I have just had a “riposte” published on EBR for the Second Person anthology.
In response to James Wallis’ article “Making Games That Make Stories”, my short piece is “Why Make Games That Make Stories?“:
Wallis makes a number of excellent observations about story-making games, the type of story-game where players explicitly create or co-create a story. He discusses story games that make only very broken stories and shows how the genre knowledge of players can be instrumental for actual game play.
So let me ask the “ludological” question: Why?
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Why make games that make stories? Actually, why would you ask that question? I don’t like games that deal with what you do in real-life; games that make you pick up the trash and clean after yourself; games in which you have to find a job and work, etc. It doesn’t make much sense to me. So why should anyone make a game like The Sims? The answer is simple: because some people like them, or because a publisher thinks so. Really, sometimes I feel the “ludological” line of thinking only consists in rejecting any approach that is not relevant to the games of one’s liking, and attempting to generalize any observation about the games of one’s liking to the entirety of games. While I agree wholeheartedly with you that Still, the goal of combining games with stories should be an aesthetic goal: not to create a work that can be called “story” by a chosen definition, but to create a specific experience, I really can’t buy in the conclusions you draw from Cluedo. That Cluedo sells even though it has a bad story is one thing, but how does that apply to games in general? There is, as you said it, no silver bullet here. There’s a number of smaller steps to be seriously made first:
1) Cluedo is a best-selling board game, but do the players like it as it is, or do they wish it had a better story and somehow manage to like it despite what they perceive to be a flaw? Does this change across types of players, contexts of play, etc.?
2) Cluedo belongs to a certain family (in Wittgensteinian vocabulary) of board games. Is the fact that it sells well despite its bad story reproduced among other members of this family?
3) Cluedo is a board game. How or why should its case apply outside board games to children’s play, video games, sports, etc.?
I am not doing this to defend Wallis’ piece. It’s just an outstanding issue that has been tickling my brain for a while now.
Dominic,
I am not sure that we disagree. My piece is not anti-story, it just discusses the motivations for making games with stories, rather than a priori assuming that story games would be the greatest thing since sliced bread.
But as I write, why not dream?
I’m going to have to write a re-riposte now, aren’t I?
James,
I believe those are the rules. It would be nice to hear what you have to say!
I see. If you are questioning that, then indeed I don’t think we disagree, for I am positively sure there are many games featuring stories that would get significantly worse with one (Tetris Worlds?). Wait, actually, that can give you a chuckle, so I guess it’s not that bad of a thing.
If everyone’s entitled to his favorite bread, though, then the question still has no reason to be asked, for any new or different type of production can be answered by pointing out one’s individual preferences.
Why ask the ludological question again?
I think we already went over this in Half Real ( a book I admire because of its attempt at providing a reasonable approach) and i wonder if there’s a need to move back to the ‘pure’ ludological argument. Don’t games originarily tell stories in some way or the other … cf. Pearce on metastories etc … in the same way many stories have a ludic element about them. It’s one thing to force an interpretation on Tetris but quite another to deny narrativity altogether in discussions of ludicity.
Games have always been used to tell stories and often quite well too (need i say this again!). The narrative element exists within the rules and the player’s gameplay and videogames do the job of bringing this light pretty well.
I agree with Jesper that the narrative element is not well-defined in games but more often than not, it cannot be denied that making games automatically implies making systems that can (and often do) tell stories. I would think of the two categories of the game and the story showing a supplementarity in the Derridean sense.
Why make games that make stories ? To adapt Mallory’s comment on climbing Everest: ‘because they are there!’
Well, it is good to revisit old grounds. It is a bit of a return to old discussions, but I thought it was interesting to return to them for a while.
I actually did write something like what you say:”Because it’s there. Or rather, because it isn’t there. Yet.”
http://www.jesperjuul.net/text/wcgcacd.html
hmm… if we’re not careful we are going to have to look again for games that don’t, can’t or won’t tell stories.
I wonder whether it would be more useful than it has been to look at the storied elements of our everyday lives and draw some parallels.
In the course of everyday social interaction we could say that people make and tell stories in accordance with certain social norms (we even refer to the telling of lies as telling stories or tall tales, but we also give accounts of our action which we refer to in terms of story telling, i.e. “a funny thing happened to me…”). I’d guess our everyday interaction is rife with stories but i’d be hard pressed to reduce everyday interaction to story-telling for sure. Much of our action seems more or less procedural… habitual and routine on the one hand, and rational calculative on the other — very ludological actually.
What seems important is to discern when an action/interaction is storied and when it isn’t and why. Why do we need stories sometimes and not others? What is the story actually doing for our understanding of what is going on?
This is a completely different approach it seems from narratology which must first assume (by rigorous definition; a positivism if ever there was one) what a story is and then check the world to see whether this or that object conforms to that idea of a story… maybe this issue is not a matter of what a game is but what it does (so to be formal about it that would suggest uselessly that all games could have a story function just as anything I say could be a lie (and therefore a tall tale).
I’m not sure the game of whether games tells stories or not is getting us anywhere but i’m happy to keep watching the debate from the sociological sidelines.
I went to the cinema this week and watched “before the devil knows you’re dead” by Sidney Lumet. on my way out I thought: hm, that was such a great story, great presentation, great actors, drama, music, everything. the question is, how could this experience be improved in any way by adding videogame interaction, and you know, there is no need for videogame interaction. so how can games with stories give us ( readers, movie goers ) more value comparing to stories, movies without game interaction. maybe we could compare it to the opera. is the plot anything important at all? games should move on and leave the cinematic experiences behind, throw away all cutscenes.
hm, on the other hand. what if I would play a police detective and inverstigate, explore the crimes in “before the devil knows your’re dead”… putting the pieces together, that could indeed be some stimulating process… now I am really confused :-)
cheeres,
George (Stuttgart)