Dess
10-06-2010, 01:58 AM
"The ability to chainsaw things in half in Gears of War tells you more about whether or not you want to play this game than the story."
That's not exactly an encouraging thing for participants in the game writing track of GDC Online to hear, but there's no denying it as a necessary truth. In fact, Greg Kasavin's (Supergiant Games) talk at the conference this afternoon was centered on the basic fact that the best exposition in games is that which is expertly hidden. Titled "I Don't Want to Know," the session was full of frank talk about how narrative is used in games.
"Exposition is a dirty word," was one of Kasavin's top points. Too many developers front- or back-load games with heavy exposition to create the game world instead of smartly weaving it in the game itself. This kind of world building sets up a series of potential problems. One, if done too thickly, it can completely overwhelm a gamer – or worse, leave them with no surprises. After all, if a game drops a massive info dump on you within minutes, you might struggle to remember all of it when it finally comes time for the story to be wrapped up at the end of the final act.
Relying too much on a tidy cut scene at the end of the game is also problematic, primarily because you risk gamers completely bailing out long before they have a chance to experience the full arc of your narrative. To underline this point, Kasavin dropped a pretty startling fact: less than 50% of gamers finished Half-Life 2: Episode Two. Think of all that wasted narrative, all of that excellent writing – and Episode 2 was certainly full of it – that went unused by over half of its audience.
So, what's the secret? "Exposition is the art of pacing your game properly," said Kasavin. And according to Kasavin, more and more games are doing a better job teasing out story bit by bit to keep gamers glued to the screen. He cited titles like Mass Effect and Red Dead Redemption as recent high points in game narrative. These are games that do two important things. As mentioned earlier, they tell the gamer only what they need to know for the narrative to make sense at that point in time instead of just flooding the system. Two, they make the player feel smart by letting them connect the dots themselves. Keeping with the Mass Effect example, we always knew Saren was a bad guy, but we were allowed to constantly guess at the ruthlessness of his overall plan while juggling the immediate threat.
Kasavin also used the session to show off how he is handling exposition in Supergiant Games' upcoming adventure, Bastion, which was also one of the PAX 10 selections at last month's expo. Here, instead of just immediately submerging the player in a cutscene that explains that cataclysm that befell the hero's world at the start of act one, Supergiant Games is using a reactive narrator.
In a short demo, the hero of Bastion wakes and a narrator explains what is happening as the player moves through the opening act. The narration effortlessly switches between tutorial and exposition, giving some narrative context to things like why the world snaps together under the hero's feet as he walks or why fountains are where he can replenish lost health. It's a really cool effect and left me wanting to see how this reactive narrator will dole out story later in the game, say, around the halfway point when I often make a decision about whether or not to continue playing a game.
At the close of the session, Kasavin went over a few tips for putting exposition in games, but one piece of advice really stuck out: assume no one cares. Design your game with the realization that no matter how cleverly you write dialogue or engage in world building, apparently many gamers will skip over it or quit before it's over. So don't be too heavy. Be subtle so the gamers that do care will love you all the more for it. Considering the incredible success of games that expertly weave exposition within gameplay – games like Red Dead Redeption and BioShock – there are plenty of gamers more than willing to reward excellent narrative with word of mouth and, even better, sales.
Read More Here (http://pc.ign.com/articles/112/1125824p1.html#ixzz11Yjxa1GC)
That's not exactly an encouraging thing for participants in the game writing track of GDC Online to hear, but there's no denying it as a necessary truth. In fact, Greg Kasavin's (Supergiant Games) talk at the conference this afternoon was centered on the basic fact that the best exposition in games is that which is expertly hidden. Titled "I Don't Want to Know," the session was full of frank talk about how narrative is used in games.
"Exposition is a dirty word," was one of Kasavin's top points. Too many developers front- or back-load games with heavy exposition to create the game world instead of smartly weaving it in the game itself. This kind of world building sets up a series of potential problems. One, if done too thickly, it can completely overwhelm a gamer – or worse, leave them with no surprises. After all, if a game drops a massive info dump on you within minutes, you might struggle to remember all of it when it finally comes time for the story to be wrapped up at the end of the final act.
Relying too much on a tidy cut scene at the end of the game is also problematic, primarily because you risk gamers completely bailing out long before they have a chance to experience the full arc of your narrative. To underline this point, Kasavin dropped a pretty startling fact: less than 50% of gamers finished Half-Life 2: Episode Two. Think of all that wasted narrative, all of that excellent writing – and Episode 2 was certainly full of it – that went unused by over half of its audience.
So, what's the secret? "Exposition is the art of pacing your game properly," said Kasavin. And according to Kasavin, more and more games are doing a better job teasing out story bit by bit to keep gamers glued to the screen. He cited titles like Mass Effect and Red Dead Redemption as recent high points in game narrative. These are games that do two important things. As mentioned earlier, they tell the gamer only what they need to know for the narrative to make sense at that point in time instead of just flooding the system. Two, they make the player feel smart by letting them connect the dots themselves. Keeping with the Mass Effect example, we always knew Saren was a bad guy, but we were allowed to constantly guess at the ruthlessness of his overall plan while juggling the immediate threat.
Kasavin also used the session to show off how he is handling exposition in Supergiant Games' upcoming adventure, Bastion, which was also one of the PAX 10 selections at last month's expo. Here, instead of just immediately submerging the player in a cutscene that explains that cataclysm that befell the hero's world at the start of act one, Supergiant Games is using a reactive narrator.
In a short demo, the hero of Bastion wakes and a narrator explains what is happening as the player moves through the opening act. The narration effortlessly switches between tutorial and exposition, giving some narrative context to things like why the world snaps together under the hero's feet as he walks or why fountains are where he can replenish lost health. It's a really cool effect and left me wanting to see how this reactive narrator will dole out story later in the game, say, around the halfway point when I often make a decision about whether or not to continue playing a game.
At the close of the session, Kasavin went over a few tips for putting exposition in games, but one piece of advice really stuck out: assume no one cares. Design your game with the realization that no matter how cleverly you write dialogue or engage in world building, apparently many gamers will skip over it or quit before it's over. So don't be too heavy. Be subtle so the gamers that do care will love you all the more for it. Considering the incredible success of games that expertly weave exposition within gameplay – games like Red Dead Redeption and BioShock – there are plenty of gamers more than willing to reward excellent narrative with word of mouth and, even better, sales.
Read More Here (http://pc.ign.com/articles/112/1125824p1.html#ixzz11Yjxa1GC)