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40oz

Are game design rules constant?

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John Carmack was once quoted saying

"Story in a video game is like story in a porn movie. Its expected to be there, but its not very important."

Do you think he'd still stand by that rule today? Do the elements of good game design evolve over time? Are there rules that will hold strong even with the fluctuating climate of gaming history? Do game designers go back on their words when talking about the important aspects of strategy, simulation, and fun over the years? Or do many game design rules remain constant? What factors can render a game designer's "rule" obsolete? Is it the players, or is it the games they're competing with? Or is it something else?

John Romero for example, seems to stick pretty adamantly with the opinions he had when developing Doom and Quake. Do you think this could help or hurt the new game he's presumably working on now that were two decades after the debut of his best work?

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I guess at the time it was harder to tell a story through a game simply due to technical limitations. For example, they couldn't add many video cutscenes if they wanted to fit the game on a bunch of floppies. Nowadays developers have more possibilities that can make video game stories more "legit".

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That's a genre-specific assertion, at best. I can't imagine a RPG or an adventure game without a story to guide you towards a greater purpose/goal and keep your interest in the game -if there isn't any, then you\d simply have a mindless roguelike grinder and a "collect the clues until something happens" game, accordingly. And, sadly, there's an example of the latter.

For an action/arcade game it may probably work well enough. How many people really wondered about the story behind Pac Man each time they played it? I must have pumped hundreds of coins into Bubble Bobble as a kid, without ever wondering if there's a story. And to think that both games had an element of progression or of a "deeper truth", revealed through cutscenes, secret codes, etc.

Other than that, I think it's a matter of semantics. What is a "story" anyway? Does every game need to be based upon a tome of epic tales and the authors must have thought of an entire fictional universe behind it? Probably not. Many games can do with storylines such as "you're the hero, kill the bad guys/rescue the princess", but not all of them. No wonder that there are gamers out there that simply discount anything that's not a hardcore RPG or old-school adventure game.

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40oz said:

John Romero for example, seems to stick pretty adamantly with the opinions he had when developing Doom and Quake. Do you think this could help or hurt the new game he's presumably working on now that were two decades after the debut of his best work?

Except John DOES want story and gameplay to intertwine. John's original Quake doc was almost a mishmash of an RPG/FPS, and despite being a great FPS, fell short of John's vision. His game Hyperspace Delivery Boy was his love letter to Chrono Trigger.

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It's often a useful design tool to set yourself a series of rules or guild-lines as limitations, because otherwise you can spend hours staring at a blank screen or sheet of paper.

But are there any universal rules? I doubt it.

However, there are often pressures in high budget projects to stick with whatever has proven popular in the recent past. An awful lot of spurious assertions have been touted as conventional wisdom over the years.

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The answer to this question probably lies in how many old video games you still play today. In the 30 years I've been playing games I've seen them go from hard-as-nails unforgiving certain death simulators to sympathetic hold-your-hand entertainment drip-feeds. Thats not to say either is right or wrong. Good game design caters for its particular audience, so you could say its the audience that has evolved over time.

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The story in a videogame matters on how actually it is inserted/implemented into the context of the game; also depending on the genre and how the gameplay or how the game it is structured.
Anyway I think that a videogame has to provide fun and it must be able to charm the player to playing it and keep him doing it; and this can be done regardless of genre, gameplay and even hardware/software limitations.

What can render certain "game design rules" obsolete are the trends that the players follow or that they create, and these evolve over time.
More generally "what is (could be) mainstream now??".

And this is what I think, like "my version" of John Carmack's quote:
"If you take away the story from a videogame, would you still play it? And even better, would you still replay it?"

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I know that, personally, the story basically unimportant. It's all about the gameplay. I could give a crap who's killing who or why - I just want to go out and frag some shit

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gaspe said:

And this is what I think, like "my version" of John Carmack's quote:
"If you take away the story from a videogame, would you still play it? And even better, would you still replay it?"

I like this. When I'm picking what I think would be a good game, one of the foremost questions is whether it's likely to be something I can go back to again and again or if it's going to be "used up" quickly. Games that lean heavily on the story side can end up being "play once and be done" affairs more like a book or a movie; I may remember them as being interesting but I generally won't want to revisit them if they were nothing but a bunch of tedious searching and puzzle-solving to prop up a story.

Edit: That said, I should note that totally abstract, gameplay-only type of games also tend to turn me off. I like some amount of lore or world design to inspire me, even if the world is just a big dungeon full of hideous creatures to smash with a battle axe.

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Brad_tilf said:

I know that, personally, the story basically unimportant. It's all about the gameplay.

I'm definitely going to agree and say it is certainly more important. Story is basically what killed modern Final Fantasy games. But games can have an immersive and interesting story, just don't make your game the vehicle for it, let it drive the game play and focus on great maps and mechanics.

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I don't see how that 20-year-old Carmack quote applies to today's audience at all.

Instead of wondering if story itself is good or not, I'd like to see the stories in videogames improve and get better.

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Technician said:

I'm definitely going to agree and say it is certainly more important. Story is basically what killed modern Final Fantasy games. But games can have an immersive and interesting story, just don't make your game the vehicle for it, let it drive the game play and focus on great maps and mechanics.


The problem is people treat story and gameplay as two different things when they should both be one thing for an ideal narrative experience. The story is the gameplay, the gameplay is the story with no clear separation. One of the things that made Spec Ops: The Line so beloved by critics was that the gameplay drove the story, not the other way around. You do many of the critical plot points, in the game, using mechanics. A cutscene didn't kill all those civilians, you did.

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Shetty gameplay = wow what an awesome story! A lot of awful games have their story to fall back on. A lot of people prefer story based games. It gives them a reason to finish.

I'm not one of them. I need to play a game a few hours before I give a damn about a story.

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Maes said:

That's a genre-specific assertion, at best.

Pretty much this. I enjoyed the story mode in Mortal Kombat X, but it's hardly the meat and potatoes of the game. And why would I want a story in a hardcore racing game, where things like gear timings and perfecting corners are what the game is all about?

OTOH, the Mass Effect trilogy would have been a dull and vacuous experience if what was happening on the screen didn't have a point - indeed, everything that happens in those games IS the story. And the Portal games would lose at least 80% of their appeal if they were stripped of their narrative and witty dialogue.

So yeah, it depends.

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40oz said :
Are game design rules timeless?

Not at all, If You already had an exact idea of what you're going to do, and if You're working on the Whole game by yourself you won't even bother Asking teammates for the game design rules since you already know how is it going to be , I never asked myself this question when i was "messing arround" with some Blitz3D/Max Tricks sometimes , Though i must say i was really in need for Some help from "a Good model designer" and "a Good Texture/Interface artist" , So yeah it depends of You work (Project) Nature , Valve for instance allows it's members to freely Work on their projects Without any administration to you how to do this or That, Instead they just give you a little notes book .
* So game design rules are kind of timeless , It all depends on your Project Nature .

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John Carmack was once quoted saying:

Story in a video game is like story in a porn movie. Its expected to be there, but its not very important.

And then was made doom porn story with better story than doom. (but I guess videogames indeed used to not be art at some point)

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The games that have gotten the most replay value out of me were games where the "story" is highly unclear, but it didnt bar you from understanding what you as the protagonist is supposed to be doing, or understanding how or why the game operates as it does.

For me, these are games like Contra, Grand Theft Auto 2, and Dead Rising. Even though Dead Rising had a plot, the cutscenes and storytelling seemed to drive me away from it, and I was literally blocking that knowledge from my brain so that I could consider the games plot as "Zombies are here, use anything and everything to kill them." instead of what they were telling me was the source of the zombie apocalypse.

I don't mean to speak specifically about this particular Carmack quote, but any quote from any reputable game designer who would share secrets or personal opinions about how to make a good game, or what every good game should have. Sure, time passes, technology evolves, and the same people that played games 20 years ago don't make up the majority of the same people playing games today, but the interaction between the game and the player, plus how the human brain perceives the feeling of "fun" should be the same, correct? How can rules made in the past that worked for some games be entirely obsolete today?

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Every story is better when its unclear. Then you make up your own story and have your own adventure. Like I got bored with Dead Space 2's story so I made up a love story in my head and laughed the whole way through. Then Dead Space 3 came along and had a love story a slew of characters and I didn't have to conjure up a story.

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40oz said:

how the human brain perceives the feeling of "fun" should be the same, correct?

No. It's not even the same for different people. It's not even the same for a single person as time goes and he gains experience. That's why it cannot be the same universally.

40oz said:

How can rules made in the past that worked for some games be entirely obsolete today?

Even if a new thing is exciting for majority, it will become obsolete for majority when the majority gets overfed with it or when something more exciting gets invented.

Or are you trying to speak about the very most fundamental rules that *should* be timeless and applicable to everybody everytime? I'm not sure if such rules even exist. The nature of human mind is nothing that can be standardized.

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Carmack's quote may have been true for a time. The majority of modern games are centered around being expository story tellers. It's formulaic in AAA titles, and most indies follow suit. Hell some indies are more like press a button story books.

It used to be "Some guy is on a space ship invaded by aliens and he's the only man left to save the world."

Where as now it's "USAMCX Colonel James Rike of the 7th Regiment Bear Claw is humanity's last hope. Col. Rike is stationed on the SCS Eureka - a Titan class battleship which is in earth's orbit. The Eureka has been invaded by an alien species of unknown origin. All USAMACX Titan Class Battleships are equipped with a payload capable of wiping out an entire planet. Col. Rike through stealth and cunning must unravel the mysteries of the invasion and thwart the destruction of the entire planet."

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40oz said:

John Carmack was once quoted saying

"Story in a video game is like story in a porn movie. Its expected to be there, but its not very important."

This quote has been retold so many times now that it's almost a cliché. There's some truth to it - games that are too story-driven can end up being restrictive and overly linear. I'd cite the latest Tomb Raider game as an example of a game where the story has been imposed too heavily to the detriment of the actual gameplay.

I think story is far more important than Carmack seems to imply, though. Rather than him, I'd cite Tom Hall whose 1994 design tips have some more nuanced and interesting insight into the role of a story:

Having a good story behind a game will provide a rich source of ideas for actors and settings. The story provides a framework for the game's world to be built on and designed from. It's not really important that the user reads the story--in fact, long stories are not welcome--but the story is important for a) building a coherent world and b) providing a unique wellspring of ideas, producing concepts and actors unlike other games. The former makes the player feel the game is really "together" and allows another of their layers of disbelief to fall away--since the world is "behaving" correctly (even if it is chaos), they allow themselves to get deeper into it. The latter is what many designers miss. There's so much you can do with each subject, but many designers tend to have a wild idea, then implement it just like the last game they liked in the genre. You want something new in your game, so it'll stand out. A story is just a handy tool to make the game unique and interesting.


But you specifically asked:

Do you think he'd still stand by that rule today? Do the elements of good game design evolve over time?

I think that Carmack was trivializing the importance of stories when he made that quote and perhaps missed some of the more subtle details that Hall expounds upon in the above quote. Nowadays story is more important, not because design rules change as such, but because of the improved technology that we now have.

For an extreme example, go and look at some screenshots of old Atari 2600 games. When graphics are that primitive the story doesn't really matter so much. The game *has* to be heavily focused on the gameplay because that's all you can really do to make a good game. Any attempt at a nuanced depiction of a story is going to require a lot of imagination.

Modern systems by contrast can support games with something close to photorealistic depictions of real world scenarios. Check out GTA5 for example, where you have an entire city to explore, realistic physics, etc. When you reach that level of technological sophistication, a story is necessary so that the world hangs together in a way that is logically consistent.

What exactly are you doing in this game? Who are you? Where are you? Even if the game itself is not strongly story-based, these are questions that deserve answers just so that the game world itself has cohesion and makes some kind of logical sense, because we're not making simplistic 8-bit arcade shoot 'em-ups any more.

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