Truths about video game stories
bottomfeeder.substack.com
bottomfeeder.substack.com
A great example would be Dark Souls: incredible setting, but really bare-bones plot. The plot is effectively: "You're the chosen undead, and you must quest for some items." The setting, on the other hand, could fill books.
In some sense, it's similar to comparing a good news article to a good story. A good story. Good story generally can't be purely fact-based, since this interrupts the needs of narrative: pacing, good vs. evil, moral decisions, defeats, and victories, etc. A good news story may have something like a narrative, but it's more of a collection of facts. If there's an narrative at all, it exists simply to help explain the relevance of the facts presented.
Video games are metaphorically similar: You may have an interesting plot in the game, but it is punctuated by the actions you get to take as a player. For example, in Wind Waker you must rescue your sister, but in practice the player is running around an island, breaking pots, and doing sidequests. The narrative plot and the play actions are almost totally disparate. The plot is nearly a side story, which helps add context to the player actions.
Some of the most impactful stories I've experienced in games have been more environmental storytelling than plot based. That is, the game expects me to find the overall narrative and story in my own time, usually because the story beats have happened already before my character even existed, and I'm trying to find where the current gameplay fits into it, e.g. Outer Wilds.
If you want a normal "movie like" story, you more often have to Railroad your player along certain paths, or tack it on in between gameplay.
Games like (the finale of) Braid do a good job of showing how gameplay and narrative can coexist in a way that films can't do, and that's one of the lessons for me.
Plot in the movie sense within games can be a fun way to mash gameplay and story together, buy it isn't superior in telling the story. You need to do something different in games to tell a story in a way where games are stronger stronger film, for me, usually slow paced games with environmental storytelling, or games that use your feelings of being the main character to mess with you, e.g. spec ops the line. YOU chose to kill people not the protag of the film you're watching.
I guess my point is, some games use video game only devices to enhance the impact of their story in a way that only games can, where the games that try to take on films using the tools of films won't be able to.match up with films.
Not because of the article’s content, but in contrast of it. It was an excellent game that doesn’t fit into a lot of the authors advice.
It was complex, and you can miss a lot of it, but it nails and authentic tone that seems to be available on indie titles exclusively.
Top Five of all time for me.
I feel it gave me room to think, and spoke to me in areas I usually don't engage. Themes of accepting you can't halt the end, no matter how hard you try and all the work you put in, and ultimately we all end up alone, but with the memories of others as parts of ourselves, as we enter the unknown.
Just my readings, but the point is it hit me in a way other media hasn't. Not better or worse, but unique and different because games haven't quite found how best to use the medium for the possibilities in storytelling.
It's not so much that they have a story, because there's more to it than that, and the lore seeps through every aspect of the games.
I have never played a game that does cosmic horror so damn well (because Lovecraftian games are about 99% disappointing, or cliche rip offs of like two Lovecraft stories).
I prefer Sunless Skies, but both of them look gorgeous, have amazing sound design, and while abundant with moments of terror they are a real feast for the imagination. It's the writing that ties it all together, makes it special.
Which, I think, makes your point. The setting is basically drowning you in that game. And you are a bit player that does not impact any world, per se. At least, if you did, you aren't aware of it.
For example, in film school you might study aspects of film which are somewhat oblique to the quality of the actual storytelling in the film. Such as: cinematography, and the framing of characters in the shot. Video games have analogous things, such as level design, game design, etc. A famous example is how the first level of Super Mario Bros. teaches you that mushrooms are beneficial, by making the player's first interaction with one mostly unavoidable. Modern games have more complex game designs, and of course these designs represent a complex communication between the game creators and the players. A lot of nuance an information is conveyed this way, and it can potentially amount to art. Much like the art of cinematography cannot exist in books, the art of game design cannot exist in other mediums.
Video games can also teach you things which movies and books cannot, (at least potentially) and this can be performed via game design. For example, when I was a child, people would exclaim "life's not a video game!" I heard this quite a bit, and I believe most people meant: the things you do have consequences, and you won't get very many second chances. Now this is frankly not really correct. Yes, the things you do have consequences, but almost everyone gets multiple second chances throughout their life. For example, if I fail at one task in a workplace, I usually get multiple chances to improve and correct my error. Even if I fail overall at a job, I will likely have future chances to prove myself at other jobs. Some mistakes can be fatal, of course, but for most of the actions I take, I can plan on success by trial and error, repetition, and iteration. In other words, exactly like a video game. Interestingly, it was video games which first taught me this. I had a friend who by all accounts was objectively not as talented at video games than I was. We'd play together, and I'd best him at nearly everything we touched. However one day he wanted to take on a challenge in a game which I felt was above my skill level. I was certain he'd never be able to succeed, because I was certain I could never succeed. But, he had something I didn't at the time: persistence. He kept trying and failing, and trying again. He never became discouraged or emotionally frustrated, and slowly he iterated on his failure and eventually succeeded. (To be clear here, when I say "iterate on failure," I simply mean to attempt a task, fail at it, and attempt it slightly better the next time.) I learned a very important lesson that day, and have been re-learning it ever since: part of success is persistence, and things which seem impossible are often simply daunting. Later in life, Dark Souls and other From Software games reinforced these lessons, and of course much more importantly, I applied these lessons to my everyday life and learned not to fear failure, and to iterate on failure until it became success. I bring this up specifically because I remember years ago reading an interview with a celebrity who felt that video games could not be art. I believe it was Roger Ebert, but I'm not sure. In either case, the argument was made that art teaches you something, something about human nature, something about being a person. It's possible I'm misremembering the argument, (I can't find it online) but my point is the same. Video games taught me something about being a person which other mediums failed to teach me.
Cyberpunk 2077 is also a great example of this trope. Night City itself is magnificent, and the missions aren't half bad either, but the main storyline is tiresome and has no satisfactory outcome. It feels as if they tried to have a deep plot but ended up botching it.
Video games are a great medium for plots! You just have to allow the plot to fail, and let the player take it on tangents. Games that go "uhh you died that's not canon let's rewind" are just shitty games.
That would be overwhelming majority of them. And overwhelming majority of players don't mind this aspect or even actively like it.
I remember how mind-blown I was when as a kid I played Warioland 2 and you could't die in it!
I'm in the opposite camp. Movies are not good vehicles for plots, because the right pacing and timing is subjective. They almost always fail at storytelling, because they proceed at the same pace for everyone. The best you can do is to watch the movie alone at home. Then you can at least pause the film when you need time to think, or jump back to rewatch a section.
Cutscenes between gameplay sequences tend to make the game and the story worse. Both because they break the pacing, and because they are often used to show things that would not be possible in the game itself. The game already tells one story through gameplay, dialogue, and player choices. That story should take priority. The gameplay should be expressive enough that the writers can tell the story they want within the framework, instead of resorting to cutscenes that break the logic of the game.
If you're looking for a search term for this, it's "ludonarrative dissonance". Spawned a bunch of interesting discussions. eg. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=04zaTjuV60A
And a lot of infighting. And there was a point where even using that term was bound to get you insulted.
There's probably not so much of Grim Fandango story in Dark Souls, given there is not so many friendlies in the latter. If anything, I would compare it to System Shock 2, but in fantasy genre rather than sf. The story of System Shock 2 was fine, though maybe not that famous because Half-Life beat it to market.
Obviously those are examples from 90's and there is always the question about modern games; AAA as well as those made on lesser budgets. Funny the author of the blog roasts titles such as Firewatch and Spec Ops: Dubai.
My ideal is to create my own story rather than have it spoon fed to me. Let me roll a character then let me do what I want in an interactive open world. Sure, some curating and minor direction is OK, but the less the better. I don't remember much of the story of GTA 3 other than slogging through it to open the city up but surfing a car all over town causing mayhem or endlessly jumping the ski jump on the third island, those are the memories of that game I remember vividly and cherish. To enhance this I absolutely love good procedural generation. Finding that one out of a thousand planet in No Mans Sky and just exploring it, taking screen shots knowing that I'm likely the only person who will ever visit it, wonderful.
The other problem with modern video game stories I notice now that I have a kid: there are plenty of video games that action wise I have no problem letting my kid play but can't due to the story and mainly the cut scenes. Seems to be a path to some edgy cred when the base action does not really justify it.
Examples?
I think games need to be better about "picking a camp". Many games try to force a strong narrative into an open world design, and both qualities end up faltering because of it. Examples: Mass Effect, God of War, Horizon Zero Dawn, most Ubisoft games.
The best open world games tell very light narrative. They may have tons of lore to fall upon and discover, but there's otherwise very little arc to the narrative you're progressing through during your time in the game. Examples: Dark Souls 1, Breath of the Wild.
The best narratively-focused games severely limit players' freedoms in how to approach the high-level narrative beats. Some great ones do give some freedoms in how to approach tactical situations (The Last of Us 2), but this doesn't impact the broader arc. Other examples: Bioshock/Infinite, Nier Automata, Portal 2.
There are vanishingly few examples of games which actually do both with high competence. I'd list: Witcher 3, Red Dead 2, Dragon Age Origins as examples. One quality shared among these games is how weak their high level narrative is allowed to be, in exchange for much stronger shorter side-narratives. When people say Witcher 3 has a great story, what they really mean is: It tells tons of very high quality short stories. Similarly with RDR2, the overarching "end of the cowboy" narrative is great, but its the ambient storytelling of the world that sells it as having great storytelling chops.
The bigger issue with narratively-focused games is how the game needs to convince the player that this was worth being a game, and not a TV Show. I feel games like those listed above (TLOU2, Bioshock, Nier, Portal) do this very well, because the beat-to-beat gameplay is compelling despite the strict world architecture. But, many other games which tell strong narratives falter too quickly in providing great gameplay (Telltale games, Firewatch, What Remains of Edith Finch) to justify it being a game. I don't generally hold this against the game, because ultimately if you want to tell a great narrative, and you know how to build games, you'll tell that narrative through a game, that ain't bad, its just one medium among many. But I also fully understand the counter-argument; its sold as a game. People have expectations going into a game, that it won't be a movie, yet that's basically all Telltale ever made, Bandersnatch-style clickable movies.
Discussions like this are one of the things I love about gaming; its such a nascent medium, its still trying to find its footing and what makes a game great. Why is Breath of the Wild so much better than Immortals: Fenyx Rising? I've played both a ton, I've thought about it a ton, and I still don't feel that I have a compelling answer which wouldn't be a 200 page essay. BotW copied a ton of gameplay elements from earlier Ubisoft games. Ubisoft then copied a ton of gameplay elements from BotW for Immortals. Yet, the Ubisoft products are never as good. What makes BotW special? Can Nintendo replicate it for BotW2? Do they even want to? Probably not; despite developing the same franchises for decades, Nintendo rarely retreads gameplay ground; so, follow-up question, how the hell is Nintendo so good at consistently creating new gameplay experiences? Why have so vanishingly few companies replicated their production success?
As a counter-example, we have series like Metal Gear Solid, which are renowned for the huge use of cutscenes (MGS4 having an ending cutscene that's practically feature-length). Admittedly, this style of in-depth storytelling is not everyone's cup of tea (especially those for whom the second point made by the OP applies), but it is a very effective storytelling tool that works well in the series. The games are predominantly not, however, open-world, unlike the other games you mention. The cinematic storytelling would probably not translate well. Indeed, MGSV, which was open-world, mostly used in-game audio tapes to be played at the player's discretion, with any cutscenes being mostly contained to specific missions. So I think the exact requirements for good storytelling really depend on the style of game and on what your players expect from it. But much of what the OP says about good writing still stands, such as finding a Whedon-esque sweet spot of serious/comedy and using original jokes.
Mass Effect, God of War, and Horizon Zero Dawn are in my list of favourite games of all time.
I couldn’t stand Red Dead 2 until I stopped doing the open world things and started just following the story.
Breath of the Wild is cool, but it definitely hasn’t captured me like these other games have.
I have never been able to stick with a Souls games, but I devoured Detroit: Beyond Human and the Telltale Walking Dead games
I’m not saying you’re wrong, but when you ask “is it good?” You need to consider what people are looking for. Personally, I’m looking for something that is technically fun but also leans closer to being an interactive movie/book
I can pull Mass Effect (lets say ME2, as its oftentimes cited as the strongest entry in the trilogy) as a nearly inassailable example of this dichotomy games are faced with (and this post does have spoilers for ME2, though not horribly big ones)
One of the biggest issues with ME2 narrative structure is a direct consequence of the open world design; the ludonarrative dissonance of talking with a crew member, being told "the ship my dad died on just started broadcasting a distress signal, ten years later, Shepherd we gotta go check it out right now", then agreeing to check it out, then waiting ten quests or 10 real world hours to go check it out. The narrative introduces urgency; the open world gives the player the agency to ignore that urgency. It would be powerful if the game recognized this, and tweaked dialog to say something like "well I would have liked to check it out sooner, but this will have to do" once you finally get around to it, but it does not; instead, it leaves us with the ludonarrative dissonance of everyone pretending like this is priority #1, has always been priority #1, even though I just spent thirty minutes in the captain's cabin trying on some new armor.
Same game: You speak with Samara, she says something like "its so refreshing to work with a crew of friends again, and to help you with your mission." Not once did I take Samara on a mission; she says this dialog no matter how often you deploy on missions with her.
Same game: Grunt is complaining about having an insatiable need to kill stuff, and his loyalty mission is to get him checked out by the Krogans. At first, I was like; woah! I also never took Grunt on any missions, not even once; is this the game reacting to him being locked up in his room all day, creating dynamic content in response to my gameplay decisions? A true integration of open world and narrative, player decisions impacting the way the story progresses in a deep and meaningful way? It isn't. He'll do that even if he's by your side for every mission killing thousands of mercenaries.
Here's the gist of it: When games try to integrate an open world with strong narrative, it is possible to do it in a fantastic and meaningful way, where the open world actually supports and builds upon the narrative. Imagine if refusing to utilize squad mates led to their desertion, which led to more missions to win them back, or spending all day side-questing leads them to ask questions about what their mission really is and why they joined.
By and large, games fail to do this, because its VERY hard. Open world games are exponential multivariadic systems; the player has a thousand things they can do at any time, trying to account for every thousand of those things, write dialog lines, record voice-over, in twenty languages... its impossibly difficult. Games which go beyond competent in this regard (and Mass Effect is FAR BEYOND competent; its VERY good) should be held up as paragons of the artform, because they attempted to integrate the thing video games do best (open-ended interactivity) with a more traditional narrative structure. But that doesn't mean sacrifices weren't made, and ultimately for me it comes down to: Mass Effect is a FANTASTIC game... but its narrative isn't.
Ubisoft - and most of the publishers - can't do this because they're set up to make games that are large in scope, boast technical excellence(an ever-increasing bar) and are destined to be yearly franchises: quantities of assets and features are given precedence over coherence, which means that you get a trail of papercut discontinuities, dropped balls and lack of focus throughout the experience. Coherence has a degree of power over the game experience that is probably hundreds or thousands of times that of scope alone: it means that the software, assets and design work well together instead of creating "door problems" that dev time is spent solving. This means that a game built around a design that coheres well is automatically more polished since it never had to compromise the experience to solve problems. Nintendo regularly takes design shortcuts to this end, omitting entire categories of assets.
The true polar opposite to a Nintendo-style approach is something more like Bethesda's open world games: the game that's launched is a simulation engine with a large sandbox scenario. It may work and be playable to completion by itself, but the underlying product focus is to use it in a way supportive of tinkering, modding and exploitative gaming - to let the player bring a complicated system "off the rails". This tendency towards simulationism goes all the way back to Bethesda's origins in making stat-heavy sports sims. It makes for a less immediately digestible product, but one that can garner a devoted fanbase because it promises to give you most of the scope of a certain kind of role-playing fantasy, and then you can mod in the last little bit that will make that fantasy complete. So they don't have to worry so much about making it cohere, because the player is using it as a design tool.
I debated not including it on the above list, because one of the things it does absolutely fantastically well is, lets call it, ludonarrative resonance. The opposite of ludonarrative dissonance; it synergizes gameplay and story to such an incredibly powerful degree, that its story is made better by the gameplay, and its gameplay (what it has) is made better by the story.
That being said, its gameplay is more in the Firewatch/Telltale category than, say, Mass Effect.
Another game which feels squarely in the ludonarrative resonant category is Celeste. If you've played Celeste, you know: its a hell of a frustrating experience. Your experience clearing those platforming challenges precisely mirrors Madeline's experience scaling the mountain. You'll have moments where you'll tell yourself "this game is too hard for me", "I can't do this", just like how Badeline tries to convince Madeline that she isn't good enough to climb the mountain. In the end, you never stop feeling frustrated; you learn to live with the frustration, as it pushes you to be a better player; just as Madeline learns to live with her ugly side, and it makes them both better for it by giving you a double dash for the last level.
Celeste could never be a movie; its narrative is too simple to work outside a form of interactive media, where the interactivity empowers the narrative by creating in you the same emotions being narrated through the main character.
As for the mini-factions and side quests, there I can agree -- these are practically the only weak point of the game.
I don't think you're in the opposite camp as he is. Your point above is essentially his Observation 2.
> the vast majority of players just tune out the story. As long as you let them skip past it, it's fine.
We played MazeWar at Xerox in the late 70s. The guy on the cover of my book is Jeffrey Smith, the son of Dave Smith, the inventor of icons. The story ("story" -- see? I did it there again) is that Dave and his wife Janet, 2 weeks overdue with Jeffrey, went to PARC to kill some time, she saw the bloody eyeball on the screen, and the adrenaline made her go into labor and deliver Jeffrey.
I found a working Alto, and shot the photograph in Nov. 2020, using the real MazeWar software. He loved reenacting the family legend.
I came to this thread to read a thread about videogame stories. Imagine my surprise (wait, this is HN), when the first thing that I see is your comment about videogames that isn't really about videogames it's a way for you to sell your book, which you admit you are shameless about.
But I just wanted to reed about videogames. If you were more subtle, if you knew how tll me a story without telling me that you are telling a story, then it's not wasting my time and I can get what I came for as well as what you want me to learn.
You'll be so concerned with adapting your brain to the mechanics and artificial limitations on a semi-real-appearing world (cue Zero Punc's knee high fence stalwart joke), do you have time for any story of complexity?
If a game is good, you'll play through twice. THEN if they're really good, you'll pick up more of the story, especially easter eggs if they are competent.
RE: edgy cred, yeah, that's still the maturation of the market. The problem with video games still remains the catering-to-teenager previous two decades. It's like any large budget or worthwhile game was all shonen manga. And really it still has that core.
Video games will eventually branch out. I bring up manga, because I think games in Japan have always been more about characters, plot, and complexity, and had more offball ones.
The characters in American games are still pretty crappy. Consider that DOOM and Halo are headed by... generic McToxicMale-SchwartzeneggerPredator-In-A-Helmet. All the other shooter games were stuck in the same rut.
Bad guys spawn across an inter-dimensional portal and start wreaking havoc. Protagonist has to kill them all, crossing the portal in the process to go destroy the alien leader.
There were some cool extra details - the G Man, the marines entering as a third force, the diversions to do things like launch a missile into space - but all of those things were additional to that same, basic story.
This author has it spot on: our standards for story telling in video games are really low.
If your game feels like traveling to an alternate dimension with vivid details and differences a lot about the story can be excused, because the player will eventually find their own story within your game.
If your story is great and the freefloating passages are dull and lifeless the story can be great but it will never a good game.
Why not both? A great gripping story in a believeable world.
Case in point: Children of Men is basically a two hour-long escort quest. It's also an absolutely amazing film with amazing storytelling.
What I hate however is when games have the most inspiring world and fail to tell unique stories in it. E.g. the game plays in South America, yet I learn nothing about the reginal culture when I play it, because all Characters are very generic.
This is something that made Witcher 3 great: nearly every quest managed to convey some feeling about how it must have been to live in the medival ages (or some fantasy version of it).
I like it when games take their own world seriously and root every character, story and object deeply within the history of that world. And yes, sometimes that means telling the player things they can't understand immidiately, because they come from a different culture and world.
If you could exchange the world just like that without changing a lot about the quests, you are doing it wrong.
For the first hour or two you were implored to, "Get to the surface" because it was your and your fellow scientists hope of being rescued.
When you run into the marines you aren't told they're bad, they just start trying to kill you and you figure out that you're not getting a rescue.
World-building wise it was leaps ahead of anything that came before it and the in-game (rather than FMV) dialogue was fantastic and immersive.
It didn't have "level screens", the level transitions were natural rather than forced with loading screen hints and title cards.
While that's all completely standard now, the other competitor titles at the time were games like Quake 2 and half-life's predecessors were games like Duke Nukem 3D and Quake, which while both ground-breaking in their own way weren't a touch on the visceral world of half-life.
The only other FPS games that came close to lore was rainbow six, but that was the "set pieces" style of choosing levels and going through rehearsed action rather than what felt like an emergent world in half-life.
While replaying half-life now it feels far more linear and scripted, that's because we have nearly 15 years of gameplay improvements built on top of where it lay the foundations.
For players at the time, going from games like quake to half-life it really did feel like it was genre defining.
That is not exactly subtle nor needs much figuring. Them trying to kill you is game telling you they are bad in very straightforward way.
That kind of scripted event, and environmental story-telling, was extremely novel in a FPS game back then.
It's easy to nowadays handwave that away as merely "Marines shoot player, player realizes Marines are enemy" like that kind of heavy scripting is just something mundane. But back then it wasn't mundane, it was quite revolutionary.
Before that the norm in the genre was mostly maze shooters with very limited NPC interactions, like certain Doom enemies fighting each other or some wall or another blowing up in Quake, Half-Life took all of that and brought it to a whole new level.
Back then, half life was one of the games that made me think about how linear games are evolving to be. At one place, you could decide to go left or right and it joined back together quickly. It was straightforwardly prescripted, which is something we discussed with friends a lot.
I did not needed hindsight of years and my current experience. If anything now I have less experience as I spend significantly less time playing games like this.
a) Choosing which enemies to go and kill with your chosen color of pixel burst.
or
b) Choosing which set of text and vaguely representational spritework the game would expose to you.
Many "linear" games offer tactical rather than strategic freedom. There is a sort of conservation of experiential depth, limited by the players' ability/inclination to absorb new interaction concepts, and the availability of developer resources to build them.
This is a good way to put it IMO. Command and Conquer is an interesting exception in the action genre because it had some meta strategy in branching missions of the over world.
Half life was not one of them. At the time, they were games that allows more strategizing and more tactic and more micro choices. Half life was as prescribed as it gets.
yes here's a clip of someone saving the scientist: https://youtu.be/e_l84_7jDoU?t=163
And the difference between full cit scene and what happened in half life was really really minor.
The difference between a cut scene and embodying a character while things happen around you isn't a minor thing for many of us.
Half life was part of pattern of moving towards extremely linear. It had better graphics than normal at the time. It had attempt at actual story. It was not move toward more agency to the player nor toward subtlety.
It had less choices than normal at the time, not even in terms of whether to hide on left or right, less options for tactical decisions, less of anything like that.
In terms of showing rather then telling via text, almost anything has that aspect.
Half life had very good graphics for the time. That is where it shined.
Wolfenstein and Doom have literally zero story choices of any kind. Not even inconsequential ones!
Clearly, Half-Life has superior story telling to Wolfenstein or Doom. Not by much, can be argued, but it clearly does. And at the time, the little bit felt like a whole lot compared to literally nothing.
In wolfesrwin, you could at least go back and had choice between left or right doors. Half life had only way to go - forward. It was like sitting on train moving on railroad.
Maybe you just missed them all!
Just off the top of my head from the start of the game: Activating the alarm from the button on the reception desk, getting the guard into trouble. Going into the kitchen and playing with the microwave cassarole (referenced from later sequel!). Opening lockers in the locker room (looking at people's stuff), getting the hazard suit and heading back (if you try to proceed without suit, guard will tell you to go get it - nonlinear maps!). Pressing the broken elevator button, sending people plummeting. Opening the dumpster to find the hiding scientist. Operating vending machines.
Did Wolfenstein or Doom have anything like this? In Wolfenstein you can optionally open cells and find hidden doors behind walls. In Doom you can push buttons, and you are always required to do so to proceed.
It doesnt matter which writer, author, musician, artist, game designer, movie maker you pick they all hit an upper bound of how many chimps in the the whole troupe they can connect with.
But if we are targeting specific niches rather than the whole population its a great time to be a story teller. The kind of engagement you can get is historically of the charts.
Are they? I would say that they are, but not for video games, but for all things in general.
Sturgeon's law [0] states that "ninety percent of everything is crap." And it was supposedly originally about sci-fi novels! “Fifty Shades of Grey” was completely criticized on all fronts by reviewers, but still became one of the top bestsellers.
If you look at ancient myths, we have things like a series of myths with a central plot resolving around a god raping humans of all genders (significant chunk of Zeus-related mythology), Loki changing into a mare and getting impregnated, because gods wanted to prevent a builder from getting rightfully earned reward [1].
Most of the stories created today are low-quality ones. And that was always so. Only when we look at the past creations, we can only experience those that were good enough to be preserved. The same will probably happen with video games if various DRMs will not prevent that.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon's_law [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sva%C3%B0ilfari
I'm pretty sure that Fifty Shades of Grey wasn't successful for its story, but for discussing sex and specifically BDSM in a more open way than what was previously seen in "mainstream" movies.
Overall, a lot of works that, on the surface, aren't very impressive by current standards, but still managed to stand out in a novel way. Fifty shades and Half Life are two examples, but you could say exactly the same thing about Minecraft, DOOM, most of the classical movies, most of the old "legendary" cars and a lot more. Things don't become classics by standing the test of time - if you discount nostalgia, a lot of "classical" stuff is crap by todays standard -, but by founding the genre they're later beaten in.
And because it feeded from the Twilight-Hype, on which it was a juicy twist. For itself it probably would never have become such a success.
> but you could say exactly the same thing about Minecraft, DOOM
Can we? Minecraft feeds mainly on its powerful sandboxing and modability, which other games still can't really match today, while also still getting regular updates. And doom as a franchise continued to move forward and created new games. They don't remain successful just because their first versions were awesome at the time, but because they continued to output awesome successors.
This is very different from classics which are usually frozen in time and stay classics despite getting no updates at all.
Nah, the standards are just different because of the medium. Just like you wouldn't write a book where people sing for 10 minutes every time they talk, and you wouldn't write opera that lasts for 40 hours and has realistic acting and dialogs - you can't compare stories between different media ignoring the differences. And the difference that interactivity makes is bigger than the different constrains between novels and opera.
The more detailed and intricate a story of a game is - the less freedom of choice the player has. In the extreme case you have so called "visual novels" which let you make 10-20 choices the whole game at predefined places. They barely qualify as games and they are very niche genre in gaming because they don't play to the strengths of the medium. At that point you might as well read a "choose your own adventure" book. The most common emotion they cause in players is frustration because they wanted the protagonist to do something else, but they can't influence the story in any way at the moment.
On another end of the spectrum you have games like minecraft - where the story is your struggle vs the mechanics of the game, and there's no need for any pre-defined plot because you create the plot with every keyboard input you do every second. Freedom of choice = 100%, plot = 0%. Most gamers prefer these kinds of games because they can only be realized as games.
The plot in minecraft can be "night was coming and I forgot the close the doors to the mines, then a creeper came and blew up my bed and pushed me into a chasm near a river of lava - I had 5% hitpoints left and if I died then I would get respawned in random place on the map cause no bed - I would maybe have to spend hours trying to find my base again so I had to think hard how to get out of there alive". It's a great story that forces the player to feel strong emotions. And it won't happen to any other player the exact same way which makes it even better. If you add traditional plot to Minecraft you make it worse.
No matter if a story in art is detailed and intricate, or barely there - what matters is how it makes people feel. Novels have 100s of pages, poems might have 4 lines, but you won't say "stories in poetry suck".
In Opera the main point is music, so the story is designed around that (and the time and place constraints). In games the tradeoffs are different, but it doesn't mean that it's somehow "low standards".
Most games tend to prefer less plot and more freedom because it plays to the strengths of the medium. It's a trade-off.
> it was the same story as all first person shooters going back to Doom: Bad guys spawn across an inter-dimensional portal and start wreaking havoc
almost every book is Hero's Journey if we look from high enough. Details matter. You can take the same central conflict and write 1000 books that make you feel 1000 different emotions.
- visual novel mode for dialogues and plot choices where player freedom is very restricted by story can be detailed
- game mode for mechanics and combat that have barely any influence on the story (besides "survive this challenge to continue") but players have freedom to express themselves
It is very formulaic in structure, I'd argue more formulaic than ancient theater, and it limits the possible plots a lot (for example you won't find any RPG where the hero gets weaker with time). But all these conventions are accepted as necessary evil by the intended audience, so that's fine.
Didn’t have much of a plot though.
Just “you are fleeing a deep cavern or something after stealing a great deal of arcane power (more than you have the mental capacity to hold onto)”. Never saw how it ended. I imagine it is either meant to inevitably end in defeat, or it ends with the character having lost all the power they stole , escaping with only their life, or perhaps, having lost all of it, being unable to continue to evade capture.
That's merely an economic decision by the industry. You can make a game with detailed and intricate stories while simultaneously allowing full player freedom. It's just difficult and expensive to do so!
Consider something like Dwarf Fortress. It's detailed down to the alcohol content of the dirt under the cat's third left front paw nail. And the cat has its own will and you are permitted to do pretty much anything to the cat. But it's taken two people years to make it without much/any profit.
The state of affairs is simply that we are limited only by our imaginations and our economic utilities. We carry supercomputers in our pockets. Few have any idea what to do with them.
On the other hand, a lot of people enjoy the art of literary composition. Grand scenes with precisely chosen words, "show don't tell" (which has little bearing on the underlying plot ideas, to me), and lots of rich description. I don't care for that sort of stuff, probably because I don't visualize things in my head much while reading, but I know a lot of people who judge books and authors on it.
I think of narrative as a combination of several elements: character, plot, world-building, execution (word choice, visual choices and performance for film or games), concepts and ideas. I tend to be drawn to strong characters first, but not always. Some examples off the top of my head:
Clerks: strong characters, mediocre almost everything else
Reservoir Dogs: strong characters, strong execution, minimal plot and world-building
Portal: strong characters, plot, world building, concepts, and execution
Brazil (the Terry Gilliam movie): strong world-building and execution, weak characters and plot
Lolita (the book): strong execution and characters
Harry Potter: strong characters, world-building, and concepts, goofy plot and execution
Primer: mind-bending concepts, good execution, weak characters and plot
Don’t know why, but I could go on and on thinking about it.
Edit: this list would imply I have pretty narrow tastes but really I like a little bit of everything; these are just some notable examples that came to mind as being particularly strong or weak in certain areas.
The comment I replied to mentionned:
> There were some cool extra details - the G Man, the marines entering as a third force, the diversions to do things like launch a missile into space - but all of those things were additional to that same, basic story.
I think it's wrong to separate a story between "a story" and "the details", all stories are the same if you boils them down enough.
At the same time, the upcoming Uncharted movie is looking to be substantially less interesting than Uncharted 4.
The fact that the movie studios are now looking at videogames for inspiration is very telling IMO.
What do you mean? People complain about movies all the time. Even Blockbusters, or especially braindead blockbusters, are being trashed everywhere. Marvel-Movies, as beloved as they are, are often bashed for how bad and generic they are. Hollywood for many people is synonymous for bad storytelling.
> The fact that the movie studios are now looking at videogames for inspiration is very telling IMO.
Because that's where the customers are. Gaming is primary a thing of younger people, and to bait them you need stuff that they know and love.
Print bleeds into video games and movies as well. How many movies start with a text blurb? How many games literally just tell you what happened, instead of showing, instead of doing.
Even then, I tend to gravitate towards open world games without stories since it is easier to imagine your own than dealing with expository interjections. The Long Dark is a good example of this. The developers are trying to make a narrative driven game with their Wintermute story mode, yet the reality is that survival mode is far more fun. Rather than dealing with criminals in an otherwise inexplicable desolate wasteland[1] while trying to find my ex (their story), I am trying to figure out what happened to the once sleepy community that I last visited in my childhood while trying to survive long enough to be rescued (my story).
(1) Technically, there is an explanation, but it is weak and not always consistent.
There is always a villain , a protagonist and he goes through challenges to eventually defeat the villain. Finally he is a transformed man and returns home with the riches for society.
Sure there are some that deviate from the traditional plot but only very few of them succeed because to pull that off you have to be a master in story writing.
What makes a story great isn’t its uniqueness regarding the plot but having great character development, dialogue, depth and breadth of the environment, the correct use of things like midpoint, flashbacks, rising action and other devices to keep the audience engaged.
Making sure secondary characters contribute equally and help the protagonist grow is also important.
The truth is that making a great video game is an incredible effort as there needs to be a balance of everything such as great AI, graphics, etc and as I described above good story telling is already a massive undertaking.
Given the above , I’m not surprised many publishers cut corners because they are limited by time and budget
Sales of printed books have been increasing every year since 2012. Last year alone saw a jump of over eight percent.
So total unit sales being up doesn't necessarily counter that statement "no one reads books anymore". Unit sales being "up" has a lot of qualifiers.
...which means a percentage of us will take it differently than intended.
In the US in 2019, a high % of adults reported reading a book recently
https://www.markinblog.com/book-sales-statistics/
…who is reading in the US?
In October of 2019, over 80% of adults, age 18 to 29, have read at least one book in the previous year. Older adults, possibly because they are not spending as much time studying and more time working, read slightly less.
Lockdowns may have increased reading in the US
https://publishingperspectives.com/2021/02/aap-statshot-sees...
Political polarization in the UK appears to drive book sales
https://www.theguardian.com/books/datablog/2017/mar/18/the-f...
(edit for formatting)
Just the hand wringing over them stopped.
Overall I agree with the idea, people for sure haven't stopped reading books. But I'm not that sure about the paper ones.
By comparison, video games are in their infancy. We've been at it for only a few short decades, and having the audience directly involved with the narrative is a radical shift from what we had before. We're looking at a new art form finding its identity.
Right now the industry is drowing in AAA games that stick to the cinematic style of storytelling (and "cinematic" is still used as praise for storytelling in games), but there's also lots of (mostly indie) games out there that are trying to push the boundaries. You have games like Braid, Brothers and Hades exploring how to strongly bind narrative and game mechanics together. You have games like the first Bioshock, which abuse your understanding of genre conventions. You have games like Return of the Obra Dinn doing amazing work with non-linear storytelling.
It's a good time to be into video game storytelling.
Video games are in a weird place because they arguably reached maturity of design with 1985’s Super Mario Bros. But as wonderful as SMB is, it doesn’t mean anything or have anything to say: it is just the first game to truly nail 2d platformer mechanics to a transcendent degree. Indeed, as the OP mentioned, the best video games seem to be able to do as of yet with respect to depth of meaning is the equivalent of a mid-grade zombie film (The Last of Us), and the industry is such a grind that the writers burn out before really developing their craft. Maybe video games will eventually bring a depth of meaning and insight equivalent to their refinement of play mechanics, but they’re not there yet.
His own attempt was to make AI that writes the story as it interacts with the player, but lastest blog entries of his suggest he is unsure if that path that took him many years (he started the attempt in 1992 I think?) was the right one.
But I also feel like the author misunderstands how the medium can elevate a story:
"Old mans Journey" was critized for having too simple puzzles, but it is not a puzzle game. It's a story, where a few simple puzzles gives you time to interact with the landscape and soak up the atmosphere, which enhances the impact of the worldless storytelling between levels.
It's a simple, nothing new story, made extremely impactful through the medium.
I also felt the story in Celeste was very impactful, even though it probably would make for a boring movie. But I struggled as Madelein as she conquered the mountain and her fears, and that struggle primed me to feel her struggle through the sparse dialogue.
You have to play to the strengths of the medium. The less defined the story is the more freedom players have. It's a design tradeoff that makes stories in games different, and they should be judged based on these different media constraints.
Consider Turandot. The story is bad to the point of being objectionable, and whatever is left verges on gibber. And yet, without it, a song like Ho una casa nell'Honan is lessened because there has to be at least some reason to care about why this guy has a house in what sounds like a badly corrupted pronunciation of Yunnan.
You can still have better and worse stories withing given medium, and you can compare them between media if you insist, but you have to separate the inherent trade-offs from real quality differences.
I agree that it can, but many (especially AAA) video games try to imitate film, rather than using the strengths of the medium.
This is why I hate cutscenes. I'm sitting here with a controller in my hands, ready to do something fun, and you're going to make me sit and watch some expository dialog instead? Where the voice acting, animation and writing are all below movie standards?
This question hints at how well gameplay and story interact which each other. In most action games, they barely interact at all.
(Also, as interactive experiences, games just are not necessarily dependent on having a story, as the article points out. If the experience is good enough, a story isn't really necessary. Alien Isolation doesn't have much of a story, but visceral, devastating gameplay. Bethesda games generally have poor stories, but it doesn't really matter because the gameplay is open ended enough that everyone can just make their own story inside the game. Online games don't have a story, or some thin veneer to put on a loading screen; they don't need that, because the people are here solely for the gameplay experience.)
This is kind of a funny comparison, because the first Call of Duty game was practically a string of set-piece action scenes, and sometimes plot lines, that were very obviously lifted from popular WWII war movies from the prior few years. IMO—and I doubt this is an uncommon sentiment among people who played it—those were also easily the best parts of the game.
I think "Life is strange" is a good example of what can happen when the writing is strong combined with a nice, easygoing gameplay that takes you through the story. The only AAA game that I bought was "The Witcher 3" precisely for the back story, but after 5-10h of playing it just felt so repetitive that I gave up on it. I am likely in a minority but I'd take strong writing over graphics, physics and other elements of a game any day.
I went through the same thing with Witcher 3, but I tried again and once I got past the initial Baron storyline the game really hit its stride. That game has so many mini-stories that you can play for 100 hours and still have some interesting stories to engage with. I don't think I've played any game before or since with that many storylines.
- Deponia
- The Detail
- State of Mind
- Black Mirror II
- The Dark Eye: Chains of Satinav
- Disturbed
- Earthshine
- Edge of Reality
- Edna & Harvey: Harvey's New Eyes
- Fighting Fantasy Classics
- The Forest of Doom
- Jericho's Prophecies
- Memoria
- Mirt. Tales of the Cold Land
- Scarlet Hollow - Episode 1
- Agatha Christie - The ABC Murders
- Life is Strange
- Life is Strange: Before the Storm
- The Lion's Song
- Misadventures of Laura Silver
- Omen Exitio: Plague
- Syberia
- Syberia II
- Wonderlust - Primordia
- Strangeland
- Machinarium - The Last Door
- Gemini Rue
- Resonance
- Whispers of a MachineIf you haven't gotten through the 1st act, I'd recommend giving it another try. (After each major act, there's usually a narrated story board scene, where you see how some of the choices you made effect the outcome, for good or bad.)
I'd also recommend ignoring the side quests initially and just progress along the main quest-line. It will move you into the meatier part of the story pretty quickly that way.
(Once the story hooked me, then I wanted to spend more time in the world doing the side quests.)
The Last of Us Part II spoils you even further, there isn’t anything else close to the level of detail and story telling that Naugthy Dog has done here.
“It’s a rollercoaster thrill ride which lasts like 20 hours and leaves you scarred for the rest of your days. 10/10”
FYI HBO and creators of Chernobyl have picked up The Last of Us and are filming 10 episode series right now with a bigger budget than Game of Thrones.
How can you compare a 2 hour narrative with a 10-100 hour narrative?
This article grossly overgeneralizes stories in games and ignores the unique storytelling device that is a "game".
A good book doesn't necessarily make for a good movie and a good movie doesn't necessarily make for a good game (and the other way around, as we've seen over and over again).
This article seems like a self-congratulating piece by an indie developer for being an indie developer.
Good for you. That doesn't mean AAA studios can't make a good game story, same as big budget movies can have a compelling story.
> How can you compare a 2 hour narrative with a 10-100 hour narrative?
Not only the length makes video game stories different. Another huge difference is that in video games you actually get to be the character(s). You don’t just passively experience the story like in a movie or a book, you’re an active part of it. Even better: you can have the player make meaningful choices that affect the plot, which is something unique to games as a medium.
The author would probably think I'm a lunatic for it, but I consider the original Call of Duty: Modern Warfare trilogy to have a good story. I thoroughly enjoyed it, and unlike with other shooters, and even though it followed multiple characters simultaneously, I was able to suspend disbelief enough to experience it as if it was my story, my world.
The writing of CoD: MW 1-3 would probably be considered a passable military fiction by most critic, if even that. But I bring this particular example up, instead of say Mass Effect trilogy, to highlight the unique aspect of videogames: it can make you live through a story, which neither books nor movies can. It's a distinct kind of experience.
SOMA is a great example of this; It could maybe also work as a movie or book, but the FPS perspective fits the story and narrative so good that it elevates the whole thing to its own unique experience.
A VR version could turn this to 11, but sadly any work on that seems to have fizzled out.
Its act dont show in games.
Alot of the traditional writers never grasp, that the game mechanics are the plot and story.
In SSX, they broke that wall by referring to the characters as riders we identify with, explicitly challenging the idea of them being characters we pretend to become.
Other titles do that, but that was the first one I noticed the distinction made in an overt way.
People are all over the place on this too.
Personally, I have seen and played games with 100 hours of playtime - none had a story/narrative of 100 hours (edit: most of it was "filler" aka gameplay without much narrative/story).
I also agree with many parts of the article regarding bad stories overall, despite playing some games with good stories - or stories I felt were good when I had little exposure to video game stories.
As you imply, there are many games whose brief summary might sound weird, cheesy or cliche but are actually very well crafted story experiences when played. For me, some would be: Life is Strange, Soma, Deus Ex, Human Revolution, Alpha Centauri, Alan Wake, Control, Quantum Break and Detroit Become Human.
Then there are the Soul Reaver games with middling stories but whose written dialogue and delivery easily put them at the level of great literature for me.
Storywise, some of the author's games would not be out of place if ranked highly amongst such a list. It's like Berkson's paradox, his studio has had staying power but you certainly couldn't point to graphics or unique game mechanics as explanations for why.
>This article seems like a self-congratulating piece
I'd go as far as to argue the author undersells his abilities. His RPG world building and stories are a great deal more entertaining if compared to many fantasy books.
> That doesn't mean AAA studios can't make a good game story,
They could but rarely do. Meanwhile, the majority of those few attempts get workshopped to death (it's easy to tell when a game with potential got derailed in this way). The author isn't saying good game stories don't exist, only that they're rare and most often from smaller studios.
Larger numbers are better? Let's take as an example the criticaly acclaimed Ghost of Tsushima. If you ask me, it could have been half as long and exactly as good if not better. There was too much identical padding to reach your 100 hour "narrative".
The standard is so low is not necessarily a bad thing. Most of the games are bad, but people will try random things to improve storytelling, and we'll see games with great stories like Planescape: Torment or Disco Elysium in the future, or even better.
Movies, on the other hand, where there are so many established patterns - people tend to abuse them because 1) they don't want to take the risk to make something subpar 2) it's easier. They were so many terrible movies in the last centuries, but there are so many great movies as well. The golden era of movies has passed, but for games, it's yet to come.
There are in fact patterns that could be found in great games, but not as widespread as Hollywood cliches, for example:
1. Planescape: Torment, Witcher 1/2: Amnesia. It allows no assumption of prior knowledge of the protagonist, making the player discover the world, the past, and even the protagonist himself/herself incrementally with himself/herself. Witcher 3 on the contrary, makes me feel less connected because the protagonist knows many characters that I don't know like Dijkstra even though I played through the first two games.
2. Baldur's Gate 2, Pillar of Eternity: Meet the villain in EVERY chapter, and make it feel like watching Steve Jobs at Apple launch events. This gives the player a clear goal, and a villain that can keep all the game plots together instead of being too random and sloppy.
3. Original Sin 2, Baldur's Gate 3: Lock the protagonist with a magical shackle, put a parasite in the protagonist's head, this also gives the player a clear goal, but without spoiling who the villain is (DoS2 is THAT surprising, I bet it might be the same in BG3).
Actually, good games can be established on these patterns, until everyone started to abuse them.
- The Last of Us 1 & 2 ( Must play )
- RDR 1&2. ( 2 is must play )
- GTA IV - Mafia 2
- A Plague Tale: Innocence ( must play )
- Metro series.
- Inside
- Witcher 3
- A Way out ( needs 2 player )
- Night in the woods
- Breath of the Wild ( if you own a switch )
- Undertale
- The whole Walking Dead series by TellTale. ( Similar theme of Last of Us )
- Life is strange. ( People say it has a clichéd story but I loved it )
- Detroit become human.
- Yakuza Series
- Sleeping dogs ( A man who never eats pork buns is never a whole man! )
- GoW (2018) ( PlayStation exclusive )
- Uncharted series especially Uncharted 4. ( PS exclusive but its coming to PC soon )
- Horizon Zero Dawn
- Nier Automata
- Subnautica
- Firewatch
- Alan Wake.
- Fallout (especially New Vegas)
- Dishonored series
- Pathologic 2.
- Disco Elysium.
Appreciate the suggestions! Will have to take a look at the few that I haven't yet.
From telltale, I enjoyed also tales from the borderland.
I guess the list should also contain a lot of eastern RPGs. Final Fantasy (e.g. the FF7 remake) and similar titles have a lot of story.
Life is strange part 2 was a huge disappoinment. There is a subpar story in the game, and literally zero gameplay (click a button every 5 minutes - without exageration). Probably more for people who are interested in the atmosphere of the game than anything else.
Arguably one of the largest story worlds of all. Almost endless lore and a game which resolves around story telling.
I'd disagree with Undertale, which is the only one on your list I have played, although I didn't make it far (a few others you mention are on my list already). Of course, there is always quite a bit of personal taste involved in such things.
My list would be something like:
-RiME
-Falcom's Trails series
-My Brother Rabbit
-Rakuen
-Röki
-Higurashi When They Cry Hou
-King of Dragon Pass/Six Ages (particularly the mythology parts)
Maybe also to a lesser degree:
-Amnesia: Memories
-London Detective Mysteria
-To The Moon
Of these, RiME and My Brother Rabbit have no text but still tell a story very well IMO while Falcom's games have tons of text (more than any individual book) and cut some corners in the story but do a lot of things well and you get to interact with a lot of different characters and hear their perspective on the world.
Higurashi When They Cry Hou was IMO unquestionably the best written of them all (which makes sense as mentioned in another thread it is a book with sound not an interactive game), although I liked it least since I don't like horror but didn't realize it is a horror game.
For Fossil Echo and The Journey Down I thought the storytelling was particularly good in how it combines video with the game but the story itself was not all that good and the games themselves were disappointing IMO. I think I would put The Longest Journey in a similar category also (and likely Sibera, although I've only played a bit of it).
The main quest of Skyrim takes 30 hours, but I'm sure that most people played way more than that. Same thing with games like Far Cry, you can rush the main story, or you can take your time and do way more things. I think that makes games a media where often you don't follow a story but engage with a world. Those are two very different things. Even in linear "walking simulators", there are usually tons of optional stuff.
The equivalent would be to have a movie or book that dynamically react to you, and that doesn't really exists, at least not as well as how games do it.
On the other hand, the experience of reading a book and imagining all the visual parts, or sitting there watching a movie are also very unique, and can't be filled by other medias.
This does exist and is called interactive fiction, FWIW. I do agree however it isn’t as clearly reactive to the consumer as a video game (you can turn on a dime in a video game, but in interactive fiction you don’t get such a granular level of control in how you interact).
There's also the whole genre of visual novels, mostly from Japan. I'm not sure if they are more games, books or interactive fiction.
The more effort you make to integrate player actions, the less resources you have to make a compelling story. In the most obvious case: story branching, you have double the work for each branch, some of them may be hard to make interesting.
Some Japanese visual novels may have great stories, but they are games in name only. For example the "when they cry" series are literally visual novels (or sound novels as they like to call them), there are zero gameplay elements, and no branching, you are basically reading a book with a few illustrations and (very good) background music.
On the other side, some games focus so much on action that the only goal of the story is to tell you who the bad guys are and not get in the way of shooting them.
That's very true, you don't have infinite resources.
> Some Japanese visual novels may have great stories, but they are games in name only. For example the "when they cry" series are literally visual novels (or sound novels as they like to call them), there are zero gameplay elements, and no branching, you are basically reading a book with a few illustrations and (very good) background music.
True, but you also have others like Hollow Ataraxia where you have way more gameplay. Still not as much as a "classic" game, especially these days, but this wouldn't be possible in another format, which I think is key. Same thing with the when they cry series, the music is very important and they wouldn't work as well as book.
Unfortunately most of the current audience for games (particularly the vocal part) are people that were attracted by these aspects. I was definitely attracted by the technical feat/ingenious gizmo aspect. If you look at the way games have traditionally been reviewed, you can see that this aspect is incredibly important. These people tend to get upset at articles like this and overreact by claiming that the art aspects of their favourite games are better than they actually are.
That said, there are still the green shoots of an incredible artistic medium here and there. I am always on the lookout for things, however crude/I'm-14-and-this-is-deep they are, if they could only have been done in games.
Uncharted is a decent action adventure, probably as good as something like Jurassic World, but it could have been done in film.
Something like Journey, Her Story, Brothers etc, have aspects that could only have been done in games. They make (fairly crude) artistic points, in an intrinsically interactive way.
I emphatically disagree. Good story is what I'm after. Good story is what I've gotten. (Undertale, the Nier games, even Ocarina of Time has a very unique story-telling experience).
A game can tell a different type of story than a book or a movie - these stories are interactive, and involve an element of meta-narrative story-telling. What was that fight like? What was that choice like? Did the choice _feel_ meaningful? The story is told through these mechanisms rather than simply words on a page.
I very much agree that many players come to games for a carnal feeling. A release that comes from the ticking of boxes or completion of objectives, or the satisfaction from a skilled execution.
But these elements as well can contribute to a narrative experience (ex Undertale).
Really disagree with this article. Reminds me of those historical articles about movies being a worse version of the theatre and opera (which they were).
China seems to be the only country that still has some original and compelling new games and stories being produced.
As a counterexample to the first part, check out Nier Automata. One of the most original and compelling games I've played in recent years.
Bright Memory Infinite is a new game from China that's coming out in November, the demo is incredible and I'm excited. Gujian3 is an open-world action rpg, similar to Nier but with a xianxia theme, it's pretty good. Amazing Cultivation Simulator is a Rimworld clone with a lot of fun features. Path of Wuxia is a very original and fun martial-arts-school/dating-sim/srpg with a lot of replayability (only fan-translated for now, but an official english translation is slated for when it comes out of early access).
I think at first I played Nier Automata mainly for the mechanics. The worldbuilding and backstory take a while to pick up steam. But once it gets going, it has some unique and interesting ideas. I still feel they could have gone a lot deeper with a lot of things though. For example, the idea that robots would start their own religion seemed intriguing, but in the end they didn't really do much with it. Still very enjoyable and surprisingly a lot of food for thought.
Thanks for the suggestions, I'll check them out!
Just off the top of my head, I remember being intrigued by the robots-trying-to-be-human thing, and how consistent they were with the fact that you're an android. For example, removing your OS chip actually killed you, which is one of the 26 possible endings iirk. That and the dynamic combat and the smooth mix of different genres were enough to keep me going.
You were unironically filtered. The game does name drop a lot philosophers, but it's meant to contextualize, not as part of the game's themes. Hell, the game doesn't even care about the "humans and robots aren't actually so different" question. I don't want to write a whole essay, so I'll just say that Automata is probably the best existentialist story written this decade, with a lot of subtle details, some _great_ acting, and melding of story and gameplay that has not even been attempted elsewhere. It is unique, and uniquely excellent, beyond the point where it can just be described as "a fantastic game". Doom 2016 is a fantastic game. Nier Automata is a game I've had as much fun thinking and writing about as I had playing it.
It is just absurd to waste more then 2 hours on something like that.
The games that had the biggest impact on me were adventure games and role playing games that had deep stories written by people who knew how to blend intrigue and humor into an enjoyable experience of you living in the shoes of the main character. I play games without good narratives, but they have to be much better games to compensate, as a good story can make me ignore some pretty horrible mechanics. (I also play certain classes of puzzle and rhythm games where story is irrelevant, but those are a totally differently head space and don't compete for my time with other games.)
Video games are in a similar position, in which they are evaluated on 'story', which is how one evaluates movies.
once we realize video games are not movies in terms of what effect they are supposed to produce, we will to be able to evaluate them on their own terms
For example, maybe what kind of beauty we should seek to maximize in a video game isnt the story, but the act of agency in the player as shaped by the game's rules or constraints. With that idea, it is the player's performance that is most beautiful, not the story.
Really appreciate your interest! Your experience is illuminating, and not unexpected.
Edit: to explain a touch more - I liked the story and its characters more, and even though I played it over 2 years ago I still remember the story pretty well. Breaking bad had a couple interesting points but I couldn't tell you what happened between seasons or really much outside of the main points.
Of course I may be entirely wrong, it's been some time, but I remember both leaving a similar impression on me.
Breaking Bad is one of those shows that gets better with every season (the Metacritic score goes 73 → 84 → 89 → 96 → 99 from season 1 to season 5). The first season wasn't really anything special but it's gangbusters by the end.
And it wasn't really well received at the time either, but it was a way of handling romance without the awkward cut-scenes that existed at the time. They only briefly showed on screen and IIRC weren't accessible later. It wasn't really collectable in the sense of collect-a-thon games like Mario Odyssey, either. Out of context it sounds horrible, in context it's a bit of a nonsensical addition.
They were going after a "french postcard" feel and it just didn't work that way. Possibly because people aren't as familiar with what they were referencing.
Video games will never do drama as well as theatre or film, because we can't see into the actors souls - video game stories are puppet theatre
Edit: thinking about this some more, I think I might be wrong - there are many animated films that I've found emotionally moving and involving that don't have human actors (Ratatouille for example!)
- Bastion
- The Stanley Parable
- Bioshock Infinite
- The Elder Scrolls series
- GTA: V
- Control
- Sam and Max
Sure this isn’t high art, but often is deeply compelling regardless. The possibilities of the medium are still yet to be fully explored.
Are there other titles I should look into?
Vampire: the Masquerade – Bloodlines, with its infamously janky combat but incredibly memorable characters and some superb storytelling moments. Unfortunately, the third-act degeneration is very much a thing here as well.
The original Deus Ex, again with rather janky combat and emphasis on stealth and nonviolent problem-solving. Exploration and finding out more about the world is much more rewarding than killing enemies. But the third act… Uh, I think I’m starting to repeat myself here :(
And if you delve deep into literary theory itself; "stories" do not exist without its form. This dichotmoy is frankly quite misleading.
I personally prefer to use another vantage point for examining "video games" borrowed from the strucuralists: What is the difference (to other games)?
This quote from Viktor Shklovsky, a Russian Formalist, can be easily translated to the art form of "video games":
"And so, in order to return sensation to our limbs, in order to make us feel objects, to make a stone feel stony, man has been given the tool of art. The purpose of art, then, is to lead us to a knowledge of a thing through the organ of sight instead of recognition. By "enstranging" objects and complicating form, the device of art makes perception long and "laborious." The perceptual process in art has a purpose all its own and ought to be extended to the fullest. Art is a means of experiencing the process of creativity. The artifact itself is quite unimportant."
Anyway, what I did for a while - not recently due to a lack of good targets - is watch Youtube "playthrough no commentary" videos (and with story-less gameplay parts heavily cut out). That's usually 4-6 hours of game movie.
The Last of Us was good, but the very top #1 for me as far as story goes - ignoring the game play completely - was Horizon Zero Dawn. One of many such game movies for this game: https://youtu.be/W6jbYfmQAG4
That story seemed to be good but kind of stupid and the same as always, completely predictable, you already know what happened when you see the start and it's a bit stupid and too far-fetched - that kind. Until it wasn't. Turned out it wasn't just well-made, when you find out what was really going on it was THE BEST.
Not only does it have two very different stories layered (three, if you count the present time story): One about what happened to earth and its people and one layered inside of two people, the MC and a woman in the past, with seemingly no connection, until we find out the opposite is the case.
Both story-parts actually had me crying. When I found out after about four hours what had actually happened on earth, it was a great emotional shock. Same with the ending, that used the connection between the MC and that person from the past.
Even the machines and their (animal) forms make sense, there is a good and IMO satisfying explanation.
The stories in this game and in a handful of others are much better than most movies.
If you are in the mood for something really dark, watch a game movie of "SOMA". Underwater survival. Earth is gone - a giant meteor made the surface into a fiery hell, the only survivors are some researchers in a deep ocean facility. Best small detail: They get the "uploading your brain into a computer simulation" right, see the very ending of that game which shows it one last time (TL;DW: As someone who knows neuroscience, the idea makes no sense anyway, but let's forget that and assume it makes sense. What will happen is you still stand there in front of the computer, wandering what happened, after the "upload". Because you still exist, and the copy is not you. It's a copy. You still die, there is no magical connection between you and your copy.)
This game surprised me so much, because I just picked it on a whim a short while ago. It is so much more than what the cover suggests.
A very emotional and impactful story, really looking forward what they do for the next chapter of her story.
There are some exceptions to this (Spec Ops: The Line comes to mind as a case where the gameplay actually fuels the story, and I also think I've heard good things about Two Brothers in this respect too) but these are the exception, not the rule.
I watched people play it to the end - mostly. I played it when it came out on PC - never completed it; the combat didn’t work for me.
Personally I think it has a cool sci-fi premise but that’s it. I found the characters … stiff, shallow, and pretty cliché. Aloy is yet another messianic player character that we have seen a billion times. Apart from the enigmatic main villain - which is yet another well worn trope - all the side characters feel pretty 2 dimensional.
I’m going to get skewered for saying this … but the story feels like it’s pandering to current social political trends - i.e. the obsession with diversity.
I don’t know why exactly the “diversity” in modern stories bug me so much but I never had a problem with Star Trek. Maybe it’s the egalitarian in me, modern stories seem to have an emphasis on differentiating people by their ethnicity and background while Star Trek promoted the view that all people regardless of ethnicity or background be treated as peers - where you stand on your own merits as an individual.
How so? I didn't get that feeling at all from Horizon Zero Dawn.
If someone told me HZD had an obsession with diversity I'd react with a standard "wat?". I do agree that some of the forced diversity in modern stories is annoying, mind you. I just didn't get that vibe from that one story.
How do you think HZD pandered to diversity? The main point that I have heard brought up is the wide variety of ethnicities in secondary/background characters, but IMO that is completely consistent with the game's setting and story. The game takes place in a world where human society has literally been reset and rebuilt from scratch, so you'd need to have the full variety of human kind for genetic diversity while at the same time all of the racial and ethnic prejudices that exist today would cease to exist unless the AI was trained to preserve them (it wasn't). Naturally the new world would see new prejudices arise (people are still people after all), and the game does attempt to portray this.
That’s true but I can’t help but feel it’s deliberately written this way to score points.
> The default video game plot is, 'See that guy over there? That guy is bad. Kill that guy.' If your plot is anything different, you're 99% of the way to having a better story.
I don't think the structure of the story needs to be more complex than that to be good. It can be, but neither complexity, nor novelty, nor non-linearity are what makes stories good. The stuff he dismisses as being of limited value (good dialog and interesting worlds) are extremely important. I'd add characterization to that. But those things are, to lots of people, all equally as important as structure in making a story meaningful.
Seems like the writer is just hating AAA games
But I'm also curious what zombie movies does this guy watch that have a so so much better story than TLoU
He's not alone. But I don't hate them, they bore me to tears. Same goes for the current Hollywood blockbusters.
> But I'm also curious what zombie movies does this guy watch that have a so so much better story than TLoU
Zombieland :)
If it was created today, it’d be a generic high fantasy work.
Blame everyone else who came after Tolkien.
There's a borges fake essay on exactly this topic: Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote
It does not fit other points either. It does not uses meme humor. It does not allow you to ignore the story. It has individual human voice.
It does not fit the thing article is complaining about at all.
The whole book is as much about the fellowship's quest than the backstory of the whole world and that's what got me in when reading it. It's not about what's happening to our heroes but what happened to others before.
FPS? All the story I need is the 'end condition' (basically what do I have to do to win this level), and I can play. "reach point X", "detonate bomb", "kill everyone".... sure.
Strategy games? Same... kill everyone, destroy base, done.
But for example, point and click adventures with a shitty story? Totally unplayable for me.
Entirely plausible and tragic.
You can make many more interesting games if you assume everywhere that the player cares about the story. Same as how you can make more interesting gameplay if you know the player wants an interesting challenge and always plays on hard, like in Dark Souls. But ultimately most people don't want to challenge themselves, regardless if it is trying to remember a lot of story content or practicing a boss fight.
Looks like they covered FF7.
It's ridiculous how The Last Sovereign, a lewd game made with RPG Maker is one of the few turn based games that got story and turn-based combat right.
Space Invaders, Pacman, Mario, Tetris are games that single-handedly defined an entire generation of games. No story to be found.
I think the OP is perfectly on point. A good story demands an authorial voice, and most games can't have (or won't bother with) that.
Of course, it can fail too, but in my humble opinion it is one of the best approach to game design.
"Story in a game is like a story in a porn movie. It's expected to be there, but it's not that important."
The guy is so deep in code engineering that sometimes other, more nuanced, details can be seemingly totally lost on him.
Some games focus on mechanical skills or rules akin to a sport or boardgame, others are an interactive narrative experience. This interactive experience can further be broken down into games that tell you what is happening (cinema), and games that let you make your own story (tabletop RPG).
So while there is a lot of crossover and blurred lines, of these types of game, only one type really needs a well written or scripted story to achieve its goals. We have many successful games with no story due to this, but other games wouldn't have succeeded without one.
Nowadays you can have the 50 year old dad spending his quality time in bed next to his wife blasting enemies with the teenage/student kids doing the same.
With another generation it will be the folks in retirement homes too.
With music you get stuck on the stuff you discovered and made your own. Into punk? Probably born way back in the 60s. Techno? 70s.
Will it be the same with games? The guy in the retirement home still playing World of Warcraft? Or that copy of Diablo that came out in 2003?
Story in video games therefore has to be good enough to not just last a week or a summer, but a lifetime.
I don't listen to particular genres of music or music from a particular period of time.
As for gaming, I would rather watch a film, read a book, go outside, watch a play, meet people, do something else, because I don't have much free time and gaming is not a priority.
I would probably play some games if I would have more free time.
As a matter of fact I worked for 7 years as a game programmer and during that period I never played other games than our own stuff and some stuff from the competition where we wanted to understand some mechanics.
Or maybe games have always appealed to nerds of all ages, but what happened in the 90s is they began to appeal to normie children too, and as you point out those normie kids continued to play them when they became normie adults.
Master of Magic gets a new life with bugfix/balance patches and addons. It's from 1993.
Also, Trails in the Sky (and the trails series in general) have a pretty solid story.
Curated stories are fragile and less impactful and personal than that interwoven serandipity we navigate by connecting experiences and imbuing them with prepotent engaged meaning viscerally entagling choronological coincidences with the synchronicity of our own personal journey.
There may only be a few archetypal stories, but each heroes journey if it is transformative in the Jungian sense of individuation is a means of self discovering growth in a verdant simulation.
Like culture, myth, fairy tales and dreams video games are a mytho-poetic structure that can utterly envelope and transform us through the power of beauty, harmony, dissonance and engagement.
There is a lot to be said for the abstraction of pixel art in that it can let the imagination fill in the gaps and engage with the characters, suspending disbelief because there is room for the imaginative act to flourish and the self to identify more than the ultra realistic fully defined hyper realism of AAA games - near perfection is an uncanny valley, the shudder that prevents us being fully involved.
Video games are powerful when they engage the imagination, the stories are created by us, we are story tellers that is how we understand ourselves and game experiences are as rich and valid as any art form.
It's not a bang-bang-shooty game though.
It's like when you are under 15 and watching a movie where a character gets raped or another has an abortion. The reality will only hit you later in life and that story won't be as easy to watch.
It's like that episode from DS9 where Captain Sisko tells his son his writing is dull because his son doesn't know what he is writing about and Siskok encourages him to write about matters he knows.
Or in Good will Hunting, when the psychotherapist explains to Will something along the line of "you can deconstruct my psyche and analyze it but you don't know jack about it".
Likewise some games that were recently acclaimed for their approach to the subject (Celeste, Old man's journey, Sea of solitude) really fell dull to me.
Grinding against AI enemies is totally pointless (well at least until real "AI" akin to Alphago becomes popularized I guess). If I want to be challenged on skills and mental traits via gameplay, I play against other human players in multiplayer games (I don't do that either since this year, as it can ultimately be perceived as a repetitive timesink from which you get nothing new, once you reach a certain level in terms of ranking and of course can't go further by making it your full-time job).
Nowadays I pretty much just read visual novels https://vndb.org/, when not reading actual traditional books. I believe it's still a relatively niche genre in the west, though its popularity outside of Japan has been steadily growing in the last decade. There's truly no limit to the authors' creativity in the world of VN, and you get all sorts of thought-provoking and sometimes even life-changing experience (not an exaggeration, see reviews for the highest-rated VN of all time https://vndb.org/v92), which when delivered well cannot be replicated in any other medium.
PS: people say "nobody reads books anymore these days" all the time just like the author does, the validity of which I have always doubted. 100 years ago the literacy rate was much lower than it is nowadays. And even 30 or 40 years ago, it was unlikely that the vast majority of the populace were into serious reading instead of more straightforward pasttime such as TV or just a day out on the beach. Reading has always been a relatively minority hobby and has probably already managed to become more popular (especially with the proliferation of audiobooks and other technologies), instead of declining.
I don't play much these days, but I've realised what I really want is not necessarily a AAA voice cast, gigabytes of lore, plot twists, or what hundreds of users might call a great story. I just want atmosphere: a coherent, impossible to explain sense of being. There are games with massive issues that have great atmosphere and vice versa.
I'd argue that games are much better positioned to offer this than story. It's actually their main strength and what makes much more sense to evaluate.
Outer Wilds.
Hands down one of my top games of all time, a total sleeper. But has more heart than any AAA title I’ve ever played.
If you haven’t tried it, super highly recommend.
In literature you have to do two things: tell a story and do it in a pleasant way. If you fail at telling the story, you fail at it.
Games have much more to them than just telling a story. You have mechanics, you have visuals. It is interactive and it has outcomes.
To not fail a game you have to give player satisfaction.
It would be nice to think of all of the things that might appeal to players, the story being just one thing among lots of others.
If story would be the only important thing then people would play lots of text based games but they do not.
The bad thing is that most of the times players get what designers think is a good game, not what they actually think it is a good game.
I’d like to submit the Marathon series of video games on how to integrate story into a game without needing to change virtually any gameplay or include cutscenes. That the story is incredibly intelligent is just bonus. For those unfamiliar, it includes AI mental illness, AIs getting molested, subjugated alien races, infinite alternative timelines, and Lovecraftian beings. It might have been recognized as a better Doom if it wasn’t doomed to be a Mac-exclusive game series in the early 90s.
Too bad Bulletstorm has no jumping so I did not buy it.
In any case, even that's too much story for me. Look what happened with Doom. The 2016 game was pure. It knew what it was and ended that nonsense right away. Doom Eternal, on the other hand, had to feature a story, a castle, idiotic cut scenes and what not. Dear god. Just stop it.
The way the Heart Machine decided to tell it (images only) still amazes me. It totally opened interpretation for the players.
And you didn't have to click through tons of dialogs to dive into the lore.
First thing that comes to mind if Planescape Torment but oddly I don't really remember much details.
Trying to remember if any videogame has actually moved me in a way some book or film did and, frankly, I don't think so.
Those games had a different playability, puzzle-solving approach, and their plot was thicker.
Doesnt compute. Not only the above particular tidbit about Wow is his own personal perception, but also the longer you game, the more you get bored of 'pew pew' and you want something that actually is memorable.
Otherwise things happened quest objectives lit up and I think Arthas married Thrall or something.
FFXIV shows how much many players want to care.
Some of my favorite story-based experiences in gaming were in an MMO (The Secret World).
But to do that you need the main story set well which WoW has lacked since post-Arthas.
I dont care about Wow's story, I didnt even pay attention to the quests or cinematics, yet even i can count 40-50% of the chronology. Likewise many people on my server.
Stories do not need to be good for a video game to sell. These days, the game doesn't even need to be original, you can just sell a remake or a remaster and print more money.
Stories aren't even a substantial factor for maximising sales. Paid DLCs are often self-contained and not necessarily even based on the story.
There is a reason why every game released now is a "cinematic" title with a generic bad story and most likely with online multiplayer (co-op and/or PvP) and microtransactions for player customisations.
These games have the "breathtaking cutscenes" and "next-gen visuals" to give game review websites their headlines (game review sites are basically as crooked as financial ratings agencies) and then the game prints money with initial cost, cost of paid DLC, and the cost to give your character flashier armor than the other guy.
In the beginning, people developed games with passion. They focused on make the game fun to play, rewarding to play. We didn't know the best ways to do things but we tried.
Games were difficult because overcoming a thumb shredding fight is satisfying, figuring out an obscure puzzle is satisfying.
But when video game publishers etc got big enough, they were able to cherrypick what they published, so naturally they go for whatever will generate the most revenue with the least risk.
This means games are easier, so more people will play them and fewer people will give up on them.
Games don't have puzzles that aren't solvable in seconds because this represents a distraction from the combat which some research has likely shown to give the general population more pleasure than anything else.
And games don't try very hard at stories because it probably costs a lot to come up with a good story and a good story will likely involve game segments that are a little harder to put together than the generic linear levels the publishers had in mind.
Publishers probably also figure it's safer to keep things basic in terms of story because they have data to show that people bought into and/or enjoyed a story 85% similar in the past.
And they can just add DLC and remake/remaster the game down the line and flesh the lore out. Hell, they can just rely on the community to maintain the game on a long enough time scale.
Stories in video games are bad for the same reason most movies these days are bad and samey. Money dictates everything on a large corporate level and video game production has reached that scale.
You still get indie devs who can go off the beaten path, but I feel like 70% of these indie endeavours result in a 2D platforming/metroidvania game because it's easy to make. Which is fine but one could argue that this results in some samey stories.
There are obviously other indie games that are good and different but it's still rare to see a great story -- the dev may not care much about the story, they have less time to write a good or original story because the game is likely their side-project, or hell maybe they just suck at stories.
ultimately the story isn't super important to whether a game is enjoyable to play. it is a factor to whether the game is fondly remembered, and to whether it moves/touches people.
what matters is passion, artistry, soul. hard to define, but basically if something is made with every effort to be perfect, to realise a vision, and to be made enjoyable and fun to play, regardless of cost-efficiency to some corporate timeline, it has a chance of being a great game. if it has a great story, even better, it can have 10/10.
I don't care what the graphics are like, I don't need to see the pores on a characters face or their nostril hairs. far too much time is put into this aspect of games.
I care about whether the game is fun, whether it's all but addictive to play again. is it challenging? do I feel good when I become skilful enough to overcome challenges? how the hell do I get out of this room? did I seriously just have to read through books I luckily coincidentally own to find the solution to this problem?
then comes the story -- and to be honest, this is mostly because there's par for the course. if it's really bad, like horror channel b-movie bad, then there it makes a game struggle to stick. but things like good execution and quality voice acting can help recover a mediocre or unoriginal story.
I value originality, I think I am just a little bit too jaded to expect it from games or indeed any media at this point -- it's nice when it happens, but if it doesn't, as long as it's done well and there's passion, as long as the game tries and is fun to play, well made, I'm not gonna hate on it for having not-shakespeare story.
but there's a threshold, like I said. Halo is a good example of a shooter with a story that is pretty familiar prima facie, but it earned a pass by being fun to play and the story has more interesting features than immediately meet the eye.
metal gear solid, the PSX gsme -- a very familiar plot, certainly for a while into the game anyway, but the execution and storytelling was so good you didn't care.
The whole article feels like OP is upset about something behind the scenes and just had to rumble about it
Maybe it's even sarcasm, you never know nowdays
The author might have a negative take on things and you might not like the article but to brand the article as "incredibly toxic" is a bit of a hyperbole.
Jeff is irreverent and highly opinionated but absolutely not “holier than thou.” He knows his games are ugly and played only by a tiny niche. The only thing he can remotely claim to be better at than most people is running a video game studio that manages to support his small household.
Also the title ("truths") implies there is no room for negotiation
And rants are fine, but trying to present it as the profound observations of a veteran with 20 something years of wisdom that shits on everyone's favourites without many arguments ("The Last of Us [...] having a story as good as a medium-quality zombie movie" is not an argument) comes of as toxic.
The author made a lot of pithy statements, but the article feels strangely lack of substance. There's little evidence or elaboration. Just statement after statement, with a lot of repetitiveness.
And the writing. Paragraphs like these:
> Now let's be clear. I'm not a great fantasy writer. If I was, I'd be writing books nobody buys because nobody buys books anymore. Still, as a writer I'm simply competent. Which, by video games standards, makes me awesome. Overall, I'm good enough that people give me money, and that is sufficient.
...... are just strange, and made me grimace. He's quite plainly saying, that he's mediocre, but because everyone else is bad, he's great.
And what's with the "nobody buys books anymore"? Plenty of people do.
> Good story isn't what gamers are after. Which is good, because they ain't gettin' it.
While not having played many games, I remember some GBA games having decent stories. They are not Charles Dickens level literature, but comparable to good short stories, definitely worthy of "good writing".
---
I had expected much more---more substance, better writing---from a "successful" story writer of a game company.
Why is this bad thing to say? If he thinks this is true, then it is OK to say it. And earning money making games is actual achievement - most indie game makers are in financial loss and that is it.
Someone who make small profit is exactly people who can say the above.
I mean it's fine to like your own achievement. Nothing wrong with that.
But he's certainly not successful enough to be so cocky as to detract everyone else's work (and again, he did so without much evidence or elaboration).
And frankly, playing a game once is enough to give you right to criticism that game story. Playing a couple of popular games gives you right to comment on popular games stories.
"I am not too good and I am still succeeding because bar in this aspect is low" is incredibly fair thing to say. It might be too self depreciating for some people's taste, but we should not require everyone to brag and exaggerate own skills each time they want to comment on something.
Of course he has the right to comment on whatever he likes to. I’m not suggesting that anyone should take away his freedom of speech.
I was merely criticizing the quality of his criticism.
I also am not criticizing the first part of that single sentence (“I’m not great”). I find the paragraph in its entirety distasteful, when he said others are so bad that he was awesome.