I think John Carmack was wrong in regards to a story in video games.

[riderr3]

The chainsaw on Phobos where are no trees around. That's enough said 😊

[esselfortium]

12 minutes ago, riderr3 said:

The chainsaw on Phobos where are no trees around. That's enough said 😊

And why do you think the trees are no longer around? ;)

[Denim Destroyer]

I think Carmacks quote is mostly about context in games. You need to know why you are doing what you are in a game. Even if it's something simple like Mario or Zelda where you are rescuing a princess from some force of evil lets that player know what they are working for and why they are there in the first place. What really determines if there is too much of story in a game is basically dependent on what type of game you are playing. I would expect an RPG like Fallout or Baldurs Gate to have a lot of story based moments where you make important plot based decisions while something like Doom or Duke 3D would only have minimal story elements since those games are a lot more simple in the plot department.

[kdoom]

2 hours ago, Ajora said:

 

Bioshock, Portal 2, and Undertale would never have worked anywhere near as well as movies or books. 

 

Probably true for you, but I dont like those games, because they have to much BS ( story ) in them.

[Jayextee]

24 minutes ago, Classicgamer6 said:

You need to know why you are doing what you are in a game.

 

Vehemently disagree. Why do we need to sort out the four suits of cards in a game of Solitaire? Why even are the black and white chess pieces at war? What's the scuffle between the O's and X's (tic tac toe AKA noughts and crosses) - is this a dispute over territory or something? Why the necessity to create whole lines in Tetris? To link coloured blobs in Puyo Puyo?

I could go on.
 

As long as the rules and objectives are clear, the rest is just window dressing. I know @Mr. Freeze said on page 1 "not every game needs to be Pong" but I find this response to be fallacious (read: fallacy of composition) -- saying that games do not need stories is not the same thing as saying "no games should have stories". They're nice to have, and can definitely improve a lot of games. But they aren't necessary.

[floatRand]

It is rather subjective and is in context of the game they were developing, but his view represents one player motivation, one which does not require a narrative or immersion to enjoy game. Enjoying the viscerality and intensity, exploration, feeling emotions (fear, anxiety), learning and mastering game, competing with other people or expressing oneself in a game - these are some other motivations to enjoying the narrative or immersion. 

And you are right, there is good basis in Doom's premise, and they do draw little from it, but I am also glad that they went with what they went with. They weren't perhaps best people to run narrative in such game. 

But I do think games are in unique position of being an interactive medium, so there is lot of space and opportunities to create cool things that you can't do in movies or books. Doesn't mean it always succeeds, though. 

[Mr. Freeze]

9 minutes ago, Jayextee said:

I know @Mr. Freeze said on page 1 "not every game needs to be Pong" but I find this response to be fallacious (read: fallacy of composition) -- saying that games do not need stories is not the same thing as saying "no games should have stories". They're nice to have, and can definitely improve a lot of games. But they aren't necessary.

 

Except the post I was responding to literally said "All a game should have is a simple setup". That's not a story, that's a setting. My Pong comparison is adequate, because that's the kind of bare-bones presentation that you reduce games down to when you take a story away from them. 

[DMPhobos]

I think that it's worth to take that quote into the context of gaming at the time, specifically the games id developed and most of the games they played at that time such as super mario bros 3 or classic arcade games, story was more of a premise for most games rather than a narrative unfolding like what we see in more modern games, you would move from level to level and maybe get a story text telling you what had happened or a small cutscene but nothing too drastic, Tom Hall's original design featured a more story based focus with multiple characters, events happening on the game (such as a dude dying at the end of the first episode) and a broader story. In many ways he was ahead of his time, but it wasn't the right thing for Doom as we know it. If we apply that quote to the classic doom games (heck even on the 2016 doom, and even doom 3 to a certain extent) he's right, story isn't that important, it was expected to be there, but honestly people don't care about it

That said he wasn't right on a broader sense, even at the time of doom's release, some games rely heavily on telling a story rather than just advancing towards the end, take the story out of a classic adventure game series, or an RPG game, and you are left with a rather sterile game

[Jayextee]

1 minute ago, Mr. Freeze said:

Except the post I was responding to literally said "All a game should have is a simple setup".

 

I know. But I read that as "all a game [absolutely needs] is a simple setup", to which I agree. Made little sense to read it, as you appear to have, as "all a game should have [in totality] is a simple setup" because this precludes the necessity of game mechanics, physics, a soundtrack, etc.

Toe-may-toe, to-mah-to. ;)

[seed]

4 hours ago, kdoom said:

My opinion: If you want a story, go read a book, or watch a movie. All a game should have is a simple setup to describe the theme/setting.

 

Yeah, I completely disagree with your reasoning as well. @Bauul explained it very well in his post so I'll just quote his post since I've got nothing else to add there:

 

3 hours ago, Bauul said:

I must respectively disagree whole-heartedly with this. Games have a capability for a particular kind of story-telling that no other medium can get close to: proper non-linear, reader-led narratives. The kind of story where the narrative lies scattered and you have to piece it together.  Where the burden of collating and interpreting the story is an active part of playing the game. I love games that do this; some of my favorite ever titles do this, like Dark Souls, Braid, Fez, Journey and a great many walking-simulators and rogue-likes.

 

Games are the only medium where, as a writer, you can offer a truly non-linear story. To create a narrative that people don't just blindly follow through at the same pace and same direction like a book or movie, but actively interact with and discover at their own pace and in their own order.

 

Games are equipped to tell absolutely unique stories compared to other media, and to say there shouldn't be any story in any game is denying an entire unreplicatable approach to story-telling.

 

3 hours ago, Aquila Chrysaetos said:

Contrast Oblivion and Skyrim where it's "follow this chain of events as we tell you and save the world this exact way." Your story is under your control, until the devs write it for you with no choices. You can't say "Well, Alduin is going to destroy the world, so I'll just be an omnicidal maniac and kill everybody ahead of time," or, "How about Miraak and I join forces and we conquer the world ourselves," or anything else. Even the Dawnguard endings are the same, just with pretty much cosmetic differences.

 

I'd thought about that on a few occasions.

 

It kind of is a shame that regardless of your choices you always reach the same conclusion, or at least in the case of Dawnguard. The events follow the same course,  and with some exceptions it all resumes to working for humans or vampires, and nothing else. Well, at least the vampires had much more fun radiant quests than the Dawnguard, I liked crawling in dungeons after ancient vampire parts which boosted some of your powers, Garen's or Fura's vampire hunting (no "thin blooded" creature shall live), and especially Feran Sadri's frame-for-murder quests. I always thought there wasn't any point in joining the forces of the Dawnguard, that offers you no significant benefits. Crafting crossbows? Yeah, you're not going to buy me only with that, they're not even that useful.

 

Either way, despite all of these events that must occur, Bethesda did give us the freedom of making some important choices, most notably joining or obliterating the Dark Brotherhood, however, they also made it obvious they didn't exactly want the players to destroy the Brotherhood as they don't make this possibility visible. Not many players would choose to kill Astrid in that cabin, not to mention that there's no proper questline for this. You just tell a guard you killed their leader, then a captain, and then you proceed to wiping them out by yourself. Wow, seriously? And the reward, just a few thousand septims??? You're kidding me. There's also the possibility of killing various characters during different quests, but oh well, once again some of these choices are annoying, such as killing Erandur in Vaermina's Daedric quest since he'll otherwise banish the staff into Oblivion. Choosing to spare him offers you nothing beside gaining Erandur as a potential follower, one that is very weak... No thanks, once again. Heh, about that, followers are so, so useless in Skyrim... the only one that seems to be useful in the entire game is Serana, the rest are either annoying, useless, or a combination of both.

[Starkiller]

I honestly don't mind how a story is handled in a game. What matters to me is the fun potential in gameplay and if the action doesn't distract the player away from the setting. Doom's story works because you are given brief descriptions of what is going on, and that is it. Everything else is left up to your interpretation. 

 

I imagine what Doom would've been like if Tom Hall had his way. Interesting, but could lessen the action a bit. 

 

 

[Aquila Chrysaetos]

3 minutes ago, Agent6 said:

Heh, about that, followers are so, so useless in Skyrim... the only one that seems to be useful in the entire game is Serana, the rest are either annoying, useless, or a combination of both.

Derkeethus was useful because of a bug that left him marked as essential, so if I had a follower, it was either Serana (usually late-game) or him.

I agree about the destroy the Dark Brotherhood, too, and most of the choices you have are cosmetic or pointless, it seemed, and in a few cases the only "right" choice was to stay the fuck away from whatever quest required you make that choice. I hate that there are so many things that anyone of your power (being ES Jesus, basically) should be able to do something about (Black-Briars, for example, pieces of shit they are, I'd have loved to kill them off, but they're essential), but you're not allowed to because story. One story. No choices. Period. You can't make things better (or worse) if you wanted because there's one conclusion and that's it.

The point of an RPG is to choose your own story, not ride the rails of the one story the devs wrote for you. That's what I think.

[sincity2100]

There are games that are important to have a story in it, perfect example (Metal Gear Solid,Last of Us,Legend of Zelda,Ace Attorney) and there are other games that you don't need story to put there like the FPS we play and some other games like Hocus Pocus or some old 2D platform, I really don't think he is fully wrong, there are situations that certain games need a story to shape it.

[SOSU]

I wonder how Carmack would explain the appeal of RPG games,especially JRPGs O:

[Nems]

55 minutes ago, sincity2100 said:

There are games that are important to have a story in it, perfect example (Metal Gear Solid,Last of Us,Legend of Zelda,Ace Attorney) and there are other games that you don't need story to put there like the FPS we play and some other games like Hocus Pocus or some old 2D platform, I really don't think he is fully wrong, there are situations that certain games need a story to shape it.

 

That's pretty much my opinion on the matter too.

 

I like classic Doom's story/plot/setting because (whether it's intentional or not) it takes a "less is more" approach. It tells and gives you just enough of the lore to set up the world in the instruction manual and the intermission texts. Beyond that though, it actively encourages you to use your imagination and theorycraft/headcanon the rest of what's happening through the level design and gameplay set ups in those levels. Of course, the "less is more" approach also works great for those who really don't give a crap about the story and just want to get right into their shootbangs.

 

My own interpretation/understanding of Carmack's quote is that what should matter above all else is the gameplay. This is something I do agree with. Speaking for myself, if a game is a chore or a pain or boring to play then I'm not going to sit around long enough for whatever story it has to tell, even if it's an award-winning story.

[Skeletonpatch]

In regards to the quote, I'm honestly sick of hearing about it. What Carmack said is correct for some kinds of games, but not others. It's simply a narrow minded thing he said once that for some stupid reason had to be recorded and reproduced without context and without end.

 

Narrative is simply one of the many ingredients that can be used when making any kind of game, the ways in which it is used depends both upon the skill of the developer and the kind of experience they are trying to make. Whether or not you like the end result is on you personally.

[SaladBadger]

1 hour ago, SOSU said:

I wonder how Carmack would explain the appeal of RPG games,especially JRPGs O:

you make it sound like that this has solidly been his opinion for the last two decades and a half. I'm fairly certain someone can change their opinion given two decades and a half of the game landscape changing

 

hell I'm pretty sure he acknowledged said changes on his twitter once, but good luck finding that again ugh.

 

ed: all that said i still prefer story-light action games. I love jrpgs but for things like first person shooters i'd rather the focus be on the first person shooting. give me a cool story to establish the setting, though.

[SOSU]

1 hour ago, InsanityBringer said:

you make it sound like that this has solidly been his opinion for the last two decades and a half. I'm fairly certain someone can change their opinion given two decades and a half of the game landscape changing

 

hell I'm pretty sure he acknowledged said changes on his twitter once, but good luck finding that again ugh.

I would try to find it if i knew how to even use twitter xD
Maybe his opinion changed back to that from 2 and a half decades ago since he changed his mind in that twitter post,who knows? :P

 

On the whole side topic:
Story is largely optional in most game genres,you can have games full of story and basically no gameplay (some visual novels) and games with no stoy and lots of gameplay (can't name any right now lol) but the thing every game needs is atmosphere (and a good atmosphere for it to be a good game) because without it the game can't convey it's theme and create a connection to the player.What would Doom be without it's heavy metal combat and spooky alien hallway exploration,what would Duke 3D be without it's cheesy one liners and references,what would the Legacy of Kain franchise be without it's gothic world,medieval architexture,lovecraftian themes and the whole "greco-roman causality (I like Berserk :) ) dilemma" plot?

[DeadAstronaut]

 

You have to consider the era in which Doom was made and video games at the time. 

 

Gameplay always comes first above everything, Carmack's words are still correct regarding this. But most games at the time did not have big cut scenes and elaborate storylines, and the ones that did often kept it toned down compared to the standard of today. Video games today are like Hollywood movies and it's the norm to have a big storyline and tons of dialogue and so on. 

 

I like how Doom barely has any story because it forces the player to use their imagination to fill in the gaps and come to conclusions on their own. Doom didn't need a big story, since it was just really about you killing demons in outer space. The original Legend of Zelda followed this approach. All the storyline was in the manual and the start screen. You were dropped into the world of Hyrule and just start exploring around. All the dialogue was clues and hints to help you. You had to use your imagination with the places and locations. 

 

Maybe it's because I'm older and grew up with these classic games, but I'd prefer seeing games go back to this simplistic approach of not caring about a storyline and focusing all their efforts on gameplay. I could care less about witty dialogue, cut scenes, pretty graphics and a grand storyline that makes me feel special. Just give me something that is fun to play and a challenge I'll feel good about conquering. 

[VGamingJunkie]

I think a good approach, especially for action orientated games, is an approach like Metroid Prime or Doom 2016 (Or Doom 3). You can go through the game with almost no story dialogue if you want to keep the flow of actions but then they pepper the backstory and all the little nuances inside logs and notes so that you can still absorb the story if you really want to. To me, the meatier parts of a game's story should be more or less shoved to the side, not force fed to you. Even Skyrim understands this. There are mountains worth of lore and backstory that you're free to absorb, either in things like side-quests or actual books that you can acquire and read at your leisure. You're not required to know why Metroid Prime has an exoskeleton to destroy it, but it's there if you want. Options are always nice to have.

[amackert]

I've generally agreed with Carmack on this one. I don't mind a story in a game if it's good and unique, but it's not the reason I play games in the first place. I need quality gameplay with natural replay value in order to have the urge to come back to it repeatedly (i.e., it's damn fun, so I naturally want to play it again). A game with a quality story but even just average gameplay is a waste of time for me.

 

Lately I have been enjoying how games like Dark Souls handle story. It's clearly there, but 95% of it can be ignored if you aren't feeling up to the task at any given moment. It's certainly not spoon-fed to you, that's for sure.

[JBerg]

I don't think there's a one-size-fit-all approach to video games.

 

Personally, I like it when the games I play are story light (Doom, Wolf3D, Quake 1, Commander Keen, Duke3D, etc)

But I don't mind venturing into games that have more story intertwined into them (Metro 2033 for example)

[Aquila Chrysaetos]

5 minutes ago, JBerg said:

I don't think there's a one-size-fit-all approach to video games.

This. Action oriented games can typically get away with little to no real plotline, but imagine an RPG without a plot. Weird, right? Like a sandbox, except full of quicksand. A Quicksand Box.

 

But then arises a new issue: what games should have a plot and what games shouldn't?

All games can have an engaging plot, but action games (Doom, Quake, God of War, etc) shouldn't have their design dictated by plot. I mean, look at the three listed. How much of their settings make any kind of sense from a real-world perspective? Not very much, but they're fun as hell to play through.

Turn it around and you get the modern FPS (CoD, Battlefield). One of my coworkers (probably 16 year old kid, we worked in retail at the time) beautifully described it as a "movie with buttons." I find modern FPS's to be too slow to play, really, so I steer away from them.

However, there's a converse to "story-oriented action games are bad," because they're not all bad. Asura's Wrath, for example, is extremely story driven, but its gameplay is so fast-paced and awesome and fun that, hey, I'm okay with it. The plot itself is really cool, too, which is a positive.

 

Some games just aren't right without their plots, just like some games aren't right when plots are shoved into them, so I think genre might be a major deciding factor in whether a game should have a real plot or not.

[Cruduxy Pegg]

A good story never hurts. People are mixing up having a story with shit like quick time events and cutscenes interrupting gameplay. Diablo 2 and Bioshock are good examples of it not getting in the way while still being nicely written -bioshock infinite is an example of it shitting on gameplay, even if it tries not to interrupt it-, even though am sure too many people completely skip the story in diablo 2 for some reason, too hard to listen to a 30 sec dialogue or read a note in a book.

[JBerg]

27 minutes ago, Pegg said:

A good story never hurts. People are mixing up having a story with shit like quick time events and cutscenes interrupting gameplay. Diablo 2 and Bioshock are good examples of it not getting in the way while still being nicely written -bioshock infinite is an example of it shitting on gameplay, even if it tries not to interrupt it-, even though am sure too many people completely skip the story in diablo 2 for some reason, too hard to listen to a 30 sec dialogue or read a note in a book.

 

Yeah Diablo 2's story was actually pretty cool.

[fraggle]

On 6/16/2018 at 12:24 PM, Mr. Freeze said:

Not every game needs to be Pong. 

I think this is a really good concise summary of my thoughts on this subject. Note that doesn't mean there isn't space for pong-like games as well. Have you ever noticed how stripped-down Doom is? From launching the game you only need to mash the enter button several times to start playing, and there's no complicated tutorial stage or story before you can start shooting bad guys. In a way that's kind of nice, it focuses on pure gameplay without any distractions. It's pretty well-documented that Romero for example made a conscious effort to take stuff out of the game like treasure items and extra lives which he thought distracted from the main gameplay.

 

That said, I think one of the biggest developments in games in the 90s was their maturation as a storytelling mechanism. Half Life is the obvious example but there are plenty of others. If id had started early with taking storytelling more seriously, I think we could have seen some very interesting stuff come out by the end of the 90s, but it's almost like they were allergic to it. Maybe because of Carmack's influence, I don't know.

 

It seems like they knew this themselves as both Quake II and Doom 3 made more deliberate attempts to incorporate story elements into the gameplay. But even then, it feels half-assed compared to other games which were coming out - from Q2 and D3 I get this very strong sense of "we're not good at this" which in a way ends up hurting the game more than adding to it. As though they're begrudgingly adding this stuff because they feel that they have to. The interesting thing is that id's strongest games seem to be the ones where they deliberately avoid bothering with story. Maybe the lesson is: either do pong, or make a story-based game, but if you're going to do a story, at least go the effort of taking it as seriously as all the other elements of the game.

[chungy]

I honestly don't think Half-Life is a good example. It tried, for sure, to have a story, but it's about as involved and very similar to the story in Doom. It's there, but it doesn't really matter.

 

RPGs, I think, have always been the king of story-driven game play. The game play doesn't really exist as a separate entity, but it's interwoven into the plot. RPGs of both the eastern (eg: Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest) and western (The Elder Scrolls, The Witcher) varieties nail this down; even despite the general design differences between east and west, they still focus on the story first, and wrap a game around that. The player, to sound a bit redundant, plays a role and an active part of the story. In most of them (but not all), they have branching paths and many different end states, the choices you make affect the story that unravels.

 

In Half-Life, as well as Doom, you just go through the world, shooting monsters and progressing to the next level. It makes no impact on the story.

[VGamingJunkie]

Half-Life 2 might be a better example. Valve had to come up with creative ways to get you to look a certain way, like having an enemy in the direction they want you to face so that you see some plot event or have an npc point to it. They didn't want to have to resort to cutscenes where you're forced to look. Felt more organic as a result, you're looking over there typically but only because you chose to, they simply nudged you.

[fraggle]

I'd agree that later games such as Half Life 2 have certainly made Half Life's storytelling look rather crude in comparison. But honestly, at the time it came out, even what the first Half Life did was pretty groundbreaking. Its story isn't just something that's printed in the manual and forgotten, or revealed through some cutscenes - rather there's an immersive experience that puts you at the centre of an unfolding drama where you gradually discover more as the game progresses. There's always a purpose or motivation behind what you're trying to do, beyond just shooting some bad guys.

 

The main thing that's missing is real characters who aren't just nameless security guards or scientists forgotten once you move on to the next room. Blue Shift and Half Life 2 developed that side a lot more. I'm certainly not saying it's the apex of storytelling, just that it was a big step forwards at the time and I remember it being recognised as such.

[MrGlide]

I like Johns thinking on the subject. In a really weird way, it reminds me of the gameplay vs aesthetics arguement. Story is cool and everything, but if it gets in the way of my game, its going to annoy me. also, I feel stories get more redundant than good game play does.