Dopass.com

I thought I'd throw this link out there since it was a good read:

GameSetWatch's HDR Knowledge - Telling Stories and Realizing Worlds

One of the things the author mentions is the layered storytelling often used in games like Halo 3 or Metroid Prime. He questions, at one point (and to be fair he questions for effect), why they would hide such amazing writing the way they do. He posits his own thought (it keeps the story out of the way of those who don't want it, essentially), which is dead on accurate in my experience, but he fails to mention the other reason this can and does happen:

Sometimes, you're not hiding the story from your audience, but rather from your co-workers.

I know, it sounds strange, but it's true. Story is one of those dogmatic issues for devs. People either love it, hate, or don't care. In the years I've been doing this, I've found fewer than a dozen people (out of the hundreds I've worked with) who "don't care."

Since 1995, I've worked on... 16 projects (many of which actually shipped! :p ). On three of those projects, that I can remember, the layered storytelling approach was adopted for no other reason than the writers had to sneak their writing by the people on the team who hated story, just to get it in the game at all. Literally, these folks would complain to me (an admitted story lover) that every time they put something out in the open, they would have to fight tooth and nail to see it in game... and by the time it was in game, it existed in a ham-fisted, hackneyed dumbed-down state that actually made the game worse for its presence.

So, to a person, these writers all decided the best way to get the story told at all was to hide that they were telling it.

I apologize for being vague; I don't want to out any of my old coworkers by telling the story. That's not really the point. Instead, I wanted to point out that sometimes what you see is a "happy accident" and sometimes? Sometimes, we get to the right answer by living the exact same frustrations and debates our audiences do. How many of you have the friend who loves every drama-laden cutscene from the Final Fantasy series? How many of you have friends who hate that same series for it's gross overuse of uninterruptible, game suspending, cutscenes? I bet the numbers are about the same.

Those two camps aren't just on the dev-side. In fact, I don't think those camps came from the dev-side. I think we inherited them from our audience.

Sometimes, the only way to keep both camps happy is to hide that you're doing anything at all. Be it Bioshock's audio diaries or Halo's logs, the thoughts of your dwarves in Dwarf Fortress or the biography pane of your Everquest 2 Character, story is hiding everywhere in your games. Even the games you're sure have no story at all at least have some premise... and once you have a premise, is it hard to imagine a story following right behind it? I mean... really?

That being said, take a moment to thank the division these camps represent... could you imagine what Bioshock would have been like if Cinematics had been all the rage for everyone? I shudder at the thought of Portal getting the Square Enix treatment. ;)

Sometimes disagreeing - even violently or religiously - is good, because sometimes it forces you to find the compromise answer (in this case, layering your stories so that only those that really want them need experience them), even if the compromise was something you swore you'd never do.

But, let's not forget that most of the time, disagreeing - especially violently or religiously - is seldom the best course of action in the first place. While I shudder at the thought of a final-fantasized Portal... I wouldn't mind seeing a Valve take on something like Final Fantasy. There's a middle ground for us all, those of that think about it know we're gonna end up there anyway, so... what's the point of the fight, along the way?

- Snipehunter