GDC08: Ken Levine says to keep the story simple
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.
Gallery: Ken Levine Storytelling Gallery
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."
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
alu @ Feb 20th 2008 3:30PM
there's some truthiness to this.
Cherry May @ Feb 20th 2008 3:32PM
"If you want people to follow your story it's gotta be really f***ing stupid."
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!
homerj312 @ Feb 20th 2008 3:42PM
I imagine Bioware begs to differ. Mass Effect is about the most in depth story you can tell. It sounds like a Levine is oversimplifying the issue, a good story can be done in long or short form its all about the quality of it.
OperatorC @ Feb 23rd 2008 11:54PM
You're right, but Mass Effect and Bioshock are two very different game types. I believe it depends on the type of game you're making as well as what you're attempting to do with your story.
Paul S. @ Feb 20th 2008 3:46PM
Sounds like he said exactly the same things he said when he was here at NYU a few weeks ago.
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.
Ghaleon @ Feb 20th 2008 4:23PM
Why is it that the biggest videogaming gets an industry, the more gaming clings to the mindset of Schwarzengger flicks? Outside of, uh, BIOSHOCK and Half-Life, compare storytelling to film :(
0ldb0y @ Feb 20th 2008 4:34PM
I've played maybe 25% of Bioshock, and I feel very immersed in the story, plot and themes.
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.
Arteen @ Feb 20th 2008 9:44PM
Don't worry. The story stopped making sense after Halo 1.
Synergistic @ Feb 28th 2008 7:33AM
Well its not that the story stopped making sense, simply that you could no longer glean the story from the games themselves.
Mark @ Feb 20th 2008 4:48PM
i love how 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, yet Levine and Co are heralded as in someway redefining storytelling for games. And now here he is telling how its best to keep it simple blah blah...
Mischa @ Feb 20th 2008 10:24PM
It doesn't have to do anything *new* to do it *well*. The whole point of the presentation was to say that atmosphere is the most important method of telling a story, and not forcing you to read a novel before playing the game, like in Mass Effect, or while playing the game, like in Lost Odyssey.
(both games I love by the way)
Dick @ Feb 28th 2008 10:18AM
@ Mark
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"?
gLitterbug @ Feb 20th 2008 5:21PM
I figure that he means not to try to come up with the most complex story you can imagine and painstakingly explain that to the player by lots of dialogues, cutscenes and the like, but use the strengths of the medium and let him experience things on his own, however deep or shallow he wants.
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.
All_Thumbs @ Feb 20th 2008 6:06PM
Good god I hope they don't listen to him. The story is the most important part of a game... although I will readily admit that bad controls or graphics will take you out of that story faster than anything.
Tara Teich @ Feb 21st 2008 12:40AM
He wasn't saying that story is not important. He was saying that how you tell the story should take into account what your medium is good at (I was at the talk). Games are good at interaction, the story should emerge from the gameplay. Games aren't movies, the story doesn't need to be pushed at your through cutscenes and it doesn't need to be pushed at you through pages of text.
I wrote up a post with a bit more detail on my site:
http://tara.teich.net/archives/gdc-storytelling-in-bioshock/
Abscissa @ Feb 21st 2008 12:00PM
Pfft, story is hands-down the least important part of a game. See Super Mario Bros, Arkanoid/Breakout, Geometry Wars, Everyday Shooter, RType, any fighting game, any Sim* game, any racing game, any puzzle game, etc.
ThornedVenom (Ludwig Defense Force) @ Feb 21st 2008 2:06AM
As crazy as his speech seemed (after all, he is the creator of freakin BIOSHOCK), it REALLY makes sense to me.
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.
SuperChuck @ Feb 27th 2008 10:25PM
Makes sense to me: playing a game should not feel like when your 12 year old newphew tries to explain Pokemon.
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...