Plot vs. Play PAX Panel Report

BioWare’s David Gaider, Obsidian’s Chris Avellone and Irrational’s Ken Levine joined together last weekend for a PAX East panel on videogame storytelling titled ‘Plot vs. Play’ and we now have reports from both Kotaku and G4 on what exactly went on during it for those of us who couldn’t be present.

A snip from the first:

All three continued to discuss the different kinds of stories that games can tell, and how designers can encourage those stories but they agreed on a fundamental theme. Restriction both for designers and for players is what makes games work. On the development end, necessity is the mother of invention, and resources are never limitless. Each had a story to tell about a time that resource limitation worked in their favor for creation. The New Vegas DLC “Old World Blues,” Avellone explained, had come about from being told that there was no budget to create new art assets for the episode.

Continuing the theme of restriction, Gaider added that from the player perspective, all choice is an illusion. “The player never gets to do what they want, necessarily,” he said, “They get to do what we let them.” He continued:

And I think that’s true for every game, so really it’s all a matter of how well the illusion is maintained. We’re setting up those little pieces of crumbs for them to follow, and it depends whether we’re setting them in a straight line to lead them to something, or whether we put them in strategic pieces around the level, or we do what Fallout did and just fire the pieces out of a cannon. But it’s all a matter of maintaining that illusion from the player, of maintaining that buy-in… The difference between good games and bad games, or good narrative and bad narrative, is how good a liar the people that make the games are.

And from the latter:

Levine is more concerned with environment than the words he’s going to write. (I would say the best tool we have to sell our story is the world. The visual space…if you think about dialogue, especially in a first person shooter…the environment gives you so much information,) he said. (You can take in so much more visual information than you can take in audio information.)

Avellone works along the same lines. (One of the parts of a narrative designer’s job is to tell out the story in the environments without a single line of text or a single line of dialogue from the characters,) he said. Environment artists in the Fallout: New Vegas DLC packs would tell stories through devices like the way a camp was set up when the player discovered it, which would indicate how long someone had stayed there, or what they were doing.

Even if narrative isn’t the strongest aspect of many video game experiences, Gaider doesn’t want to tell someone they are taking the wrong approach, because he doesn’t know if he’s taking the right approach. (There are many different types of narrative, and with the advancement of technology we’re starting to encounter them,) he said. (Cinematic storytelling, environment storytelling…emergent narrative.) Proper writing demands linearity, but that’s not good gameplay, so game developers have to decide where they draw the line between storytelling and writing, because they’re not the same thing.