Hacker News Reader

Comment by moritonal | Hacker News Reader

I get that, but I'd prefer games that tell a story rather than cause angst whilst they siphon your wallet. Played LoL quite a lot and haven't learnt a thing from it :(

View on HN

Best games don't tell stories - they generate them. There's no need to make games more like movies or graphic novels because we already have movies and graphic novels.

That's just, like, your opinion, man. There's clearly a market for, say, JRPGs, and that market is comprised of people who fully disagree with you. Ultimately what you're saying is "there's no need to make games I don't like".

Personally, for what it's worth, I love games where you neither generate nor are told stories, but rather where you uncover them. Outer Wilds is the best recent example I know of-- the entire game is essentially a detective mystery/archaeology expedition where you have to piece the story of the game together. Similar DNA lives in games like Dark Souls and Myst, where the game lore is predetermined but not necessarily shoved in your face.

Ultimately what I'm saying is that computer games are wasting an opportunity to be good what they do best: interaction and simulation. No one condemns basketball, soccer or chess for having poor story. They are however good at generating stories people tell to each other later. Computer games do that even better.

Unfortunately not - there's too many of them, so they don't work as social objects in most contexts anymore.

I could tell endless stories about the crazy flights I've done in Kerbal Space Program - like that time when I miscalculated Δv in my moon lander and had to plot an emergency intercept on a suborbital trajectory, to let the crew EVA over to the command module before the lander crashed into the moon's surface...

... but nobody cares. I have no one to tell them to. Everyone has their own set of games they play, and the intersection of these sets contains very few games, if any at all.

Just want to add that I was actually thinking about Outer Wilds when I wrote my parent comment. That game was a literal journey of the soul for me.

There is room for many types, and when it comes to more traditional storytelling, games can create more direct emotional connections by making you the character, rather then the protagonist just being someone you watch.

But most games nowadays actively avoid that! They make you control Geralt or Solid Snake or Master Chief or whatever. You know, someone cooler than you could ever possibly be. They introduce third person cutscenes if the game isn't already 3rd person by default. You can't choose what to say or are very limited in what or how you say it. You pursue someone else's goals.

Half Life 1 is one of the few games that got it right, but does it have imitators? A silent protagonist is something to be ashamed of nowadays.

Silent protagonist games still exist. 'Prey' comes to mind (though an AI character speaks to you using your character's voice, and you can also hear your character speak on a few recordings you can find. But in the tradition of HL, your character never utters anything while you are in their perspective, and there are no third person cutscenes. Spoilers: the entity you are playing as is not actually the character it's presented as, so technically you never actually hear your character's voice.)

The new Doom games also have silent protagonists, but unfortunately have some third person cutscenes and are extreme examples of 'cooler than you'.

At some point story generators are barely games and more like tools or toys. Dwarf fortress doesn't have a ton of replay value as a fortress manager. Maybe five or six attempts to make a stable fortress but i could spend hours just tweaking the world gen parameters and looking through the legends mode.

I can't disagree more. Stuff like minecraft(which I assume you mean) just have no lessons to teach. They are great games. But they can't grow beyond that. They can't be masterpieces precisely because they don't tell a story.

I'm shamelessly pasting a wikipedia quote because it puts it better and more succinctly than I could.

"Non-games are a class of software on the border between video games and toys. The original term "non-game game" was coined by late Nintendo president Satoru Iwata, who describes it as "a form of entertainment that really doesn't have a winner, or even a real conclusion".[1] Will Wright had previously used the term "software toy" for the same purpose.[2] The main difference between non-games and traditional video games is the lack of structured goals, objectives, and challenges.[3] This allows the player a greater degree of self-expression through freeform play, since they can set up their own goals to achieve."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-game

Will Wright is the designer of Sim City, and he deliberately called his creation this way. I think the above wikipedia distinction is spot on. I don't think the term "non-game" is ideal, but I can't think of any better one that's short. Sandbox, entertainment software, etc. "Sandbox" doesn't capture graphic novels. I think Will Wright also compared Sim City to a ball. You can play a game with a ball, you can invent some rules, but it's not a game by itself.

Speaking of Minecraft, you can make a game within it, or out of it. But it's not a fully fledged, "batteries included" game. Minecraft is very similar to Lego, and if you remove one dimension - even a painting set.

The term "non-game" is somewhat useful for me because I specifically look for games for my active entertainment. I'm annoyed when I have to wade through several quasi-games on a review site to find one proper game. I don't necessarily think games in classical sense are inherently better or more challenging. But if the word "game" ceases to have any meaning on computers, someone will have to come up with a game2 term, which would be silly.

I wouldn't go so far as to call Minecraft educational, but it certainly can teach things. It's probably taught the utility of logic gates to at least a few kids. The comparison to Lego seems apt. Most will probably just build houses or spaceships, but some with the aptitude will start building differentials or digital calculators.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com