WAR is everywhere

This new cinematic trailer for WAR is quite simply the coolest video I have ever seen! Wow.

Why the hell don't people make feature films like this?! I mean it. Sure, it's an insane amount of work, but it'd be insanely popular with scenes like this and a solid story.

Of course, no Marauder would ever go down so easily. ;) Yes, I'm in beta, and my main is a ruthless Marauder:



Oh, and by the way.. that huge Chaos monster at the end? I saw that in-game last night!

After completing a quest in the troll mountains, reclaiming a mighty scepter and unleashing its power on an altar, Tchar'zanek himself stepped from the giant portal behind me and spoke to me! He basically congratulated me and said I was worthy servant of Chaos.



Again, wow. I stayed up waaaay too late last night (and have been paying for it, believe me), but that was the perfect ending to a long adventure.

If WAR has anything at all going for it, it's a kickass setting and quests that feel alive. Great job, Mythic.

Directing attention in stories

LIMITED ATTENTION
There's an important difference between (1) all of the information a storyteller lays on the table and (2) the small range of information that the audience is able to instantly internalize and respond to. Placement is pivotal. If the author places the most vital information in the wrong place (effectively, in the background), the audience receives future information with false assumptions; they may even construct a flawed avenue of interpretation which they will follow to end, then wondering why the story's conclusion feels so unsatisfying.

FOCUS IN WRITING
In literature, the word's placement in the sentence, the placement of the sentence in the paragraph (and so on) influences focus. For example: "The mother placed the blanket gently on her daughter" versus "Gently, the mother placed the blanket on her daughter." By changing the placement of the word "gently", more attention is called to the word. In a paragraph, opening and closing statements tend to be the most remembered. The first and last lines of a story are absolutetly vital. And quotation marks usually denote action, rather than description (only), so they tend to receive more rapt attention.

FOCUS IN FILM
In film, the camera usually decides the audience's focus. If Jack is talking while Bob is listening, Jack is the center of attention only as long as the camera stays on him. If the camera shifts to Bob during this scene, then the audience is encouraged to focus on Bob's reactions to what Jack is saying, rather than what specifically Jack is saying.

Body language, setting, background movement...these things can relay a lot of information; enough that their messages will sometime drown out dialogue. If the camera zooms in on a character's eyes as they stretch wide in terror or pain, any cooperative dialogue may be effectively silenced. If the character is off-center, any potentially relevant object in the center of the frame may distract from the character.

FOCUS IN GAMES
It is only in recent years that game stories have been written by professional writers, rather than programmers or artists (which isn't to suggest that a Renaissance man can't trump a specialist). So it's perhaps ironic that game writers have so commonly missed the narrative boundaries of their own medium. In a game story, the player's focus is typically on his or her own potential actions and involvement. The player is almost always the primary protagonist (intended or not).

As a player, if I'm watching a cinematic cutscene, I want to know how everything in that cutscene relates to my character and my choices. Most cinematics in games thus far have been largely unrelated to character choices. Developers have incorporated cinema as it was already known, rather than take limited elements of film to adapt its visual storytelling capacity to a new medium. If my choices have had no obvious effect on the events of a cutscene, then that cutscene is more a distraction from than a progression of my story-experience.

The player needn't be in absolute control of the story. In fact, the vast majority of popular stories (of any medium) involve the natural conflict between things in and things out of the protagonist's control. It is perhaps desireable that game audiences should experience this conflict more than they do currently. Gamers up until now have accepted a lack of story control as a perhaps-regretable but necessary trait of the story medium.

A better way
Anyway, it's something to consider. In my own experience, cinematics can be greatly appreciated even when they're not related to gameplay much at all. Diablo 2's sporadic movies and World of Warcraft's intro movie are good examples, but note the quality of those cinematics.

Generally speaking, I think cinematics are a poor method of storytelling in games, and zoom-in character conversations aren't much better. The medium is more rewarding of narratives that are less fixed and are experienced while the player still has full mobility (and capacity for actions in general, including combat skills). Not simple, I know, but such methods have a much greater affective impact on the player.

Gameplay, not narrative, defines the game

In a recent issue of Game Informer, Mathieu Ferland defends the idea that Splinter Cell: Conviction is not a break from the Splinter Cell franchise by saying "I think there was a natural progression with the narrative."

I'm a fiction writer and a lifelong RPG fan, but I just don't buy that narrative ever defines a game. If a game was designed so that the gameplay is, not just heavily dependent on the narrative, but at its very essence little more than the progression of a story, then I might agree that narrative can define a game. But I have yet to play a game in which my primary interest is the narrative.

Call of Duty: 3 might come closest, and I played it for only 15-20 minutes before giving up on it. The game (the beginning, at least) was so dependent on cinematics that it felt like I was just going through motions to reach the next cinematic...and my impression was that it was a terrible game. If I want to watch a movie or read a book, I'll go do that.

This medium is about interaction. The narrative might be extremely important, but interaction will always be the core of any game. The more one-sided the game's progression (the more pace, plot, setting, and so on are controlled by the developer and not the player), the less it is a game.

The goals that make the most sense to me as a writer for games are:

• To design and anticipate possible player decisions, and accomodate that free will through gameplay trees, ala Deus Ex.
• To design a context for player actions: a world which demonstrates interest in player choices, rewarding/punishing those choices according to its own interests and concepts of right and wrong action.
• To provide elements with which the player may build (consciously or not) his or her own story; to build a world with room for creative, and not just explorative, gameplay.

I certainly believe that there are many admirable ways in which game writers may create a variety of narrative-gameplay combinations. But, ever since I played my first MMORPG (Everquest), the avenue which most attracts me, and which seems glaringly absent from the modern game library, is a central narrative theme...only moderately predetermined...surrounded and fulfilled by the spontaneous and creative narratives of individual players.

Player input, not the narrative that input may reveal, is the game. Dev-written stories extracted by the player will always be somewhat peripheral to core gameplay.

MMO cutscenes

I like cutscenes when they're fluidly implemented from normal art assets. Neverwinter Nights merely took control of the camera and scripted events with the usual models. Battle for Middle Earth 2 does it slightly different, fading the usual art into something more like painting...but really not that far from the original models.

I'd like to see this done in an MMORPG. Imagine having just triggered or come into contact with a major story event; the camera swings into first-person view, and you watch (the camera turns and zooms as necessary) as a scripted conversation or other situation unfolds before you... something akin to the cutscenes in the Condemned 360 demo. Maybe the artists even have a way of applying a temporary effect to the scene to make the normal models appear more cinematic.

If the game is capable of making your character's face provide expressions, then maybe the camera will swing around in a 3rd-person view to show your character reacting to, or taking place in, the events. Honestly though, I like cinematic story progression mostly when it doesn't employ my character significantly, because I like as complete control as I can get over my character's actions and personality.

Anyway, I've heard about a couple MMOGs having cinematics before, but it didn't sound like they shared the incorporative style of Neverwinter Nights cutscenes.

I'd be particularly interested in seeing a method like this used to bring the audience (player) into the perspective of his or her antagonists at times. I'm still thinking about how best to do that though.