Jonathan Blow on How Games Set Themselves Apart
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- Опубліковано 30 вер 2024
- Interview: • Eighteen thousand hour...
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Jonathan Blow on How Games Set Themselves Apart
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#jonathanblow #gamedev #webdevelopment #programming #games
Games are unique because during a walking cutscene moment when characters are talking about something heavy and important and emotional I can just turn right and start attacking a random rock, which will be totally ignored by everyone involved.
this dude asked all the questions in one breath
😂
I don't think game stories lack space for sophistication, I think there's a mix of poor space utilisation and gameplay/story conflict. And I don't buy the "missing details" argument, because animation is pretty much universally beloved, there's no shortage of excellent stories told through deliberately detail-lacking visuals, and indeed no shortage of awful live-action stuff.
The way I see it, stories give you two types of thing, characters and concepts. If you look at a synopsis for a book or movie, usually what you're going to see is either a description of a person or a description of a concept, sometimes with a splash of the other. Hunger Games is very concept focused - it's not really important who any of these people are, focus on this: what if some kids fought to the death? Romance stories are typically very character-focused - Jane is a junior librarian struggling with exactly three relatable daily life issues, Dave is her designated romantic interest. When a concept story is good, it's good because it thinks of some interesting ideas and then explores the meaning or reality of those ideas in a compelling way. When a character story is good, it's good because it thinks of some likeable, nuanced and potentially flawed characters, and then explores how those characters change in their interactions with other characters.
Video games do this too, they're about characters and concepts, but they have difficulties actually presenting either thing. Lots of video games present concepts, and lots of those concepts are genuinely good concepts. For just one example, Horizon Zero Dawn says "what if there were robot dinosaurs that were part of the ecosystem?". Superficially, it does this very well, you do get quite a good feeling that these machines are "organic" and have a natural place in the world. It ends up struggling as the game goes on because a good exploration of that concept would require either the ability to show the player a lot of philosophy or the ability to make drastic irreversible changes to the world and therefore gameplay. The latter is expensive, and the former is extremely difficult when the only words you can show the player are words of speech (dialogue or diary log). Books can completely upend the status quo with letters alone, no more resource-intensive than continuing on the current course. How does a video game dramatically change the world to explore concepts without spending a lot more money?
Lots of video games present characters, but here we reach a largely irreconcilable conflict between gameplay and story, especially in western games, which is that the player controls the main character, at minimum controls their decisions outside cutscenes, and in many cases is given superficial control over the character's dialogue personality too. It's virtually impossible to tell a good character story about an undefined character, and many games have undefined characters in the lead role. This impacts the NPCs too, because an NPC cannot develop off an undefined protagonist, but the vast majority of dialogue is going to be between NPC and undefined protagonist (in practice, mostly NPC infodumping at undefined protagonist). The best game characters usually result from strong decoupling of player character and player, but the more you decouple, the more that cutscenes feel at odds with gameplay, and the more likely the player is to skip them.
My untested theory is that the way you make a good game story is by not making a game story at all, it's by writing good music. Less facetiously, what you do is present characters and concepts in a way that means you don't have to explore them because the player will explore them in their imagination. That means finding the right player and priming them with the right inspiration and emotions. And the single best way to choose what emotion someone feels is by using music. I don't know how well this holds up for anyone else, but for me, I find myself criticising Skyrim's shallow setting a lot less when that nostalgic city theme is playing. And I consider Nier Automata's storyline and worldbuilding very good, even though when I break it down, it's pretty cheesy. Nier Automata just so happens to have an extremely good soundtrack. I also wonder exactly how much the japanese flute sounds of Ghost of Tsushima influences the fact it's one of the most immersive games I've ever played.
Why does the interviewer keep expanding on and answering his own question before giving the interviewed a chance to talk about it? Really disturbs the flow for me.
He likes to make himself seem very sophisticated but bc of the extreme aspy levels here, he wants to make it seem more important than it really is
We are talking about games
Not saving civilization or anything like that
Overimportance of trivialities is about to be treated
Luxury beliefs are about to go bankrupt
I have no idea why Jonathon blow keeps going on this guy’s show, he is such a clown
I never watched those interviews because of the interviewer, I couldn't just sit through his long-winded questions. Someone needs to make a version of those interviews with this dude cut out.
I listened to the whole interview and I never thought the interviewer was bad. If you’re going to complain at least offer construction criticism.
@@atcharaphunsanson7956 constructive criticism was given. Stop leading the questions so much and let the interviewee give their own thoughts.
Maybe one day Jonathan will play a Japanese game.
This is a thing I've been saying for a while about game plots. I regularly hear about how certain games have an amazing story but a basic TV series has a significantly better plot with better character development.
People get excited about a game having a 6/10 plot but then seriously bash games with 4-5/10 plots as if there is a huge difference between them.
I think he's really trying to say that a video game's strength is non-linear storytelling. Branching isn't non-linear, it's non-deterministically linear.
What I think he's touching on is how Dark Souls/Elden Ring have created a prototype such a method. It's shallow because it's just text, but there's far more potential for depth while being out of the way for players who are exclusively interested in gameplay.
I think he did say that
For the record, he isn't trying to say that. He also argues that not every "action" is a part of a "story", and that for non-linear storytelling, you cannot do what is done in normal stories. His example was foreshadowing.
IMO, he kinda doesn't care about "traditional" story that goes from book (even non linear one) to movie to videogame. He feels that games are something different altogether.
Others have noted that games tend to present scenarios over stories. The environmental storytelling method used by every dungeon crawler since the early D&D modules and the Zork series is a way of bounding the story in "sometime in this past this happened" while allowing the scenario in the present to develop freely. It's been reinvented a few times by newer games like the Souls series but it's all fundamentally the same thing: the player character is in a museum with exhibits, the gameplay just shuttles you from one exhibit to the next. The Witness is also of this type, although it's not trying for a tight narrative within the environment, either. This type of game can be made deeper, in essence, by introducing puzzles at a larger scale than is first obvious.
For example, in the first Jagged Alliance, you have a huge cast of mercenaries to hire for your team. At first, as any min/maxing gamer might, you might choose them just based on cost and stats. Then it turns out that you hired a mercenary who murders your other hires in the night. So the actual puzzle behind hiring involves selecting a mix of both the numeric stats and an appropriate personality. Achieving this kind of gameplay requires your players to fundamentally trust that *everything* in the game is meaningful to reaching the ending and isn't just "filler". That's what tends to go missing in the large productions, because they gravitate towards a checklist of fast food "play styles": the good dialogue, the evil dialogue. This kind of McStory ends up not communicating anything, since it says all of the choices are balanced and equally appropriate.
The most clever uses of branching story tend to come from the visual novel space, where time loops and hidden flags abound: knowing something will go wrong creates a motive to look for an alternative, thus, the second loop of the game makes that alternative appear, or changes the sequence of events, without any in-world machinery explaining why. Again, it presents a form of larger-scale puzzle design where the story is formulated through iterated scenarios.
What I think is often missing from the story discussion is other media that are not story-focused, but are compositional in nature. Illustrations, songs and poems are all compositional, but none of them require a plot, setting or characters. Literary constructions specific to prose fiction are just one facet of what the arts can do, and it's OK to fragment a story into something more episodic or with "missing pieces" when designing it towards interactivity.
tbh books will just always be a better storytelling medium and game stories only work because lots of people don't read books
@@JH-pe3roDS/BB/ER storytelling is more than just being in a museum. The plot itself is not knowing who you are and what’s the real purpose of your mission, and your choice is to follow the rails or to try to understand what’s really happening and make informed choices.
^^^ youtube viewers when an interviewer asks a more complicated question then "So Jon, where do you get your ideas from" VVV
Skip to 1:48 to shut the interviewer up.
one of the biggest problems is that the majority of time spent in a game is inherently not narrative, it's playing. in any other medium, be it movies, books, anime, or manga, it's narrative 100% of the time. depending on the genre that narrative can lean more towards entertainment, so you could argue that it has a lot of "entertainment" narrative and little "real" narrative, but even then, all of it is narrative. in a game, narrative is constantly interrupted and cut short by gameplay, and the gameplay takes up way more space than the narrative. it's impossible to provide an equal or superior narrative experience to other mediums as long as developers keep thinking of story moments and gameplay moments as separate things.
there are a lot of games that integrate these things well like Undertale, though this doesn't mean the story itself is super sophisticated or anything. it's just far better integrated with the gameplay as a holistic unit, which makes it make more sense for the story to exist, since it's inextricably dependent on the gameplay.
for most games with narratives, you could remove most of the gameplay and the story wouldn't suffer, and viceversa. so then, what is the meaning of putting those two together?
I’m not a huge fan of the game, but Half-Life is the only action game I can recall where the gameplay was the narrative. It’s not the only one of its kind, but it did it better than any other shooter that tried.
I wish I had the patience for RPGs.
@@FoxFavinger I was just about to mention Half-Life 2 making excellent use of environmental storytelling. 20 years later people are making videos about subtle details in the game and their implications for the world.
@@6IGNITION9 I’m playing the game for the first time in VR with the unofficial mod. The details from the base game are incredible. Nuanced physics should’ve become a trend.
i don't think many games need sophisticated stories.
for example one of my fav childhood games -- mirror's edge -- doesn't have a very good story, even for a game. but this game always will be one of best games in my book, because of good action and of carefully crafted atmosphere of Fukuyama's "end of history".
and some games, like strategies, survival, sandbox, puzzles, Factorio-like ones, etc don't need a story at all.
I think this is his main argument as well, that games excel in many other areas, it just isn't storytelling. The point is that putting your linear story in a game makes the story less sophisticated and interesting. People seem to confuse sophistication and inventiveness with emotional resonance, which I wouldn't say is the same. It's actually kind of easy to get people into being emotionally moved - cinematic music, decent lighting, somebody dies or some tragic thing happens etc. We've figured this stuff out. Even very simple things can resonate strongly with most people.
I remember killing a trader in Fallout 4 by accident, then went to his hut and saw it was decorated with pictures of cats. That's was somehow the most intense sadness I've ever felt during the 200 hrs I played that game. And it was a complete accident, nobody designed that interaction.
Actors enjoy plays with scripts and some enjoy improv. I've always found games occupy this same space where the "linear" story driven games are plays with scripts and there's nothing wrong with that, but some people only wanna improv.
But yeah, we're still kind of in the "highschool play" territory of sophistication in most games. 😂
Gravity's Rainbow is a really good book.
As someone who grew up ravenously consuming books of all kinds, I just couldn't get immersed in the simplistic and superficial stories presented in games when I was old enough to be able to afford a computer that could run half decent games (this is pre-internet folks ;)). Games don't compete with real stories in novels. There's no comparison. The human imagination is able to generate immeasurably more detailed and immersive worlds than is possible in a computer game. Games engage a different part of the brain, exploring, problem solving etc. It's not just about the story.
its easy to have a billion ideas in a book where all you need to worry about is writing stuff down. in a video game people arent trying to read novels, first of all. never mind all the graphics and music and stuff. authors dont have to learn blender or progamming
I believe this is from the "The No-Frauds Club" podcast, for those who want to watch the full thing
It would be really nice if you posted a link to the source for these.
Ludonarrative is really hard! Making a bounded story seem unbounded requires a lot of narrative sleight of hand to do correctly.
Xenogears
4:50 - Jblows fav book: gravity is rainbow by thoman pincheon
apparently really complicated and hard to understand
because: it's full of ideas and likes being cryptic
Video games that I like or have enjoyed seem to juggle several concepts and linear based story telling is a nigh-disposable extension of the action taking place. The story is there to merely give an excuse for *win the objective(s)* . I'm more of an old-schooler, so bear with me, but here are the concepts:
1.) Progressive Challenge: The game can get your feet wet in the shallow end, but the player must eventually dive into the deep end of difficulty and fight for a sense of accomplishment.
2.) Good controls. Feels, man...
3.) Stimulate AND reward Curiosity: The game must offer more content that rewards the player's curiosity as they progress or bonus content if the player goes above and beyond the bare necessities of survival. This is multifaceted and can be, but not limited to: enemies/bosses, environments, powerups, abilities, and even customizable content or unlockables. A 2D-shmup can have airtight controls, but if the bosses are boring looking bullet sponges than I'm not going to remember it. Or, I have fond memories of the upgrades I slowly discovered in the Mega Man X game. However, these upgrades can sometimes cause point #1 to become an overturned objective. This is a balancing act that sometimes requires the difficulty to be extreme if the player does not take care of upgrading their controlled entity (I personally think Mega Man X became way too easy if you discovered all the upgrades that the game offered, in spite of my praise for it).
4.) Entertainment. Some people forget that a video game offers multifaceted entertainment. Gameplay is first and foremost, but if the graphics, sound and music are all unnecessarily bad or unfitting, then the game will probably fail. Xevious was a fun looking oldschool shmup but I turned it off soon after the annoying chromatic chiptune assaulted my ears and honestly haven't bothered to return.
Bottom line: you do NOT need to be Charles Dickens or a Cinematography genius to accomplish these four things. However, an RPG-based audience might be different than this way of thinking.
I don't think games necessarily have less total room for storytelling than movies, but it does feel like longer games try to tell the stories of half a dozen movies, and the density ends up the same.
Invisible cities
This guy is the worst interviewer I've ever seen.
I disagree with Jonathan Blow here on story driven games. Some games have on par stories with books or movies and in some ways superior.
Last of Us Part 1, GoW Ragnarok, Hades, the first Walking Dead are all some of my favorite stories on any medium. Games have an advantage of putting you in the protagonist shoes which enhances the emotional attachment to the characters which you can't get watching a movie (or maybe even reading a book).
You can already see the lack of diversity in the examples you gave, TLOU1, GOW and TWD season 1 are basically surface level version of Léon: The Professional.
Also TWD is literally a tv show with some branching, I don't see how it would put you more in the shoes of the protagonist.
@@benjamindeharo314 agree to disagree. Love Leon too but last of us part 1 stayed with me for much much longer Same goes for life is strange 1 BTW.
Imo, those stories trump the majority of movies I have seen.
@@demarek - "agree to disagree. Love Leon too but last of us part 1 stayed with me for much much longer"
You're confusing what you like with what is good.
I'm going to use music since it's easy to make my point with it.
I've never been able to enjoy classical music, I tried, it's just not for me.
Even singers like Selena Gomez or Drake are more appealing to me.
Does that means Selena Gomez and Drake are better artists than Beethoven, Mozart, Bach, and Wagner ?
Certainly not !
What you enjoy actually have little to do with its quality.
The best proof I can give you is that this music was the most popular at some point :
ua-cam.com/video/VJcGi4-n_Yw/v-deo.html
You enjoy things based of what's trendy, the way it fits in the mood of the time, what you've heard about it, and many other factors.
There's also your personal taste, which isn't an objective metric to measure the quality of an artwork.
Being a kid in the 90s, I love Dragonball, that's pretty much a given.
That doesn't mean Dragonball is better than things I don't enjoy, like Shakespeare's play or Hitchcock's movies.
You could argue that art is subjective by nature, and you'll be right, but there are some qualities that are relatively objectives, like originality for instance, and that's something TLOU is terrible at.
The majority of what people enjoy in TLOU actually comes from movies like Léon (pretty much the entire relationship between Joel and Ellie is lifted from this movie), and Children of Men / 28 days later (the entire plot comes from there).
But they took only the surface level, for instance in Léon it's a nuanced relationship between an innocent criminal (see the interesting contradiction there) stuck into childhood and a child that was thrown into adulthood.
A mix between a father-daughter relationship, a forbidden love story, a coming of age story for Mathilda AND Léon (because he's actually the child in their relationship), on top of an initiation story.
How many movies, tv shows, or games can you name that have this kind of relationship ?
TLOU on the other hand is just a basic father-daughter relationship like it's been done a billion times (and in its execution, it takes a lot from Léon).
You may prefer this game, but when something is common, it loses its artistic qualities.
-"Same goes for life is strange 1 BTW."
What I said about TWD apply to this as well it's just a tv show.
BTW, If you want to see something similar, I'd re command "Steins;Gate" (the anime, not the visual novel) if you haven't seen it already.
"The Girl Who Leapt Through Time" (the anime movie, I haven't read the book) is another one, but my favorite is "The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya" (again the anime movie, the book is not interesting imo)
I'm not saying the examples I just gave you are better than LIS, I like this game too, I'm just sharing some stuff that I think you may like too.
Also, the relationship between Max and Chloe was inspired by the french movie "Blue is the warmest color", you may like it too.
- Imo, those stories trump the majority of movies I have seen.
In any given medium, you can be sure that 99% of what is produced is garbage.
Movies, TV Shows, Books, Comics and Games are all guilty of it.
So picking a decent story from one medium to conclude that it's better than most of the examples you've seen in another medium isn't really making a point.
Recently, I watched Jigokuraku (an anime), it's decent, nothing special about it.
Yet, it trumps the majority of games I've seen, but that's normal.
I humbly propose that your experience of books may be limited. Games absolutely can have good stories, but books can have phenomenal, history-altering stories that ingrain themselves in our culture.
@@yurisei6732 I humbly reject your proposal :)
But on a more serious note: I was referring more to movies and TV shows but I believe every medium has different advantages and disadvantages when it comes to telling stories.
Books can do stuff the other mediums can't because they are longer and they use your imagination to fill in the visuals. They can jump around more and show inner voices and exposition in detail that other mediums can't afford to do.
Movies and TV shows also have their own distinct advantages but that's my whole point: games have unique pros as well. Games allow you to put yourself into the protagonist (or even antagonist!) shoes. They allow you to develop an emotional attachment that's harder to pull in other mediums because you are essentially that person. Games also allow you to make decision (often moral ones) that drive the story in different directions thus making you more part of the story.
I am. Not saying game stories are superior to other mediums. I am just saying that Jonathan Blow is wrong here (imo) and that Gane stories can stand on their own extremely well and deliver great narratives that other mediums can't.
Wonder what he would think about Outer Wilds. This is a massive oversimplification, but it is basically an open world non-linear story. I feel like it solves both his issues very well.
I think he has some minor interesting points but is extrapolating them way too far. Yes, it's very hard to capture the exact artistic intent as something like a Kurosawa film, but that's a far cry from implying video games can't have good story.
You missed the point then. It's not that games can't have good story, but games stories often pale in comparison to the diversity and richness of other media.
This critique falls apart a little bit when you consider Pixar movies or Arcane - they don't require the same level of detail in their "actors" to convey strong, emotional stories.
But they aren't games.
@@deaththink my comment was more in reference to his point about actors showing emotion in movies that video games can't capture. but thanks for stating the obvious :)
Where have you seen a game with a story on the level of Arcane (or better movies from Pixar)?
Maybe like 1 game per 2-3 years has a semblance of that level of storytelling, even something like Metal Gear is hardly that good. let alone something like Bioshock or Dishonored (and those games were made to be explicitly political and plot-heavy). Maybe some niche game, like Disco Elysium, but only because devs really wanted to clear that bar.
And those aren't remotely top movies in terms of sophistication, as you've mentioned. And we haven't even started with books.
That, and also consider 2d animation (as opposed to real actors). The main component to make something interesting enough is facial expressions, which games are just bad at.
@@aenpien i'm pretty sure pixar-level animation is a bit beyond most modern games.
Star Ocean 2 didn't have a trivial amount of branching at all which was released in 1998. Very high amount of different endings based on your decisions and actions. This guy is a programmer, not a gamer. Really, zero good points were made. He compares games to books, where books ONLY merit IS story and a game's merit is many many more things. He compares movies to games, where movies with real actors will of course have greater strength in visuals. A game beats them both in you ACTUALLY playing out the scene or storypart, which neither will ever rival. So this is the dumbest comparison I ever heard. Apples and oranges. Useless.
@@ASSEMBLOTRONNot really, you don't see movies, tv shows, and games having 45 minutes of internal monologue like books can do, people would be bored.
In theory movies could do everything books and comics could, but it's not what's happening at all, the same goes with games.
Each medium have their own constraints
"He compares games to books, where books ONLY merit IS story and a game's merit is many many more things."
Yes that's literally his entire point.
@@ASSEMBLOTRON - What do you mean by “45 minutes of internal monologue”? How long the scene spans in the book? Or how long it takes to read?
I don't even understand how you could be confused by this.
What would be the problem of having a scene that spans 45 minutes in the story ?
You show a character sitting in a waiting room; he looks at the clock; it says 9:00; you show a little montage with him waiting, then he looks again, and it's 9:45.
It's easy.
Of course, I meant a scene that would take 45 minutes to read.
You can have a scene with a woman going to meet a man, and on her way to meet him, she's having an internal dialogue about the one she's going to meet.
What does she expect of him ?
What does she expect of this meeting ?
Where is she in her life at that moment ?
Is she ready to have a relationship ?
How does her former boyfriends have influenced the way she builds relationship now ?
How about her childhood ?
How about her parents ?
How does that affect her ?
There's a depth there that other forms of storytelling could only dream of touching.
- Assuming it’s the former, you obviously wouldn’t 1-1 replicate any of it, in any other medium, but you could absolutely make it just as interesting story-wise, which means it can be even better, when adding on audio, visuals, and interactivity.
You couldn't get the depth that books can have in a simple scene about a woman on her way to meet a man.
You can't express some things visually, you can't express some things with dialogues, you can't use a narrator speaking during a movie for 45 minutes, and audio, visuals, and interactivity takes away from the poetry of reading.
There's a reason why libraries have such strict rules about being quiet, noise takes you away from the poetry of reading.
Reading isn't like listening, which isn't like watching, which isn't like interacting.
The Longest Journey (+ Dreamfall) are genuinely good stories that genuinely work best being games (of course, I don't live in a counterfactual world so I cannot say the latter with 100% certainty, but I'm willing to bet on it). The problem has many aspects to it. First of, what audience sizes are we talking about? Most books aren't read by that many, similarly only a minority of gamers would enjoy Dreamfall. Secondly, some gamwdevs think they need their game to be gameplay heavy and that they cannot tell their linear story by making e.g. a well crafted poont and click adventure. But of course they can, and they can do it extraordinarily good. In general games can take on the role of roughly all other media forms (depending on if you include things like say the theater, of course). But we have these people out there who claim that games aren't allowed to do lore dumps, must take advantage of their interactivity, etc.. Which means that games which would have been good linear stories sometimes turn into something that were never meant to be (you know what I mean ... hopefully). It seems like in these discussions all the bullcxxx books that have been published are ignored and all the genuinely good games are similarly ignored, for then the popular slob to be compared with some often unmentioned ideal work of fiction from the film or book world. Often ignoring all the implicit not only visual story telling done by games but the feel produced by the art direction and world building as you move through or around the world (indepently of how you do so). Games are often not to be separated from their stories, you cannot simply extract the story of the Souls or Deus Ex games and compare it with a book. Also, yes I do read books, I love reading. And this is perhaps why I am so annoyed at opinions such as this.