some systems which make representations of romance, adventure, mystery etc. possible, but all that really is the overactive imagination of a player reading excessively into a scenario. There's no guarantee that even the majority of players are going to have any experiences like that, because it depends on the excessive emotional investment of the player.
The second big problem with that is just how random it all is. Events happening in any order do not make coherent stories, and that inherently conflicts with the idea of there being consequences for later events in any coherent way.
Branching paths are the ideal, you just have to make branches complicated and interesting enough so that most people can't see the guiderails.
I agree
I like this video because thanks to Yahtzee, I've realized most of my favorite games use this kind of storytelling !
Breath of the Wild, Subnautica, Hollow Knight, and of course, Dark Souls. You're playing AFTER the party ended and you're left with scraps to deduce what exactly happened.
Heck, I just struck on an idea for action games of all kinds, but particularly spectacle fighters; have the animations and maybe other aspects of fighting enemies change based on how long a fight has been going on, how much damage you’ve taken, etc.
Like, if you’re more heavily damaged, maybe your character’s attacks become more sloppy and erratic, dealing more damage but leaving you more open; sell the panic and desperation the character is feeling or their exhaustion from how long the fight’s been dragging on
OUTER WILDS IS ALSO A PERFECT REPRESENTATION OF THIS. Yaaaayyy another reason for me to fawn over my favorite game of all time. :D
I still can't tell if he's saying Barmy or Balmy.
It's barmy.
STALKER is a brillian example of this concept.
If you want to go down the rabbit hole of interactive storytelling, go look up Chris Crawford's various writings and videos on the subject. For those who don't know, he's the guy who made a couple hits several decades ago, founded GDC, left in a rather dramatic fashion (massive understatement, treat yourself and look up the "Dragon Speech"), wrote several books criticizing the game industry for not living up to it's full potential and expressing his own theories as to what games could be, and then wandered off on a quixotic quest to create an interactive storytelling engine (which failed but that doesn't mean we can't learn from it).
I'm a bit confused at your title. It seems to imply that Linear stories and immersive stories are at opposite sides of the spectrum which they aren't. The message that I got from the video was "Tell the story through the gameplay not just disjointed cutscenes" which is typically a good idea but Isn't a fit for every game. Outer Wilds is an amazing game with no cutscenes and finding its story is directly tied into the gameplay it's great. Final Fantasy 6 Has a great story that's told almost always through uninteractive cutscenes, Same with the Nier games. Would these games be better if they told their story was like Outer Wilds'? No, usually the tradeoff that games like Outer Wilds have to make is the complexity of the story. Since the story is told in such a complex way the over-arching narrative needs to be simple or else the player wouldn't be able to keep up. Like I said Earlier though these things are not at the opposite ends of the spectrum, Pathologic 2 has it's narrative expertly woven into it's gameplay while most of its dialogue is said through cutscenes. Ultimately there's no objectively better way to make game narratives, you need to identify what type of story is a good fit for the story you are trying to tell.
You mention that Elden Ring contains little side stories and stories the players make themselves and both of those sound self-contradicting to your overall point. First, a series of small side stories are still linear stories. They're just a group of connected linear stories that share the same universe. By that logic the MCU as a whole (but not the individual movies) is a perfect example of non-linear story-telling. Second, if the players have to make their own stories, then that kind of implies there's no real story there, doesn't it? And that, in the absence of what we recognize as a story, we're going to make our own linear stories.
Honestly, what you're describing doesn't really sound like a story at all. Just world-building. Just setting. A story has two key components: A structure and Change. Without the former, it's just disjointed nonsense. Without the later, there's no point to any of it. In a game where you're just exploring around and finding tidbits of lore, you don't have either of those. Sure, your character levels up, but there's no emotional change or characterization that occurs. Your character is exactly the same as when you started and all of the lore that was laying around for you to discover remains the same at the end of the game. The only lasting changes you make are done via linear stories.
This is not to disparage setting exploration games. Not at all. It can be very fun and very rewarding to explore a world and feel like you're part of something bigger. Something that approximates real life and exists with or without your presence. Without a structured narrative surrounding you, the world feels bigger and less like it might stop existing when you look the other way. I agree that such a thing is easier to convey in video games BECAUSE you can approach aspects of it in any order you choose. The Lord of the Rings, for example, has so many references to a larger world in it, but, unless you're VERY good at memorizing page numbers, you're always going to experience those references in the same order and always a background events to the main story, not as the primary reason you're reading the book.
Honestly, a fan Wiki also achieves this fairly well for much of the same reasons a video game does, imo. I admit I'd never considered looking at a wiki as a means of story telling, but I think that might be an interesting thing to try.
This reminds me so much of MrBtongue's video on the Shandification of Fallout. Even all those years ago he commented on how games became more "cinematic". I'm hoping for better ways to get lost in a world without feeling like I'm railroaded into one specific line that developers wanted me to see and play through
I so too remember Outer Wilds, that's the best kind of inmersion storytelling couple with explanations in the form of archeological discoveries
The Witcher Netflix series is actually pretty good. I wasn't expecting all that much from it, but it genuinely had me binge the whole thing with its characters and narrative drawing me in. Of course in terms of experience, it probably can't hold a flame to the games, but if I remember correctly, it doesn't try to replicate the games, but tries to stay closer to the books.
It does have an easter egg or two that references the games of course (and sometimes straight up borrowed some visuals for location and character design), but I think it can hold its own pretty well.
I feel like linear stories can be more immersive (at least for me), in a lot, and i mean a lot of games when you can make decisions, most of the outcomings just feel ridiculous, lazy or they wouldn't even make sense.
This is some great insight! This is some of the good stuff you can get from 'sandbox' and 'simulationist' worlds. It can mess up spectacularly, but when it works, it sure works!
Oh and I loved that bit at the end of your video where they were gonna kiss but instead the lady got bread.
My favorite one of these so far. Spot on, really hits the heart of why VGs remain my favorite medium.
One flaw I can already see in immersion storytelling is that - as Yahtzee’s said in his review of Bloodborne or Dark Souls 3 - you very likely need to play the game a second time to get a coherent narrative out of it. You might get all the way through a game and be near the end of it, but if you missed one very important detail, you’ll finish it and think to yourself ‘what the hell is going on, and why did that enemy have a spider coming out of his head?’
It’ll probably make sense to people who go through everything the game has to offer, and it probably is something only a video game can do. But I’m reminded of the old saying ‘if it ain’t broken, don’t fix it.’ Narratives stick with a beginning, middle, and end because it’s perfectly functional. It works, and it works well. You can play the story, and understand why we need to go here, do this, and fight that.
Nice to see Yahtzee finally give fighting games a little love. And yes, I agree, NRS games don't count.