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What does Dark Souls's storytelling get right that most games get wrong?
Well, everything.
Okay, I'm going to start with a bold claim... but hear me out before you grab those torches
and pitchforks.
Videogames in all their varied, wonderful, and button-mashing manifestations generally
suck when it comes to storytelling.
Of course there are exceptions, but most are ineffective, clumsy or just unnecessary.
Quicktime events are frustrating because I hate not really being in control of my player.
I want to be the one to disembowel that centaur. Or maybe not. And cut-scenes are a great opportunity
to do some texting or catch up on House of Cards.
But let's look at Dark Souls for a second.
The thing that people talk about the most with Dark Souls is its crazy level of difficulty
But do you know what doesn't get enough credit? Its story.
You might be saying: hold up, what story?
At first blush, the plot is threadbare: an age-old tale of a knight trying to lift a
curse on a savage land. You know, Sword and Sorcery stuff.
You can play Dark Souls straight through and never realize it goes much deeper than that.
Ok take a look at this guy, an enemy archer with just a fancy bit of armor.
But if you look closely at the sword that you loot from his body, you learn that his name
was Ricard. He's an undead Prince with a name and a history, and a life that didn't go quite
as planned.
Clearly, because you're looting his undead corpse.
Dark Souls tells its story environmentally, through objects armor and weapons you find
lying around. It lets you discover the story for yourself.
And Dark Souls 2 which just came out, continues that trend.
Yui Tanimura, codirector of Dark Souls 2, says that he wanted players to collect certain
pieces of information so they could try and put the story together and create their own
version of the narrative.
It was the methodology of storytelling that was super-important. For him and the team
to maintain.
This is revolutionary because, sadly, most games copy storytelling tools from cinema,
novels, or comics. They're not using the gaming environment to do something unique.
So how did Dark Souls get it right?
First, let's restate the problem.
When I'm watching an especially longwinded cutscene, like the entire second half of Metal
Gear Solid 4, or a poorly written one, like the arm wrestling scene in Shenmue 2, I'm
disengaged.
Even when it's seamless and beautiful, like meeting Elizabeth in Bioshock Infinite, it
breaks the interactivity and damages the sensation that I'm actually inside this game world.
It forces me to become a viewer, not a player.
Check out our episode on immersion if you'd like to know more.
On a broader level, some people question whether games should even be telling stories in the
first place.
Enter the ludology and narratology debate.
Those on the ludology side say that story is unnecessary and may distract from play,
which is the whole point of games.
And they have a point. Tetris, Minecraft and Go don't need stories to be ridiculously fun
and engaging.
On the other hand, the narratology camp counters that games just haven't figured out how to
do stories yet.
And there's no question that game narratives have historically been problematic.
Text adventures, like Zork, told good stories, but you were always battling with the text parser.
Likewise, reading the text in Ghost Trick, one of my personal favorites, is interminable.
No matter how adorable Missile the Pomeranian is.
Then there's cut-scenes, little clips that take control away from the player.
For every good one, spoiler alert from like 15 years ago, like Aeris dying in Final Fantasy,
there are millions of bad ones, like every dialog exchange between Master Chief and Cortana.
To solve that riddle, game designers came up with "walkie-talkies," where a player
is free to move around while a voiceover narrates.
But as much as I love The Last of Us, it's weird to wait for your character to shut up
so you can get back to playing.
And all the games that I've mentioned are good games with decent stories. But how many
times have truly horrible, awful stories gotten in the way of what would otherwise be a fun
experience? I'm sure you have a personal example that you can leave in the comments.
Games have cribbed these techniques from comics, movies, and pretty much everywhere without
developing a narrative voice of their own.
It's kind of like the Frankenstein of stories, or Frankenstory if you will.
But now, there's signs of hope.
Games are finally figuring out how to tell good stories without interrupting themselves.
They do this through "diegetic storytelling," a consistent world where events flow from
the game world itself.
In film, diegetic sound is sound that originates from the world. So when you see a car brake,
you hear a screech.
In games, diegetic storytelling is story that emerges from the game world. Discovering it
is part of the design. And it keeps you fully immersed in the game itself.
This means that you can happily have your ludology and eat your narratology too.
But a couple of things are required.
First, game environments have to be believable spaces where things happen as you'd expect.
GTA gets around the walkie-talkie problem by having a passenger in the car narrate the
story when you drive from place to place.
Which usually makes sense!
Second, the environments are specifically crafted to tell stories.
Dark Souls has Sen's Fortress, a ***-trapped temple which has sparked all kinds of speculation
about who constructed it and who Sen actually is.
Dear Esther has cave paintings, crumpled letters, and tea candles to guide you through a narrative
about a character who may or may not really exist.
Third, the objects that you find and interact with have stories of their own.
The food you collect and eat in Skyrim gives you some insight into the gastronomic preferences
of the people that live there.
And yes, Gone Home does have reading, but it makes sense. Teenage girls in the 80s wrote
a lot of notes.
Rather than being told a story, you're discovering it for yourself. And that makes it way more personal
Plus, diegetic storytelling has the advantage of letting players choose exactly how much
of the story they want to engage with.
If you're not that interested in Dark Souls backstory and you just want to keep from dying
.. . Go ahead! If you want to learn everything there is to know about that world, you can
do that too!
So do all games need to be masters of diegetic storytelling?
Of course not. I don't need to identify with the Galaga spaceship.
But every art form has its own specific capabilities when it comes to storytelling. Novels let
you inhabit somebody's mind. Theatre lets you experience raw live emotion. And movies let
you jump time, space, and point of view.
And videogames tell stories as exploration.
So while games haven't delivered an Oscar-worthy performance, they don't have to. They'll do
something better.
So what do you think? Are games finally finding their storytelling voice?
Hash it out in the comments and if you like what you saw, please subscribe. I will see
you all next week!
Last week we talked about whether or not you will be terrible at virtual reality.
Let's see what you had to say.
Calvin Spealman says that virtual reality has the potential to put the "first person"
back in first person narratives. Virtual reality has the potential for people to have empathetic
experiences with characters that are not themselves. There's a great project that we'll link to
in the description that someone put together that allowed a man to see what it's like to
be inside a woman's body and a woman to see what it's like to be inside a man's body.
Which could be pretty awesome.
Dominic Nicholson says that the thing that really concerns him is the omni-directional
controller and brings up a point that we've had several other viewers mention in past
episodes. If you are someone who is in a wheelchair or doesn't have the ability to walk on one
of those treadmills, then you're not gonna be able to use those games. I mean I do think
that this is a big important question. Virtual reality obviously requires you to move your
head. If you're not someone who's able to do that... and if you look at the work of
the Able Gamers Foundation, obviously this is a big question for gamers going forward.
So yeah, I think there's an element of social responsibility there, that we as a gaming
community are going to have to reckon with.
But on the other hand, as Ramanujan88 suggested, perhaps virtual reality will open the door
for someone who's say paralyzed, to experience what it's like to use their legs for the first
time or to use them again. That, with new advances that we've seen in the field of robotics
that allows prosthetics to be controlled by the human brain certainly opens new possibilities.
We've said this in the past, that all technology is assistive in some way. And I presume that
virtual reality won't be much different.
Mageoftheyear. First of all congratulations for winning! I hope you do it again next year,
I know it's a really competitive award. As far as the salmon bucket helicopter thing,
I have no idea.
TheNugShow mentions Cardboard Computer's amazing The Entertainment, which is part of the Kentucky
Root Zero franchise. Highly, highly recommended. Opens up whole new possibilities for immersive
theater. I'd check it out if you get a chance.
Humberto Bracho and Farewell VHS mention something that I didn't talk about in the episode which
is the world of adult entertainment and intimate experiences. I tend not to be too alarmist
about new technologies, but I do have to admit that is one area that I may be a little concerned
about, simply for people who haven't had that first date or first kiss or whatever that
is, if your first encounter with those things is through virtual reality, that absolutely
will affect the way you think about these things in the real world so I do think that
this is going to force some very serious conversations amongst game designers and people who create
things for virtual reality about what are the responsibilities particularly when you're
dealing with adolescents. So it's a good big open question. I try not to be scared about
these sorts of things but, you know, I do worry for my children some day that some of
these things, like having human touch and those types of relationships are going to
be opt-in only. Which is weird.
Hey there newcomers! First of all, welcome.
Second of all, as many of you have noticed I wear
glasses without any lenses in them and the reason why is
because I where the exact same frames but with lenses but there's lots of
glare so that's super distracting. So when we're filming,
voila! No glare! No lenses. So I'm
not one of those people who just like wears glasses
without any lenses in them to be cool or
something like that. That'd be pretty dumb. So no need to say anything about it in the
comments hopefully. Anyway, thanks for watchin!