It's a surprising message from BioShock developer Ken Levine, who spoke this morning at the GDC. But despite how intricate his game was, he said that plotting details are (with a few exceptions) best left out. He says that the best storyteller is the one that might seem the most benign: The world.
"What is he engaged in all of the time? What's right there in his face? He's engaged in the world," he said.
He shows, to illustrate his point, an early demo from mid-2006. It's still strikingly similar to the final product, but the world feels hollow, with few of the details that set the game apart.
"What's wrong with this world is that it's not saying anything to you," Levine said. "We basically decided to scrap the whole thing and start again."
The game originally took place over 70 years, spanning three civil wars and including dozens of characters. When the team decided to start fresh, they took the knife to most of these characters, choosing to leave certain ones to communicate specific aspects of the story.
What 2K Boston discovered was that they more cuts they made, the more details they trimmed, the stronger their story was.
"We gave the player the option to opt-out, with the hope that for those who opted-in the experience would be all the more powerful because they were invested in it," he said.
Levine also cautions against the long-winded intro, which he illustrates with a hilariously verbose version of the BioShock story as told by Yahtzee of Zero Punctuation fame.
In the end, all of Levine's points hearkened back to a central point, and it's perhaps a surprising one coming from the developer of one of if not the strongest game narratives of 2007: In almost every way, smaller is better.
Or, as Levine (as if to demonstrate his point) put it so succinctly:
"If you want people to follow your story it's gotta be really f***ing stupid."
(Page 1) Reader Comments
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Somehow I think this goes against his background slide in the photo saying 'RESPECT YOUR AUDIENCE'.
Still, I agree with the whole 'don't try and explain every single detail in the games' thing, but... that last phrase seemed a little contradictory!
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From what I understood from his talk was that respecting your audience and making the story "really f***ing stupid" do go hand in hand.
Imagine how confusing BioShock's plot would have been if they decided to stick with the whole "70 years, 3 wars." There would be so much history that would need to be covered in a finite amount of time - the huge amounts of important information would have likely confused many people and made them hate the story, and therefore the game itself.
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I've also completed all 3 Halos, but could not tell you what it was about. Unless you consider "saving humanity from evil aliens" to be a sufficient summary.
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(both games I love by the way)
Feb 20th 2008
4:48PM
I know you posted this comment a long time ago, and no one will read this, except you, so Ill keep it short.
You're Stupid.
"...bioshock is suddenly the standard for video game storytelling when all it does is just reference old stories and art that came before it. the narrative of bioshock does nothing new..."
Oh Yeah, because Underwater "Utopia" Gone Wrong with genetic experiments and the harvesting of some bizarre substance from mutated bodies is a story thats just been done to fucking death.
God, do any of you read what you type before you click "Add your Comments"?
Also I don't think he insulted his audience. You don't have to be a moron with attention deficit to not want to read a ton of essays on a fictional history without having a skip button. A few people do and you can put it into your game, but don't force it on every player if that one could get more out of the game for himself by playing it another way.
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I wrote up a post with a bit more detail on my site:
http://tara.teich.net/archives/gdc-storytelling-in-bioshock/
Games are meant to be played instead of watched. What I mean by that, it's that the player has to live the storyline on his own as well.
It's not by scripting whatever the character's going to do in the plot, with this event or that, that the game is going to be anymore interesting. The player has to mentally invest within that new space of freedom to really experience whatever was thrown in his face.
The player ends up pushing himself through the game, instead of being pulled.
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As an art form, video games should resemble films, not novels. You have some backstory, very few characters, one central plot, thematic elements. Films are simple.
Bioshock followed this model. Ryan creates underground world, something bad happened, and you're smack in the middle of the result. As the plot goes on, you learn more about what happened. Simple, but effective.
Often, designers will want to recreate something vastly complex, like Tolkien's Middle Earth, with a long history and complex interactions. All this does is bore and confuse your audience, no matter how smart they are...
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