Great point.

Lots of great points, throughout this thread, in fact. I know I’m smarter for having asked the question. I hope you all are getting as much out of this as I am.

Of course, actions contribute to story in both games and films, but in many games, player agency is dealt with in a way that generates a fundamental tension between the progression of the story and the free will of the player.

Most games that have narratives let the story wait for the player to a greater or lesser extent. Films generally don’t. There are pros and cons to both when it comes to storytelling.

Films have a pre-determined duration that narrative events are carved into – like a block of ice being sculpted, say. This allows narrative forms to be defined and refined with greater precision, because what is decided stays decided.

Games (again, to greater or lesser extent) have the fludity of spontaneous choice to contend with. However, the reward for succeeding in this is the ability to involve us more actively in a narrative by giving us choice and control.

Ultimately, both narrative games and films represent events in sequence tied together with some sort of causal/logical/thematic thread. However, within the bounds set by game designers, opportunities to forward the action are often in the player’s hands, and the story must necessarily wait for those choices to be made.

I don’t think story and action are separate by necessity. To my mind, the former requires the latter. Why we experience them differently in films and games is down to how much of each are determined by ‘author’ and ‘audience’.

I think the reason action is considered more separate from story in games than in film is because action tends to be the focus of a game’s ‘fluidity’. If stories could be given the fluidity in games that actions have, then perhaps the two wouldn’t feel so separate.

Which could make it a mechanical question of interfaces (whether in video or tabletop gaming), or a question of who is making the story and how.

Very interested by the comment “If my guy is beaten in combat, I’ve lost”: if the game is about continuing a story, the only “lose” conditions are “no story” and “dull story”. In story telling, reversals of fortune are bread and butter. In some people’s views of gamist play, reversals of fortune get identified as player failure, rather than character failure (with, yay for hardcore gamists, more challenge up ahead).

With respect to TABLE TOP gaming, which we do as a family as well, my husband the gamemaster is a natural storyteller. The action, while slowing down the story, is very much a part of the story.

*sorry for the flub*

The action can’t be pre-planned. It has to be random. The players would feel it was completely unfair, otherwise. (”What do you mean, it was foreordained that I would be killed by that Ogre?”) So the action never happens for a reason. It isn’t based on the author’s intentions.

Try to imagine if it was the other way around. If the GM rolled dice to decide what the story would be, but just told you what happens with the action.

Since the outcome of the action is necessarily unpredictable, it can’t be taken into account in the GM’s preparation which is designed and planned. So the action will always end up as a sort of bolted-on adjunct to the rest of the story.

That’s probably why in terms of producing a story I find RPGs that integrate conflicts with the rest of what’s going on to be more effective. I do enjoy throwing down with D&D4e, but there’s a very sharp division between combat and everything else in the game, so the source of the enjoyment is very different. Some games have reduced if not outright eliminated the mechanical distinction between action and not-action, and I wonder if perhaps those kinds of games make it easier for the action to feel like part of an overall narrative.

There are very few video games in which the action is there to move the story along. In many games, the story just seems to be there as an excuse for the action/shooting or particular game mechanic.

My family and I like to do video games together. We treated them like interactive movies. One person will play and the others watch with popcorn and snacks like a movie. It was fun to play “Twilight Princess” and “Wind Waker” and the like because there were great puzzles and stories and lots of interaction between the player character and NPCs to get the viewers involved. Now that the kids are older, it’s very hard to keep everyone but the player interested in the more mature games. We get a little bit of story, then lots and lots of sneaking around and shooting. Half of us get up and leave saying, “call me if anything happens.” Or “just tell me what happens with _____.”

The “action” ends up interrupting the story so badly that those not actually performing the actions lose interest.

Outcome.

John McClane falls in a fight to an Austrian ninja, it’s because the story (and its collaborators) want it that way. For the story. His failure is a good conflict. It feeds the tale.

When I fall in a game fight, I have “lost.” It serves nothing if I lose. It’s based on random factors and my Mad Button Skillz. It isn’t, however, based on what the story needs — not even from my perspective as “player-collaborator.”

– c.