I've alluded to the problems with trying to set up an award for (niche especially) game narrative in longer, non-IGF-friendly games, but I thought I'd ramble about the topic a little to make the pitfalls more clear, and maybe some good ideas will come to light.
First off, if there were some sort of prestigious story game award, what sort of games would be eligible, and how would they be defined? I wouldn't really be happy about lumping every NaNoReNo entry into the same awards show as the latest Bioware RPG and the latest mainstream shooter, but I wouldn't want to start out with a VN-only show either. Too niche. So for starters:
- Only computer games in English with a primary or co-primary focus on narrative allowed.
-- This means VNs, digital gamebooks, some RPGs but not action ones, some adventure games but not pure puzzlefests, and some nebulous arty games that people argue about how to categorise in the first place
-- This would be trying to exclude AAA games in other genres, even though they obviously include narrative as a strong component. But how you actually judge that? Who would be making the decisions on whether Assassins Creed was 'narrative' enough to count? Do you try to cut them out by making the awards "indie only" instead, hoping that it's slightly easier to adjudicate? Or do you issue strict genre guidelines to include ONLY visual novels, RPGs, and adventures, and then fight over what games do and don't count as those?
-- Should freeware games be excluded, in order to keep the field size manageable, or just restricted to certain award categories?
-- What about games that aren't originally in English? What about freeware games that have been fan-translated, sometimes with or without permission?
-- Should games only be eligible if the original author actively submits them for consideration? That might limit the field, but it might limit it too much. An award's not very meaningful if it's only chosen between the games of the five people who were interested.
That's just some basic questions about the games themselves that would be up for awards. A much bigger problem is - who would judge it?
It is not practical to have a small panel of paid judges who are obligated to complete every game and compare them. Think how many hours some of these games take to complete! Think about paying a reasonable salary for 3-5 judges, at the very least, to play them exhaustively. Think how LONG it would take them, too. And, of course, a small group of judges, even esteemed judges, is obviously going to bring in their own set of biases that would make the award less representative of general opinion.
To get a wider range of opinion, you need a wider range of judges. But if it's pretty difficult to pay 3 people to play 20+ games, it's impossible to pay 200 or 2000 to do it. And, especially if all games released are eligible for awards, you just can't even begin to hope that everything will be played and evaluated. And of course, not only can you not afford to pay 200 judges, you might not even be able to get 200 free copies of every game to give out, especially not for a new contest.
So what does that leave you with? Calling out to the gamer populace to vote on the games they've personally played, and just sort of vaguely hoping you can get enough people to speak up and play fairly that you'll get a good spread of results? Well... it is sort of how the Hugos are supposed to work, after all.
If the judges are 'the gamers' rather than specially recruited judges or hand-vetted volunteers, then you need an organisation to make SOME attempt at verifying the identity of the judges and stopping people from signing up multiple times, as well as a barrier to entry to try and restrict this to people who are actually interested in the subject and not boredly clicking a webpage. This of course requires that you have created this central Gamers Association and someone is maintaining the membership and keeping track of the money (which will probably be used to pay out the awards), but one might find it a little hard to get thousands of people to sign up and pay money to get the chance to vote on their favorite video games. Or maybe it's easy, I don't know!
Now, once you've started making things into a popular vote based on nominations from this wide base, you run into the issue of campaigning. Should game developers and/or interest groups be barred from trying to push the voters to vote one way or another? And if so, how? Or is that totally fine, because that level of dedication should be rewarded? Are there other rules that can balance the possibility of one group trying to steamroll?
Of course, if this sort of awards thing were being organised there'd also be a lot of work that would have to be put into determining the categories, in order to reward different kinds of narrative instead of JUST having the 'best game' which will probably be swept by the popular thing. Categories might include things like
- Worldbuilding: setting, lore, consistency
- Player Agency: how much can the player shape the direction of the narrative?
- Multiple Endings: who does the most with the interactive ability to tell more than one story?
- Humor: obvious, but deserves its own category as its a writing thing often overlooked in awards
- Emotional Rollercoaster: not so much 'best drama' as 'most lasting impact'. what game's story most kicked you in the gut, or made you fall hopelessly in love with a sprite?
- Best Character: this is probably a more meaningful option than Best Dialog
- Best In Genre: to separate RPGs from VNs and so on (although there'd be an overall best as well)
And there'd probably need to be some rules restrictions limiting the number of categories a title could be up for final consideration in.
Again, this is all just the result of me thinking about it for a few minutes, and you can already see what a messy undertaking it could be, trying to manage it.
And even if I founded something like this and recruited 2000 people to judge it, people would probably complain I had an unfair advantage by virtue of being the founder, so I'd never be able to get awards, and what good is that? :)
Showing posts with label storytelling. Show all posts
Showing posts with label storytelling. Show all posts
Wednesday, 15 April 2015
Saturday, 8 December 2012
Friday, 7 September 2012
news tidbits
I'm sponsoring a small visual novel writing contest this month. It's silly. You will need to be creative. There are prizes. Go for it.
Development on The Royal Trap continues. Three of the four planned initial routes are written, and we have an awesome new CG artist helping get things moving along.
Cool new bonus stuff will be coming to LLTQ in the next couple of months. There will be art. I can't show you anything yet! But there will be entertaining new reasons to murder Elodie that is, to seek out rare events.
Greenlight news - we have two pages up at the moment.
Science Girls - If this gets voted up high enough to pass, it will get a graphical overhaul with cool new visual effects for battle, better maps on the alien world, etc, while at the same time being sold way cheaper because that's sort of what Steam expects from a silly little RPG like this. Should it then actually sell some copies, it might have a sequel someday. Otherwise, probably never. So if you actually liked this poor little game, cheerlead for it!
Date Warp - If this one passes, the price will drop by half and existing customers will get free Steam keys, but this game is done so no huge changes would pop up. Vote for it to boost VNs on Steam and to get yourself a discount. :)
Development on The Royal Trap continues. Three of the four planned initial routes are written, and we have an awesome new CG artist helping get things moving along.
Cool new bonus stuff will be coming to LLTQ in the next couple of months. There will be art. I can't show you anything yet! But there will be entertaining new reasons to murder Elodie that is, to seek out rare events.
Greenlight news - we have two pages up at the moment.
Science Girls - If this gets voted up high enough to pass, it will get a graphical overhaul with cool new visual effects for battle, better maps on the alien world, etc, while at the same time being sold way cheaper because that's sort of what Steam expects from a silly little RPG like this. Should it then actually sell some copies, it might have a sequel someday. Otherwise, probably never. So if you actually liked this poor little game, cheerlead for it!
Date Warp - If this one passes, the price will drop by half and existing customers will get free Steam keys, but this game is done so no huge changes would pop up. Vote for it to boost VNs on Steam and to get yourself a discount. :)
Tuesday, 20 March 2012
Endings, and the rage they inspire
DISCLAIMER: I haven't played ME3. This shouldn't surprise you, I wasn't planning on it until it was super-discounted at best, and considering how much I hated using Origin for ME2 when it was _free_, it was gonna be a long time coming. I have been roughly told what happens at the end and I know a few events mid-story. Please don't feel the need to tell me any more. :) I don't really care much about spoilers, but at the same time, I DON'T CARE about mass effect and want to talk about stuff I do care about.
Is it right for consumers to be enraged by an 'unsatisfying' ending to a work of fiction?
Endings are hard. Many, many good stories are let down by disappointing endings. Most of the time, you shrug and accept it, or write fanfic for how it 'should' have ended, or simply invoke CanonDiscontinuity and claim it never happened.
The amount of rage tends to, in my experience, vary based on how much the ending's "fail" goes against what you liked out of the series in total. Many stories sort of peter out at the end, and that's sad, but it's understandable, it doesn't make you as the consumer feel INSULTED, just disappointed. The story ran out of steam somewhere. It happens. We can sympathise.
Then you get cases where someone who isn't the creator dislikes the ending and forces it to be altered before release, even if the new ending is jarringly disconnected from the work as a whole. Two infamous cases are the play "The Doll's House", which in early performances after showing the complete breakdown of a marriage, had the wife... decide to stay with her husband because Divorce Is Bad. Playwright was not happy. I don't think even audiences were happy. Progress marches forward and real ending was restored. Another, more recent example is the movie "I Am Legend", which spent the whole movie building up to a specific realisation, only for some exec to decide they didn't like the realisation, thus cutting off the movie right before it happens and going down an entirely different route. Leaving all the foreshadowing untouched. The end result is a movie that's vaguely watchable as some sort of sad action flick but completely lost its thematic integrity, or any relation to the title of the film. The "real" ending was shipped on DVD anyway.
This sort of ending-censorship tends to provoke anger because it feels patronising. The execs are saying that we can't "handle" the real ending. They think we are too X to appreciate whatever was there to begin with. It is therefore reasonable that the reaction is to argue with it, to insist that actually we are just fine with the real ending, why are you treating us like this?
Not all ending changes are because of that. Sometimes an author gets rather worn out by the end of a story and decides to kill everyone off for shocks, or because they're tired of writing these bozoes and want to stop, or because they're depressed and want to demonstrate the futility of life, and so on. There's at least one well-known movie that was originally meant to end with the main characters dying for no real reason, and the execs stepped in and said "WTF?" and talked them out of it. Movie (and series) is better for it. But sometimes it doesn't get caught, and Rocks Fall Everyone Dies.
If the reason was that the author was depressed, many fans can understand that and be upset at the result but not filled with anger. If the reason was that the writer hated the fans and wanted them to go away and stop making em write this crap, is it not reasonable that the fans feel a bit insulted by this? :) Especially if they were paying good money to be insulted?
Special benefits go to the category of bad ending where the writers not only introduce a sudden and jarring change, but drastically undermine the entire point of the work at the same time. My case in point is the ending of the Xena TV show. After however-many series of working for redemption and doing GOOD to balance out the evil of her past and showing how just dying would be taking the easy way out and struggling to do good is a much harder and nobler thing, at the very end she... decides that actually she has to die for her sins. SO APPARENTLY THE WHOLE SERIES WAS A WASTE OF TIME THEN. Rage does not begin to describe the reaction. Fans felt personally insulted, because everything the show was about, everything they'd been drawn in to watch, they were suddenly being told was worthless. Apparently the producers were surprised by this. What were they smoking? (This was later officially declared a canon discontinuity - at least as far as the ongoing comic book series goes. That Never Happened.)
Another great way to piss the consumer off? Intentionally fail to resolve the plot at all and leave it hanging for the next installment which you intend to demand more money for. There's a balancing act here. If you're writing a series, or you think you might ever write a sequel, you don't want to tie up EVERY loose end. But at the same time, each installment needs to come to some sort of conclusion.
Imagine if you had been playing ME2 and just entered the big nasty scary relay and got a tense scene of hurtling through super-space and then - you got a black screen with 'Please insert $60 to continue'. You'd need to buy a new monitor, because you would have just punched a hole in yours.
I threw a book across the room once and swore never to read anything by the author again because it ended with absolutely everything the heroes had done up to that point having been utterly pointless, plz buy the next book. No. Screw you.
Let's put it this way. Epic stories are designed to stimulate the emotions. If you work up the reader's emotions and cut them off in a very badly-resolved way, you should not be surprised that they go crazy.
Now, do players have the "right" to "force" developers to make things end better? No, not really, and the idea of lawsuits to get your money back from a shitty ending is just stupid IMO. On the other hand, there are circumstances where I feel it's quite reasonable to be angry and insulted by what you've just played/read/watched. And if you feel insulted, obviously you should feel free to express that.
Is it right for consumers to be enraged by an 'unsatisfying' ending to a work of fiction?
Endings are hard. Many, many good stories are let down by disappointing endings. Most of the time, you shrug and accept it, or write fanfic for how it 'should' have ended, or simply invoke CanonDiscontinuity and claim it never happened.
The amount of rage tends to, in my experience, vary based on how much the ending's "fail" goes against what you liked out of the series in total. Many stories sort of peter out at the end, and that's sad, but it's understandable, it doesn't make you as the consumer feel INSULTED, just disappointed. The story ran out of steam somewhere. It happens. We can sympathise.
Then you get cases where someone who isn't the creator dislikes the ending and forces it to be altered before release, even if the new ending is jarringly disconnected from the work as a whole. Two infamous cases are the play "The Doll's House", which in early performances after showing the complete breakdown of a marriage, had the wife... decide to stay with her husband because Divorce Is Bad. Playwright was not happy. I don't think even audiences were happy. Progress marches forward and real ending was restored. Another, more recent example is the movie "I Am Legend", which spent the whole movie building up to a specific realisation, only for some exec to decide they didn't like the realisation, thus cutting off the movie right before it happens and going down an entirely different route. Leaving all the foreshadowing untouched. The end result is a movie that's vaguely watchable as some sort of sad action flick but completely lost its thematic integrity, or any relation to the title of the film. The "real" ending was shipped on DVD anyway.
This sort of ending-censorship tends to provoke anger because it feels patronising. The execs are saying that we can't "handle" the real ending. They think we are too X to appreciate whatever was there to begin with. It is therefore reasonable that the reaction is to argue with it, to insist that actually we are just fine with the real ending, why are you treating us like this?
Not all ending changes are because of that. Sometimes an author gets rather worn out by the end of a story and decides to kill everyone off for shocks, or because they're tired of writing these bozoes and want to stop, or because they're depressed and want to demonstrate the futility of life, and so on. There's at least one well-known movie that was originally meant to end with the main characters dying for no real reason, and the execs stepped in and said "WTF?" and talked them out of it. Movie (and series) is better for it. But sometimes it doesn't get caught, and Rocks Fall Everyone Dies.
If the reason was that the author was depressed, many fans can understand that and be upset at the result but not filled with anger. If the reason was that the writer hated the fans and wanted them to go away and stop making em write this crap, is it not reasonable that the fans feel a bit insulted by this? :) Especially if they were paying good money to be insulted?
Special benefits go to the category of bad ending where the writers not only introduce a sudden and jarring change, but drastically undermine the entire point of the work at the same time. My case in point is the ending of the Xena TV show. After however-many series of working for redemption and doing GOOD to balance out the evil of her past and showing how just dying would be taking the easy way out and struggling to do good is a much harder and nobler thing, at the very end she... decides that actually she has to die for her sins. SO APPARENTLY THE WHOLE SERIES WAS A WASTE OF TIME THEN. Rage does not begin to describe the reaction. Fans felt personally insulted, because everything the show was about, everything they'd been drawn in to watch, they were suddenly being told was worthless. Apparently the producers were surprised by this. What were they smoking? (This was later officially declared a canon discontinuity - at least as far as the ongoing comic book series goes. That Never Happened.)
Another great way to piss the consumer off? Intentionally fail to resolve the plot at all and leave it hanging for the next installment which you intend to demand more money for. There's a balancing act here. If you're writing a series, or you think you might ever write a sequel, you don't want to tie up EVERY loose end. But at the same time, each installment needs to come to some sort of conclusion.
Imagine if you had been playing ME2 and just entered the big nasty scary relay and got a tense scene of hurtling through super-space and then - you got a black screen with 'Please insert $60 to continue'. You'd need to buy a new monitor, because you would have just punched a hole in yours.
I threw a book across the room once and swore never to read anything by the author again because it ended with absolutely everything the heroes had done up to that point having been utterly pointless, plz buy the next book. No. Screw you.
Let's put it this way. Epic stories are designed to stimulate the emotions. If you work up the reader's emotions and cut them off in a very badly-resolved way, you should not be surprised that they go crazy.
Now, do players have the "right" to "force" developers to make things end better? No, not really, and the idea of lawsuits to get your money back from a shitty ending is just stupid IMO. On the other hand, there are circumstances where I feel it's quite reasonable to be angry and insulted by what you've just played/read/watched. And if you feel insulted, obviously you should feel free to express that.
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