[Malignus]

I just posted something on IndieRPGs.com where I put the question to a smattering of indie RPG developers: why have narrative in games? Check it out!

http://indierpgs.com/2010/06/why-have-narrative-in-games/

[XMark]

Emergent gameplay is good to have, but without a human level of AI it won't be able to tell as good of a story as what a human developer can craft into the game.
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Mark Hall
Abstract Productions
I PLAYS THE MUSIC THAT MAKES THE PEOPLES FALL DOWN!

[Rainer Deyke]

Why write books, when you can just sell pens and paper instead? Why paint, when you can sell paint? Why take photos, when the world is full of objects to look at?

Emergent gameplay is only as interesting as the stories it creates.

[tcaudilllg]

Narrative depth evolves over time. Since the 80s to today, game narratives have steadily increased in depth. For me, it's a matter of engagement in the quest to uncover the depth of human nature. If you don't have passion for the quest, then the narrative is little more than a roller coaster for your emotions.

[Hajo]

Most roguelikes work with a very limited background story, and many of the simulation type games do not need much story either.

The need for a story, and how well the story works with the game, depends much on the rest of the game. In the more exploration based RPGs the story is more of a background, while the more guided RPGs (JRPGs?) allow more story and also benefit more from a story.

For me a story is always a problem: If it's too present in the game I can play the game only a few times, and games which depend too much on the story get boring once one knows the story. Roguelikes, simulation and exploration based games have a much higher replay value, but at the expense that the story is shallow and generally cannot be linked strongly to the events in the actual game.

There are attempts of procedural story generation. I haven't seen really good ones yet, but I imagine that such can combine the best of both worlds: Interesting story with endless options for new games which will be always different from the former playthroughs and new.

I think the Soldak Entertainment games with the dynamic worlds are good at this already - there is no written story, but the changes in the games world make a story, too.

[RampantCoyote]

One of the best minds in the business - Chris Crawford - has been working on the concept of "true" interactive storytelling for a couple of decades now. My limited exploration of his results thus far suggests we've still got a ways to go, though I have to admire what strides he's taken.
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Tales of the Rampant Coyote - Old-School Game Developer talks Indie Games, RPGs, and the Games Biz

[tcaudilllg]

[XMark]

I think the best kind of storytelling in a game is a combination of everything. You need to weave as much story into the fabric of the game as possible. Some games do this really well. I'll discuss a few:

Half-Life 2 has a lot of great examples of this. Take Ravenholm for example. Nobody tells you what happened there, but from your previous experience dealing with combine headcrab bombings, and seeing the evidence that they deliberately launched headcrabs en masse into Ravenholm, you piece together what happened there and it just adds to your feeling of hate towards the combine without saying a word to you. And the random G-man encounters have a different flavour than in Half-life 1. He knows that you know he's watching your progress, so he even waves at you one time. There's little details like a chained vortigaunt doing menial labour at the train station, sounds of an alarm message being sent to central command when you kill one of the masked civil protection officers. Spray-painted Lambda signals showing where rebels have cached ammo. One of the more interesting ones, back to Ravenholm, is when you get up to a higher point and you see a chair set up with a shotgun and a bunch of ammo, and empty beer cans all around. You can totally imagine father Grigori spending a bunch of time up there, drinking beers and blasting zombies, laughing like a maniac.

In Shadow of the Colossus, there's a very small amount of cinematic cutscenes compared to gameplay, but it still tells an effective story by demonstrating how barren the lands are, and how humans have stayed away from it for untold centuries. And there's a gigantic bridge over the land leading directly to the temple just so nobody needs to set foot on sacred ground. Something that must have taken a tremendous amount of time and energy to build. There's the feeling after killing each Colossus that you've just done a really horrible thing, making you question whether it's right to destroy all these creatures, defile the sacred lands and destroy what took so long to build, unleashing a demon on the world just to save one person's life. There's the slow degradation of the main character's appearance as he kills more of the colossi. The pillars of light that appear for each one you kill.

Basically, to tell an effective story you need to consider the story in every single aspect of the game's design from level design to character design, music composition, gameplay, sound effects. It's all gotta work together.
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Mark Hall
Abstract Productions
I PLAYS THE MUSIC THAT MAKES THE PEOPLES FALL DOWN!

[tcaudilllg]

That's very interesting. It leads one to ask "What is a colossus? Are there colossuses in my own life? How is a colossus not unlike an older way of thinking, an institution, perhaps?"