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Jake

Idle Thumbs 85: "An Indulgent Dateline" or "An Indulgent Episode Title"

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Having watched my housemate play through chunks of it, the early stuff hinges on the protagonist being native American, in one instance involving him turning away from the revolution stuff because a relatively minor player is trying to buy out his people's land. I'll have to ask him whether it comes into play much when the war begins in earnest.

Re: story in games, I take the potentially extreme opinion is that if games can't tell stories they are completely fucking useless to us as humans, given that stories are fundamental to the way we see the world, often to the point of misinterpreting the world because we're trying to make it a story. Thankfully, this isn't the case! Games support stories just fine, as can be readily seen by the way everyone who's played Minecraft has a Minecraft story. That game has very minimal context, but it has a gameplay cycle that maps reasonably cleanly to a story structure, and so purely as a result of the game mechanics, a story emerges.

I want to see more developers work their story into their game mechanics. The players don't care about what the protagonists care about because what the protagonists care about don't influence the game in any way. We don't need to know the context of anything to participate to our fullest extent, we don't need to ask questions, we don't need to know anything about the characters or the world to have perfect information. In terms of Halo, mostly John and Cortana solve their problems by shooting them and putting Cortana into a terminal, and other than making a mechanic out of putting Cortana into the terminal she needs to get the access/information she wants, I'm not sure how you'd go about it exactly.

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I have to admit that as many times as I cursed the gods for there never being enough ammo/weapons when you're in the middle of a fight whether it be with the Prometheans or the Covenant I liked that sometimes I'd just have to dive into the swarm and start meleeing the hell out of everyone, because when you can pull that off you feel like a monster.

Also, since I'm having to start Dishonored from the beginning again anyone notice how they have to proclaim in the beginning what "strange times" we're living in? Brings me back to the Red Dead Redemption episode where the guys brought up that they're shoving the strange and changing times in your face. I mean a plague is ravaging an alternate reality steampunk city fueled by whales... I can deduce that the times are a little strange.

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Re: story in games, I take the potentially extreme opinion is that if games can't tell stories they are completely fucking useless to us as humans, given that stories are fundamental to the way we see the world, often to the point of misinterpreting the world because we're trying to make it a story.

This seems like a very odd position. What if I said that if games can't cook food then they are completely fucking useless to us as humans, given that food is fundamental to our ability to exist in the world, often to the point (especially in the past) of killing people to take their food? Just because something is very important doesn't mean that games have to provide that important thing. There are all sorts of things that are crucial to what it is to be human that games can't do, and that's not a failing of games any more than it is a failing of books that they can't play music or of movies that they can't heal a broken bone.

Thankfully, this isn't the case! Games support stories just fine, as can be readily seen by the way everyone who's played Minecraft has a Minecraft story. That game has very minimal context, but it has a gameplay cycle that maps reasonably cleanly to a story structure, and so purely as a result of the game mechanics, a story emerges.

You mention games that can support stories, but what about the ones that can't? Quake III? Chess? Tetris? Go? Are those games completely fucking useless? Can we just throw them all in a giant fire pit and never make any more games like that in the history of the universe and nothing will be lost?

I want to see more developers work their story into their game mechanics. The players don't care about what the protagonists care about because what the protagonists care about don't influence the game in any way. We don't need to know the context of anything to participate to our fullest extent, we don't need to ask questions, we don't need to know anything about the characters or the world to have perfect information. In terms of Halo, mostly John and Cortana solve their problems by shooting them and putting Cortana into a terminal, and other than making a mechanic out of putting Cortana into the terminal she needs to get the access/information she wants, I'm not sure how you'd go about it exactly.

Do you really think Halo would be a better game if it found more ways to force the awful fucking story into your face at every given second? Chris' point is that he wishes a game like Halo could realize that what's valuable in Halo isn't your relationship to an inexplicably sexy robo hologram woman inside this convoluted nonsensical sci-fi universe, but rather the amazing combat that the game has. Would Halo be a better game if it doubled down on the shitty sci-fi and started compromising its peerless fighting mechanics to jam its second rate narrative into the experience at every conceivable opportunity? Because that's what it would have to do in order to work the story into the game mechanics, right? Change the mechanics of the game. And Chris is suggesting that the mechanics are the greatest thing about Halo and also one of the only good things, especially compared to the stupid story.

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Do you really think Halo would be a better game if it found more ways to force the awful fucking story into your face at every given second?

Halo came about during a time when games were just starting to combine narrative with decent combat. It was from the beginning a very generic sci-fi story that gave you some kind of reason for why you are this character in the multiplayer world. I don't have a problem with how they wrapped it up, and honestly I think they are trying to end the Halo "saga" because it was a weak story from the beginning. Halo 4 is visually stunning, and this is to me why the reviews have been so good plus who the hell can beat how satisfying the combat is in 1-4.

The game has never really been about the story and we all know this, so yes why try and force more story into the campaign when that's not really why people play it in the first place. The campaign to me was about learning the new mechanics so you can go and have a good time with your friends in whether you're playing capture the flag or slayer or whatever. Writing in games is evolving in a very positive way as you can see in the AAA games and indie world (even more so here). Halo, in the terms of game age, is a relic, and deserves it's respect for what it has accomplished. Maybe we should let it rest in peace?

So for all you looking for good story in games.. go play Frog Fractions.

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About PC retail being dead. It's not in the Netherlands. Granted, usually the PC section is smaller than the PS3, XBox or Wii section, and often not front and center. But it's not dead at all. I still buy a lot of retail copies, but usually via online retailers.

I like the space wasting cases and big boxes.

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Halo came about during a time when games were just starting to combine narrative with decent combat. It was from the beginning a very generic sci-fi story that gave you some kind of reason for why you are this character in the multiplayer world. I don't have a problem with how they wrapped it up, and honestly I think they are trying to end the Halo "saga" because it was a weak story from the beginning. Halo 4 is visually stunning, and this is to me why the reviews have been so good plus who the hell can beat how satisfying the combat is in 1-4.

Video games have been combining narrative with decent combat since long before 2001! Marathon, Halo's predecessor, did this back in 1994, for instance

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Ok well if you hadn't noticed I wasn't disagreeing with you, but as I can see by the history of this thread no one likes continuing the conversations with you because you're so damn insistent that everyone else is wrong (except for Remo). So I concede. Halo is just shit!

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I didn't quote the rest of your post because it was indeed agreeing with me so I wasn't sure what to talk about. I just wanted to give all games made before 2001 some props and I'd use a frowny smily face right here if we had one that didn't look angry. I'm sorry if disagreeing with people makes me sound like an asshole - my position has always been that discussions are no good if everyone just sits around saying "yes" to each other. It's not what we agree on that's interesting, because we don't need to talk about what we agree on.

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Harsh, H. Yawl! I don't think Tycho is any more opinionated or argumentative than anyone else on this forum. We like to argue about video games, because we care (maybe too much?)!

As to the subject at hand, I do agree that what makes Minecraft great is its ability to generate stories. I also think it's legitimate to play games purely for the sport of it (chess, quake, starcraft etc). They're two very different ways to pass the time so I don't think you can make a value comparison between them.

I think Halo could have just had better writing. Like most long-running narratives it got bogged down by its backstory and got more grandiose and self-important with age. I doubt stripping the story out completely would have made for a very compelling single player experience. I found the MGS virtual missions to be quite a fun exploration of the mechanics but they'll never be as memorable as Snake struggling with the player whether or not to shoot a rocket at his old friend.

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Yeah, the Halo 4 story seems bogged down by the two fallacies about what makes good game writing: tons of lore and shocking twists/reveals. If it were, say, a more economical story just about trying to stop the war with the Covenant from being reignited, it would probably read much better to audiences.

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I found the MGS virtual missions to be quite a fun exploration of the mechanics but they'll never be as memorable as Snake struggling with the player whether or not to shoot a rocket at his old friend.

Mmm, I disagree entirely. Whenever I think about my favorite MGS moments, I always think of the PS1 VR Missions game. Similarly, I'd love a Dishonored game that's totally like that. I don't need no story if the mechanics are there for a really fun game.

That's not to say I don't appreciate a good story. I still enjoy MGS' story (far more than I should), but it's completely secondary to the gameplay. An example of the opposite, where I care more about the story, would be, well, The Walking Dead.

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having never played any Halo game, I think they are really overrated.

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Waking mars to me has the unique distinction of involving character archetypes I am personally way too attached to; with the exception of their computer intelligence character, I'm trying to find ways to not like these characters so much.

The universe setup also seems specifically targeted towards people like me, as with the game mechanics.

It contains all the concepts I want in all my games: ecological interplay, exploration, fluid traversal, ability to instigate widespread impact, unpredictability, teaching by experimenting, and stuff like that.

The plot is a little pulpy, and I'm probably at the point where that starts to drag, so I'm not expecting an especially well executed ending, but who knows.

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This seems like a very odd position. What if I said that if games can't cook food then they are completely fucking useless to us as humans, given that food is fundamental to our ability to exist in the world, often to the point (especially in the past) of killing people to take their food? Just because something is very important doesn't mean that games have to provide that important thing. There are all sorts of things that are crucial to what it is to be human that games can't do, and that's not a failing of games any more than it is a failing of books that they can't play music or of movies that they can't heal a broken bone.

Games are a medium, and if a medium cannot tell stories than it is not capable of expressing things in a way humans understand, which would suggest that it was pretty bad at being a medium. That's where I was going with that argument, as incendiary as it was.

You mention games that can support stories, but what about the ones that can't? Quake III? Chess? Tetris? Go? Are those games completely fucking useless? Can we just throw them all in a giant fire pit and never make any more games like that in the history of the universe and nothing will be lost?

You think they don't support stories? Sports support stories, or else we wouldn't have sports journalists. As I mentioned, humans are real real good at extracting stories out of a series of unrelated events, so we should probably try and anticipate that reaction when we create things. For instance, maybe we shouldn't use cutscenes as the only medium for transmitting a storyline! Maybe we should have actual dialogue mechanics instead of ripping control away from the player every time they want to talk to someone!

I'd contend that Quake, Chess and Go support stories because there's a natural flow to the way the gamestate moves that allows people to ascribe narratives to it - to an extent, it's because there are two people playing against each other and two people in conflict in any medium is ripe story fodder. My point is what makes a game or a sport good is its ability to support a storyline, not the other way around.

On the other hand, Tetris really doesn't, which might demonstrate some flaws in the argument. I don't have the distance required because I'm kind of bored of Tetris at this point, and I don't want to fall into the very common trap of proclaiming that What Games Are is what I like about games. So it's good that I'm putting this out there and testing the limits of the argument to try and avoid pretentious wankery. I guess I would argue, though, that Tetris only really starts becoming interesting when you fuck up and make a hole you can't fill, and that sets off a little narrative where you're trying to fix your own mistake and it's a lot, lot harder than it seems. When I stopped doing that, I kind of got bored of Tetris. I don't know if my experience is typical - again, I'm conscious that every armchair games theorist usually makes the mistake of assuming their personal tastes are universal properties of games.

Do you really think Halo would be a better game if it found more ways to force the awful fucking story into your face at every given second? Chris' point is that he wishes a game like Halo could realize that what's valuable in Halo isn't your relationship to an inexplicably sexy robo hologram woman inside this convoluted nonsensical sci-fi universe, but rather the amazing combat that the game has. Would Halo be a better game if it doubled down on the shitty sci-fi and started compromising its peerless fighting mechanics to jam its second rate narrative into the experience at every conceivable opportunity? Because that's what it would have to do in order to work the story into the game mechanics, right? Change the mechanics of the game. And Chris is suggesting that the mechanics are the greatest thing about Halo and also one of the only good things, especially compared to the stupid story.

Well here's the thing: the shitty storyline in Halo is a direct result of the only good thing about that series being its combat mechanics. The storyline is basically a giant excuse for Master Chief to fight some Covenant, and all of it is oriented towards justifying Master Chief fighting Covenant because constant, unending war against a vast alien race is super-unrealistic so there's a lot of pointless backstory to generate - which wouldn't be necessary if there was something to Halo's storyline other than the combat mechanics. You can't let anything grow, you can't let anyone win, and so it descends increasingly into emotional retardation so the combat mechanics stay as intact as possible.

But let's say they did just give up. No storyline in Halo 5 whatsoever. What happens? I'd put forward that a) obviously Halo lore fans are going to complain, but more importantly B) any objectives other than "shoot all the dudes" become notable roadblocks to players and c) players, on average, have less fun. The most important role of a game story is to provide context to the game mechanics. If it's absent, the game notably suffers, and we know this happens based on experiments by the Experimental Gameplay Project among others. It doesn't have to be much, World of Goo (which came directly out of the EGP) has the signpainter's signs and the vignettes every so often that provide just enough context to make the game more compelling than a series of anonymous puzzles. For a shooter like Halo, one of the most important pieces of context is to explain secondary and unusual objectives, and to be fair most games do this adequately. Our hypothetical Halo: No Story can't without it sounding like a bad action movie ("we have to get to that turret!") and so they're stuck either under-explaining what to do or violating their vision of a no-story Halo. There's also the jarring transition between maps you'll get by wanting to provide visual variety but not really trying to explain it, which makes all that additional art you created feel like a reskin and not an actual place. (Level 2 is Spaceship World!)

If you're mostly just mad that the Halo series has too much fan wank and to tone it down a little, though, I think you and I can come to an accord. I'm not defending tiny stripper Cortana.

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Games are a medium, and if a medium cannot tell stories than it is not capable of expressing things in a way humans understand, which would suggest that it was pretty bad at being a medium. That's where I was going with that argument, as incendiary as it was.

I think humans can probably understand more than just stories. For example, I have a pretty good handle on what it takes to build a computer or catch a baseball or cook dinner. Narratives are important but they aren't the only reason for living or the only thing we can understand. Humans are complex creatures, not just slaves to stories. Why can't games hook into some of the non-narrative parts of human existence? For example, the joy of solving a puzzle, or optimizing something, or surmounting a challenge that doesn't have any narrative attached? All of these things can be enjoyable in real life (playing with a block puzzle, writing a complex computer program, climbing that hill over there) and they can be enjoyable in games (getting past the next stage in English Country Tune, allocating your forces correctly in Hearts of Iron III, clearing a stage of Tetris).

You think they don't support stories? Sports support stories, or else we wouldn't have sports journalists. As I mentioned, humans are real real good at extracting stories out of a series of unrelated events, so we should probably try and anticipate that reaction when we create things. For instance, maybe we shouldn't use cutscenes as the only medium for transmitting a storyline! Maybe we should have actual dialogue mechanics instead of ripping control away from the player every time they want to talk to someone!

You're right - I spoke too quickly to say they can't support stories. What I should have said is that they have value without any stories. When you play a pickup basketball game or a round of Warsow you don't have to attach a story to it. You're correct to say that you CAN do so and that humans often do so, but it's not necessary and it's certainly not crucial to the enjoyment of any of these activities that we attach any narrative to them. I'm not sure what the point about cutscenes is - are you saying that taking control away from people is bad because humans are good at making their own stories and we should let them piece together disparate elements instead of imposing our own narrative on the elements? That seems to go too far, I would say. We COULD do that, and maybe games are better at that than any other medium, but we put the scenes in a movie in a certain order or the chapters in a book in a certain order to achieve a certain effect, and I think a lot of games rely on narrative control being in the hands of the creators. Thirty Flights of Loving is a perfect example. You could dial down on the player control even MORE in that game and it wouldn't get much worse.

I'd contend that Quake, Chess and Go support stories because there's a natural flow to the way the gamestate moves that allows people to ascribe narratives to it - to an extent, it's because there are two people playing against each other and two people in conflict in any medium is ripe story fodder. My point is what makes a game or a sport good is its ability to support a storyline, not the other way around.

To reiterate my point, I was too hasty to say certain games can't support stories. Humans can come up with stories for anything. I should have said that what is good in some games can be had without stories. There is no story when I play a round of Quake III instagib against players with names that I don't even have time to read - I don't impose a narrative because I'm operating entirely on reflex for the duration of the match. I could go back and impose a narrative, or if I were a better player I could multitask and impose a narrative in the moment, but none of this is crucial to getting what is good in Quake III out of Quake III. Chess is a great example because a lot of people like those little chess puzzles in the newspaper, and I don't think there's much of a narrative going on there, or if it is we're stretching the idea of "narrative" a little far, a point I'll get to in a moment.

On the other hand, Tetris really doesn't, which might demonstrate some flaws in the argument. I don't have the distance required because I'm kind of bored of Tetris at this point, and I don't want to fall into the very common trap of proclaiming that What Games Are is what I like about games. So it's good that I'm putting this out there and testing the limits of the argument to try and avoid pretentious wankery. I guess I would argue, though, that Tetris only really starts becoming interesting when you fuck up and make a hole you can't fill, and that sets off a little narrative where you're trying to fix your own mistake and it's a lot, lot harder than it seems. When I stopped doing that, I kind of got bored of Tetris. I don't know if my experience is typical - again, I'm conscious that every armchair games theorist usually makes the mistake of assuming their personal tastes are universal properties of games.

I don't think Tetris is only interesting when you start fucking up. When I start fucking up is about when I start to get frustrated with Tetris (I don't play Tetris much). It's before I start fucking up when I get to jam to the music and slot blocks into block-sized holes that I have fun. I don't know if I'd call it interesting, but there's a lot of things that I wouldn't call interesting but that still have value. I don't think playing catch with a baseball or fetch with a dog is interesting but they are a lot of fun. Fetch is actually another good example of something that's fun without any narrative imposed on it, and in a lot of cases if you start imposing a narrative on fetch it gets kind of depressing because the dog isn't really thinking in narrative terms and it doesn't seem to care that it's living in this Sisyphean world where every retrieval is just an excuse to start another quest for the ball or stick or whatever.

Well here's the thing: the shitty storyline in Halo is a direct result of the only good thing about that series being its combat mechanics. The storyline is basically a giant excuse for Master Chief to fight some Covenant, and all of it is oriented towards justifying Master Chief fighting Covenant because constant, unending war against a vast alien race is super-unrealistic so there's a lot of pointless backstory to generate - which wouldn't be necessary if there was something to Halo's storyline other than the combat mechanics. You can't let anything grow, you can't let anyone win, and so it descends increasingly into emotional retardation so the combat mechanics stay as intact as possible.

I really shouldn't be ragging on the Halo storyline because I haven't even finished the first game let alone played any past that, but I've heard that some Halo fans liked the storyline up until Halo 4, when the writers apparently got a little confused about which characters would know which things in this big confusing set of lore they've got, and there isn't an excuse for the Covenant and the Prometheans to be allied, or something. In any case, even if we defer to your diagnosis of Halo's story failings lying in the unchanging gameplay of the series, which I think is a pretty big jump (surely the Halo story could be good and yet still support unending war - The Forever War was a pretty good sci-fi book, was it not?), this doesn't really tell us much except that good games make for bad stories and that we should really stop putting effort into those stories because they have to be bad.

But let's say they did just give up. No storyline in Halo 5 whatsoever. What happens? I'd put forward that a) obviously Halo lore fans are going to complain, but more importantly B) any objectives other than "shoot all the dudes" become notable roadblocks to players and c) players, on average, have less fun. The most important role of a game story is to provide context to the game mechanics. If it's absent, the game notably suffers, and we know this happens based on experiments by the Experimental Gameplay Project among others. It doesn't have to be much, World of Goo (which came directly out of the EGP) has the signpainter's signs and the vignettes every so often that provide just enough context to make the game more compelling than a series of anonymous puzzles. For a shooter like Halo, one of the most important pieces of context is to explain secondary and unusual objectives, and to be fair most games do this adequately. Our hypothetical Halo: No Story can't without it sounding like a bad action movie ("we have to get to that turret!") and so they're stuck either under-explaining what to do or violating their vision of a no-story Halo. There's also the jarring transition between maps you'll get by wanting to provide visual variety but not really trying to explain it, which makes all that additional art you created feel like a reskin and not an actual place. (Level 2 is Spaceship World!)

If you're mostly just mad that the Halo series has too much fan wank and to tone it down a little, though, I think you and I can come to an accord. I'm not defending tiny stripper Cortana.

This is a really interesting idea but I'm still not convinced. Puzzle games are probably the best example - I actually like World of Goo less for the story in there, compared to back when it was Tower of Goo or whatever (just the tower building game with no puzzle). I find the little signs from the Signpainter or whoever to be irritating for a few reasons. I have to try to keep this narrative in my head, even though I find it most natural to play puzzle games in small spurts spread out over long periods of time. So, I feel like I'm missing out on something in World of Goo unless I either have a perfect memory for the story or I sit down and trudge through it. Second, arranging the puzzles in a narrative structure makes it feel like I'm trudging through a set of obstacles in order to get to the end rather than encountering anew a series of interesting puzzles. Contrast World of Goo with something like AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! A Reckless Disregard for Gravity. There is no narrative in that game - you can play any stage you want as long as you unlock the stage "next to it" on the giant unlock grid thing. More importantly, what narrative content there is is entirely divorced from the game, and you encounter it in any order, completely divorced from each stage. So I can play a round of AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! without feeling obligated to keep the entire narrative in my mind and without feeling like I now have to play the next level or risk losing the thread of the story. My first time through Hotline Miami I felt like I had to beat each level in whatever way I could to keep progressing to the end to find out what was going to happen. Now that I've beat it, I can replay the levels at my leisure, divorced from any narrative, and try out interesting strategies or go for a high score. Hotline Miami isn't BETTER this way but it's not worse either - it's just a different style of game, and games that are focused around getting a high score or solving a puzzle or something like this are games that don't need narratives and are likely better without them.

Maybe you're right that a game as complex as Halo couldn't communicate everything it needs to communicate without a narrative. Maybe Halo needs its story to contextualize its game mechanics. But... I don't think so. Halo could just dump you in an arena and tell you to fight. The Witcher 2 literally does this before the game starts - it teaches you the controls, dumps you in an arena to kill a bunch of people without really explaining what the fuck is up, and then uses your success/failure to set a difficulty level. Did we need a story to contextualize the arena? The Witcher 2 tried to add one but it was a failure if you ask me, because I was slaughtering dozens of people with no repercussions. It would have been better if this arena had been an extra-narrative one that was designed purely to test my combat skills. Assassin's Creed II or Brotherhood or Revelations or all 3? has something like this too, the Animus challenges. They have zero narrative attached - they're just "kill X people" or "traverse this area in X seconds" or whatever. Could someone load the game up and just play these? Or would they need a narrative to contextualize things? I don't think they'd need a narrative at all. This sort of virtual reality no-story world is what some people wish Mirror's Edge was, and that's the route they went with their DLC, and it is also the route inMomentum went. I haven't seen anyone get confused about inMomentum's mechanics because it lacks a contextualizing narrative. Some of my favorite mods, like Suicide Survival, Perfect Stride Continuum, and Half-Life Bumper Cars, to name three of more than a dozen examples that I could have given, do just fine without any narrative contextualization of their mechanics.

But you might be right. Maybe for Halo to tell you to get to the turret, there needs to be a man yelling "get to the turret." I think we can all agree that the right way to do this isn't to have Cortana saying a bunch of condescending lines at Master Chief, and maybe the right way to do this isn't to have any sci-fi bullshit in there at all. Maybe just make it like a sport. This is what Shootmania does, right (I haven't played it)? It's what paintball and airsoft do. If paintball had turrets, and we made a paintball video game, do you know how we'd tell you to get onto the turret? A paintball dude would say "get on the turret!" Then instead of a massive bullshit sci-fi universe bolted on to our "shoot people" game, it would just be a "shoot people" game with the minimum amount of "narrative" needed to get off the ground.

To wrap it up, I said that I'd return to the idea of "narrative" being stretched too thin. I think that's what you're doing when you say we need narrative to contextualize actions. I think I can contextualize lots of actions in certain kinds of games just by having the guy next to you tell you that you have to the action. If that's enough narrative for games, then sure, most if not all games need narrative. What they don't need is what Halo has.

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I should point out that when I say "humans think in terms of stories" I'm talking on a much more fundamental level than a three-act-narrative structure. Our enjoyment of a puzzle comes from grasping the understanding of the cause and effect of the puzzle, which I am arguing here is, on a fundamental level, building a story of how the puzzle works. I am using "story" as a shorthand for "a simple cause-and-effect model that explains something" because "mental model" implies a higher-level intelligence than what I understand is at work here - it's an automatic reflex, not something we consciously assemble. I've been a bit careless when throwing around the word "story", my apologies - narrative is on a much higher conceptual level, and when I switch to talking about Halo all that's about narrative. While I think narrative is useful (both because it can be used in service to the game design and because it appeals to people who enjoy narratives without really affecting people who want pure mechanics) and shouldn't be abandoned for a myopic focus on pure mechanics, I am certainly not going to insist that every game should have a plot.

I'm not sure what the point about cutscenes is...

What I'm getting at there is that what makes games different to other media is the participation of the player, and so when we're delivering narrative we should probably do it in a way that invites participation from the player. (I don't mean choice - you can do a lot of fun things with false choices, but the illusion of choice still invites player participation if they think it's real.) I think a potentially fruitful avenue to explore is the use of the environment and mechanics to deliver narrative - Super Metroid does this almost exclusively, and while its narrative is pretty sparse it's immediate and memorable. It's one of the many reasons it's my favourite game.

This is a really interesting idea but I'm still not convinced...

From your argument here, I suspect we'll just have to agree to disagree; I feel the exact opposite way about many of your examples, so I guess it comes down to what we each find fun. I'd suspect in the case of being ordered around that I'd start mocking how little the game is trying to make me care about what I'm doing, but that'd be just fine for you. The trick with these AAA games is finding a balance between what everyone wants, whereas smaller games can go straight for a particular niche and ignore everyone else.

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If "cause and effect" counts as narrative then everything is a story, and when I say "Halo should take the story out of the game" and you say "no, Halo needs a story!" what's really going on is that I'm saying "Halo should take what normal people think of as the story out of the game" and you're saying "Halo needs the forces of cause and effect to operate without breaking." So we don't really have a disagreement, we're just talking about different things.

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New guests aren't used to the way the Thumbs layer their conversations, and tend to politely wait to be asked or brought into the word-scrum that is an episode of Idle Thumbs. It doesn't work like that; you gotta be a Breckon and bring yourself into the conversation.

I like that everyone has so much to say that they sometimes talk over each other. This ain't no Terry Gross interview on Fresh Air, y'all. And though I originally thought doing the podcast in stereo would be really strange in my ears, it works to help pick out and follow one person if the :words: get too much.

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Huh? :blink:

He kept interrupting Hamilton every time he was trying to speak. Would be nice of him to actually hold up a little bit let others also speak, this particular podcast was mostly a monologue.

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Chris interrupts everyone all the time on the podcast. It's just a thing. Idle Thumbs is a conversation, not an interview. If you don't like people interrupting at all then I guess I can understand that (I don't mind it) but it's not like Chris was particularly interrupty in this episode.

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