"Good" vs "Enjoyable" when it comes to games

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"Good" vs "Enjoyable" when it comes to games

Post Post #0 (ISO) » Wed Jan 22, 2020 7:44 pm

Post by AcRv »

This is a discussion I've had with a few of my friends, but it's always interesting to have in different communities and from my skimming over the forums I'm not sure that it's come up here. Although I haven't been around for a few years now so like maybe I just missed it.

As the title suggests, I've always had this idea of the difference between "good" games and "enjoyable" games. Part of this came from my last year of uni where I had to convince my honours supervisor that games could even convey narrative (seriously, this is an issue that's up for contention in the academic world and video game scholars will snarkily call you a "narratologist" if you try to say that they can). And in trying to identify exactly HOW games can convey a narrative, I came across two real distinctions in how games operate. And it's really the difference between a game that is "good" and a game that is a movie broken up with incidental player action.

Just for reference, this post is going to be working with the understanding that a game's narrative is "any and all events which unavoidably must occur assuming the player successfully arrives at the creator's intended ending."

So for example, in
Halo
, the Master Chief must get off the Pillar of Autumn in the first level. Exactly how he does this and what occurs will vary from player to player. A speedrunner will play the cowardly Master Chief running away from the covenant like most people run away from their problems, zipping through them to get to the escape pod. Your more conventional gamer probably played the heroic Chief stopping to aid other crew members in fighting the covenant forces until he can get to the pod. Both narratives are different and give the cutscenes different lights, but both narratives rely on the fact that the Chief did indeed escape. These different versions then get labelled as "Emergent Narratives", which exist as a result of the player's ability to control the protagonists's specific actions at certain points.

A "Good" game, I feel, is a game in which every possible Emergent Narrative feels as though it could be interpreted as a complete narrative. That is, cutscenes are unable to contradict the player's choices. Obviously older games especially have a million glitches and this can throw that out, and some issues with the gameplay/narrative integration can be pretty minor, like in the
Fire Emblem
games in which support conversations assume the class of the character. People referring to troubles riding their Pegasus that they are no longer riding, characters complaining that they don't understand swordplay despite having been changed to a sword using class, etc. But even those sometimes can be a bit grating and break the immersion of training your elite group.

The best example of story and gameplay integration I personally would say is
Pyre
(in which the player can have anywhere from three to nine protagonists along for the entire ride depending on how well you play, and the story is not compromised regardless of which three you have remaining for the final stretch of the game).

A "Bad" game is one in which the player's actions seem completely irrelevant to the story that plays out. Games like
Tales of Berseria
where you get presented with a boss fight that you have to win, but as soon as you win it you get a cutscene of you losing the fight and the boss walking away. But if you lose the fight because you're not good enough, you just get a game over. This is made especially jarring since earlier they do an unwinnable boss fight for narrative purposes, and then this time around forget that they can actually do that.

My justification for calling them bad comes down to the nature of gaming. In a medium that is currently under constant public scrutiny for being mindless violence, and being written off in significant areas of the academic world as nothing more than mindless entertainment incapable of telling a meaningful narrative, I think it's important that we do see games which are able to give the player a meaningful narrative which actively benefits from the interactivity that is unique to gaming. Not necessarily through meaningful choices (as this is pretty impossible because you can't allow the player to influence literally everything (see The Stanley Parable Raphael Trailer) but rather by creating a reasonable "illusion of choice". You want to give the player enough choice to be engaging, but not so much choice that it allows them to go against the intended narrative and create canon or narrative errors (Like
Life is Strange: Before the Storm
).

Either that or have a few intended narratives/consider ways of recognising more unusual player choices, or construct a broad narrative which will allow the broad range of player options to not contradict the core narrative. Basically so long as someone can sit down in one complete play through and get a narrative that works, it's at least a passing grade.

This structure is only really useful in assessing single player games.
Overwatch
and similar multiplayer only games need an entirely different form of assessing quality which I've not given that much thought into as my interest has always been drawn to single player games more.

How do people feel about the distinction? Are there any games which you feel don't easily fit into this mould? Do you feel this distinction is too black and white? Do you think that it matters whether or not a game is bad on a theoretical level but enjoyable on a "fun" level? Do you think a similar distinction can be placed on multiplayer entertainment-focused games?

I think for me I find it interesting that I put
Pyre
on the top of my list of technically competent games, but I don't think I'd put at the top of my list of my favourite games of all time and so that puts me in an interesting spot in regards to which is more important between technical competence and enjoyment competence.
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Post Post #1 (ISO) » Thu Jan 23, 2020 5:17 pm

Post by Espeonage »

I know this is your argument but I have long felt that that Skyrim is objectively one of the worst games in recent history but one of the best games subjectively in recent history.

I think that your question of distinction between a well made game and a good game is a valid distinction. I know you are mostly talking about integrations of elements in to something cohesive that doesn't break immersion or fail to make sense.

Using other media as an example, there is a long history of well made films not being popular while poorly made films being really popular. So many people will have something widely panned close to their heart for some reason or another and I think it is the same for games.
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Post Post #2 (ISO) » Thu Jan 23, 2020 5:20 pm

Post by Xtoxm »

i dont understand how some people think movies have a narrative but games dont
a lot of games feel just like movies but with interaction
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Post Post #3 (ISO) » Thu Jan 23, 2020 11:44 pm

Post by AcRv »

In post 1, Espeonage wrote:I know this is your argument but I have long felt that that Skyrim is objectively one of the worst games in recent history but one of the best games subjectively in recent history.

I think that your question of distinction between a well made game and a good game is a valid distinction. I know you are mostly talking about integrations of elements in to something cohesive that doesn't break immersion or fail to make sense.

Using other media as an example, there is a long history of well made films not being popular while poorly made films being really popular. So many people will have something widely panned close to their heart for some reason or another and I think it is the same for games.
I think a few open world games have a similar issue to Skyrim, but yeah, I 100% understand that assessment. I feel like people don't talk about games in this way often enough though which is kinda why I wanted to see how people felt about it as an idea.

Xtoxm wrote:i dont understand how some people think movies have a narrative but games dont
a lot of games feel just like movies but with interaction
The argument is that if the interaction isn't having a meaningful interaction on the story then the story is incidental to the gameplay. And since the only thing unique about gaming as a medium is the interactivity, sidelining the narrative to an in-between role through cutscenes feels like saying "we can't tell narrative through interactivity so have it on the side." Which a lot of games tend to do, thus confirming the argument they're all making despite
Portal
and
Half-Life
noticeably avoiding cutscenes altogether. If the unique/meaningful portion of gaming doesn't convey the story then they assume gaming in its purist form cannot tell a narrative.

Having interaction isn't enough to be distinct unfortunately. It's more about how the interaction influences the narrative to make most scholars even consider the notion. Which I'm not sure when I last saw in a significant way.
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Post Post #4 (ISO) » Fri Jan 24, 2020 8:24 am

Post by popsofctown »

I'm skeptical that GlaDoS's voiceovers are meaningfully different from cutscenes. That seems to me like a technicality. Portal does contain events that make some stronger arguments for interactive narrative though, notably
the variable amount of time you can hesitate before betraying your companion cube, and the different amount of dialogue you get. But even if there was no dialogue at all, I feel like the orchestration of that event in the game
is arguably emergent narrative, at least to the extent playing a cowardly Master Chief instead of a brave one is emergent narrative.
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Post Post #5 (ISO) » Sat Jan 25, 2020 6:59 pm

Post by AcRv »

Portal
has more to it than GlaDoS's voiceovers though.

You have the hidden areas where other test subjects have (presumably) tried to hide out in, or other employees. But these exist entirely in the environment and a player may choose to not bother with them. They supply more meaning to GlaDoS's voiceovers than it being just a podcast playing alongside your gameplay, even if that is definitely an understandable stance to have on those bits. That being said, it's also hard to not notice those little areas because accessing at least one of them makes the puzzle a lot easier (access to cubes which help deal with turrets).
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Post Post #6 (ISO) » Mon Jan 27, 2020 10:19 am

Post by popsofctown »

I'm saying it's a technicality to say Portal "does not have cutscenes". Hearing dialogue when you are trapped in the elevator and can only look around the elevator isn't meaningfully different from if the controller locked up during the elevator ride. Portal does have a lot more to it and delivers lots of narrative in forms that do not resemble cutscenes, but at least some of the forms of the delivery of the narrative so closely resemble a cutscene they essentially are.

I don't think it's necessarily the case that the necessity of cutscenes as a crutch
means
the gameplay components of the story aren't delivering narrative as genuinely as a movie is. Consider early silent films. It wasn't really possible to keep the story coherent and followable unless, at least occasionally, letters were placed on the screen stating something, interrupting the silent acting. No one would say that silent films don't deliver narrative and that the letters on the screen were the only "true" narrative in the film just because silent films mostly didn't seem to exist without them.
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"What? Nothing? You would make the prince suffer over... nothing?"
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Post Post #7 (ISO) » Wed Jan 29, 2020 9:32 am

Post by bugspray »

In post 6, popsofctown wrote:I'm saying it's a technicality to say Portal "does not have cutscenes". Hearing dialogue when you are trapped in the elevator and can only look around the elevator isn't meaningfully different from if the controller locked up during the elevator ride.
HL2 also has many moments where your only interaction is looking around. Consider after alyx wakes you up in at the end of the first chapter and that entire section inside the citadel where you are just riding a cage
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Post Post #8 (ISO) » Wed Jan 29, 2020 4:56 pm

Post by popsofctown »

HL2 is free right now and I haven't played it so I probably should not read the post.
"Let us say that you are right and there are two worlds. How much, then, is this 'other world' worth to you? What do you have there that you do not have here? Money? Power? Something worth causing the prince so much pain for?'"
"Well, I..."
"What? Nothing? You would make the prince suffer over... nothing?"
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Post Post #9 (ISO) » Thu Jan 30, 2020 2:47 pm

Post by bugspray »

Enjoy
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Post Post #10 (ISO) » Mon Feb 03, 2020 3:26 pm

Post by vonflare »

In the OP you talk about halo creating different narratives depending on whether you play it with a 'speedrun' strat or not, and the fact that both narratives are consistent in the world makes it 'good'.

Does that mean games where the speed running strat involves silly-looking out of bounds skips/clipping through walls are instantly bad games due to this? That's not a very good way to determine if a game is good. How 'consistent' does the narrative have to be before its consistent enough?

Seems like a very weird subjective way to judge quality.
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Post Post #11 (ISO) » Tue Feb 04, 2020 4:21 pm

Post by AcRv »

In post 6, popsofctown wrote:I'm saying it's a technicality to say Portal "does not have cutscenes". Hearing dialogue when you are trapped in the elevator and can only look around the elevator isn't meaningfully different from if the controller locked up during the elevator ride. Portal does have a lot more to it and delivers lots of narrative in forms that do not resemble cutscenes, but at least some of the forms of the delivery of the narrative so closely resemble a cutscene they essentially are.

I don't think it's necessarily the case that the necessity of cutscenes as a crutch
means
the gameplay components of the story aren't delivering narrative as genuinely as a movie is. Consider early silent films. It wasn't really possible to keep the story coherent and followable unless, at least occasionally, letters were placed on the screen stating something, interrupting the silent acting. No one would say that silent films don't deliver narrative and that the letters on the screen were the only "true" narrative in the film just because silent films mostly didn't seem to exist without them.
I think the issue I take most with cutscenes is where their content is stuff that could have been told through gameplay. Like when people start fighting in a cutscene in a fighting game. There's no reason for it. The one thing I can do in this game is fight so why would they take it away from me? Or when the cutscene shows something happen that simply can't happen within the confines of the game or is illogical based on what's happened within the game. They need to actually be supporting the gameplay instead of contradicting the gameplay, which is pretty common in a lot of games just because of how many choices a player has. I do get how GlaDoS's narrations are kinda like podcasts that help complete the narrative that's obtained through player interaction.

In regards to silent films "needing" text, I would argue that was because of where they were at with film innovation.
Shaun the Sheep
has over a hundred episodes without a single word uttered and over a hundred different stories. That being said, Aardman are a brilliant studio and they've had many more years of innovation and film history to work off of than early silent films. But I would agree that people don't undermine silent films just because they use written text in them.

Theoretically being able to exist without an element and being competently made without an element are two different things.
In post 10, vonflare wrote:In the OP you talk about halo creating different narratives depending on whether you play it with a 'speedrun' strat or not, and the fact that both narratives are consistent in the world makes it 'good'.

Does that mean games where the speed running strat involves silly-looking out of bounds skips/clipping through walls are instantly bad games due to this? That's not a very good way to determine if a game is good. How 'consistent' does the narrative have to be before its consistent enough?

Seems like a very weird subjective way to judge quality.
I didn't say that both narratives were "good". I described the two kinds of emergent narratives, and then said that a "good" game would be one where every possible emergent narrative DOES make sense. Because some of the shenanigans I got up to as a kid really didn't make sense (constant burnouts and driving out into the ocean just because). However there are only so many restrictions a player can have put on them in a game. That's why it's so hard.
Halo
at least has the marines deciding to fight back if you shoot them too often, and in the first level shooting an ally too early forces you into an unwinnable fight against a squad of invincible marines to discourage such behaviour down the line. Of course they couldn't do this at every possible opportunity for the player to shoot their teammates.

Games which can be self-reflexive and change based on the player's shenanigans are ideal. Even if it's subtle things like if you turn the marines hostile at any point they remain permanently hostile or something like that. Things that show that you are actually impacting the storyverse.

Out of bounds glitches are an entirely other category. Those are more about the game's structural integrity than the game's narrative integrity.
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Post Post #12 (ISO) » Tue Feb 04, 2020 4:25 pm

Post by AcRv »

Just for reference, this post is going to be working with the understanding that a game's narrative is "any and all events which unavoidably must occur assuming the player successfully arrives at the creator's intended ending."
The creator's intended ending definitely didn't assume glitches/going out of bounds. The creators intended ending includes anything that exists within the rules of the game as laid out by the code, not by exploits in the code. Finding that line is a much larger discussion. It's probably more of a spectrum than a line in the sand.

Though also if there are lots of ways to go out of bounds then yeah, the game probably required more bug testing.
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