Role-Playing Games Aren't Movies

Movies, like books, tell a story. They don't tell it in quite the same way, but that's just a difference in the medium. It makes sense to take a book and make a movie out of it. The movie is just borrowing the story and telling it in a different way.

It has seemed reasonable to most of us, I suspect, that computer games aren't all that different. (I'm talking primarily about role-playing games - RPGs - here.) Well, our computer monitors aren't that much different from a TV screen. We watch the action on a monitor and listen to the sounds from speakers. And as technology has improved, computer games have come to look and sound more and more like movies. It's not surprising that the video game industry is often compared to the movie industry, and it was probably inevitable that game developers would follow the movie model.

To a large extent, I bought into this myself. Oh, I always claimed that fancy graphics weren't important to me (even as I was wowed by them often enough). Certainly, the graphics in an RPG aren't as important as the gameplay or the story, right? Games are different from movies, as movies are different from books, but there are a lot of similarities, too. The critical difference is that games are interactive. You have to give the player something to do (the gameplay). And when telling your story, you have to make the player a part of it, in some way.

Some RPGs (and pretty much all adventure games) are very linear. Every player has basically the same experience in these games. You might choose different characters and you might fight battles differently, but every player must stay on the same general path as he follows the storyline. Others offer more freedom. Modern developers try to make the player's decisions matter - or seem to matter, at least - often creating several different endings to the story, and sometimes creating multiple paths to get there. But it's an interactive movie, basically. Or one of those "choose your own adventure" books. In either case, it really helps to have a great story.

But I've come to believe that this is wrong, that there's a fundamental problem with this approach. Mainstream developers, IMHO, have been on the wrong path for some time now. Games are not movies. Their resemblance to movies is only superficial. I'm convinced that the whole idea of telling a story in a game is completely wrong-headed. I used to want a good story in an RPG. Now, however, I don't want a story at all.

A good story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. The author knows where he's going, and he tries to make the journey as enjoyable as possible. If he's really good, you'll learn something along the way. But it's basically a linear, and passive, process. It works great for books and movies,... but computer games are different. In computer games, the player is a participant. And the bigger the participation of the player, the harder it will be for the author to tell a good story.

You can tell a good story by making the game very linear, but that inevitably means less participation for the player. Oh, sure, the gameplay may be fun (it had better be fun!), but his participation in the story is going to be very superficial. As you increase the player's options, you increase his participation, but the author loses more and more control over the story. Sure, he can write a story with several different endings, but that's just a compromise. What is the fundamental problem here? Why does this difficulty arise?

I think that game developers have made a huge mistake. I think that I've been wrong myself in wanting a good story in an RPG. I think, basically, that a game is not the place to tell a story at all. Instead, I think that each player should be creating his own story as he plays the game. That's how games are fundamentally different from movies and books. That's why movies are such a terrible model for games. Movies and books are passive, but games need active participation. We should take advantage of that, instead of trying to make them into something they're not.

Some games, some game developers, get this, but we seem to be in the very early stages of this realization. This is why Dwarf Fortress is so famous. Yeah, it's a free game with ASCII graphics (basically, no graphics at all) and a terrible interface. It's about the least commercial game you could possibly imagine. Most people wouldn't give it a second glance. But you hear it talked about everywhere, and for good reason.

Dwarf Fortress doesn't even attempt to tell a story. Instead, Tarn Adams has created a world in which players can create their own stories. He doesn't just let a player make some choices while enjoying a set story. He doesn't just acknowledge the need for player participation. Player participation is the whole point. He creates the setting and the rules, but the rest is up to you. As a player, you're not enjoying a good story, you're creating one. (This is easy to see when you read the stories so many players post about their games.)

The DF world is full of artificial people, not just non-player characters there to play particular roles. These people try to live their lives - they make friends, fall in love, get married, have children, adopt pets; they have likes and dislikes; they get happy, angry, sad; and they grieve for their loved ones. As I say, they aren't NPCs, there to help or hinder the player or to move the story along. They're not in the game to provide quests or to sell the player equipment. And they're not just interchangeable game-pieces, either. They are part of the world, and their stories are your story.

This is a completely different model for a game than what we see from mainstream developers. It's not the only game doing it, either. Aurora is another example. It's another game with no commercial appeal, but which is pointing the way to the future of gaming. It's a space-based strategy game with RPG elements,... but primarily, it's a setting in which a player can create his own story.

UnReal World is another example. It's an RPG/survival game set in Iron Age Finland. Sami Maaranen hasn't done much to make the NPCs people, but I hope that's in the works. In the meantime, there is no story but what you create yourself. Another, more commercial example, is Mount&Blade. I've actually heard this game criticized because it doesn't have a story. But that's the great strength of the game (well, that and the really, really fun combat). What this game needs is not a story, but the potential for players to create more elaborate stories than is possible right now. (I hope that's coming in the sequel due out soon.)

Similarly, though I haven't played Solium Infernum myself, I've certainly enjoyed the many stories posted on the Internet about this strategy game set in Hell. This kind of cooperative storytelling is what we might want from multiplayer games, but so very rarely get. Personally, I have no interest in multiplayer games, and I think that single-player games are better suited to what I've been talking about. But maybe there are possibilities with multiplay, too.

And finally, let me just mention a couple of old mainstream RPGs. I loved both Daggerfall and Morrowind when they were first released, despite my complete ineptness at "real-time" combat. But although I know that both had a story, a main quest line, I have no idea what it was. I ignored it completely, being happier just exploring these worlds on my own. Oblivion, the fourth Elder Scrolls game, put you into the main quest immediately (though you could ignore it after that). But I think this was the wrong direction. I'd rather see them create a world, full of realistic NPCs (virtual people, ideally), and let things evolve from that point as chance and the player's actions dictate. But no doubt that would be a lot harder to do.

My point is this: games are a terrible medium for telling a story, but a great medium for allowing us to create our own stories. IMHO, mainstream developers have been going the wrong direction. They seem to see movies as a model for games, but that's all wrong. Games and movies are only superficially similar. In reality, they couldn't be more different.

Edit:  I posted a follow-up to this here, in response to a comment below. This is a new idea for me, so I'm still working my way through it.