John Carmack on story in video games: "Story in a game is like a story in a porn movie. It's expected to be there...

John Carmack on story in video games: "Story in a game is like a story in a porn movie. It's expected to be there, but it's not that important."

Was he right? Is he still right today?

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Depends on the genre

One of the most overrated hacks in vidya history.

In his days sure, because the only way to bring a story across was chunks of text.

Is there any porn that actually has a deep and interesting plot?

He's an alien

That alice in wonderland: an x-rated musical had a pretty solid story.

Forbidden Lovers

He should stick to being a code monkey and not pretend like he has any knowledge of game design

carmack is barely human, his opinion on anything besides programming is irrelevant

...

john carmack, designer of game engines, has opinion about something he knows nothing about (professionally or otherwise)

coming up next: staying up past your bedtime, cool or lame? find out, with john carmack.

Carmack also thought that it's a good idea to take data from your old employer and give it your new one.

how was that lawsuit with zenimax going?

That one Hentai I watch when I was 9 the dark chapel,dude rape a nun in orderto get her pregnant and use the baby as ransom for a church or someshit

source code?

Monster Girl Quest

Pretty good analogy actually.
No matter how good the story in a porno could be, you're there to fap.
No matter how good the story in a video game is, I'm here to play a game.
I wouldn't call them deep but there are some that are interesting.

yes, he's still right. even in games that try to tell a good story ultimately the gameplay is what keeps you interested. it's not a good medium for storytelling since you can't have too much exposition or people will get bored.

Caligula if you count the version with porn spliced into it.

There was also some artsy shit in the 70s when you needed to give people a reason to get out of their homes an go to an actual theater to watch porn.

That's why Rage kind of sucked...

As reported in David Kushner's Masters of Doom, when Carmack was 14, he broke into a school to help a group of kids steal Apple II computers. To gain entry to the building, Carmack concocted a sticky substance of thermite mixed with Vaseline that melted through the windows. However, an overweight accomplice struggled to get through the hole, and opened the window, setting off a silent alarm and alerting police. John was arrested, and sent for psychiatric evaluation (the report mentions 'no empathy for other human beings' and describes Carmack as 'a brain on legs'). Carmack was then sentenced to a year in a juvenile home.[4][5]

Last I heard they specifically named Carmack instead of just generally alluding to ex-employees. Straight up claimed he came in after he already resigned, dumped a lot of shit on a USB, and left.

fucking fatasses ruining everything

Fuck off John
I pirated all your games, eat your fucking heart out

...

Meme Lover
youtu.be/o3jR_9oW3Lk

who's #1? billy g? gaben? some nintedo guy?

Hope he gets sued.

>mfw buying games for the story
>when 98% of video game stories are bad
>when you can literally watch them on youtube for free

Hilarious.

what if he is innocent, and manages to code his way out of court?

Completely valid opinion to have at the time. You have to remember it was just the generation before doom's release where the amount of text you could get in a videogame was cripplingly small. Experience and development might have differed on pc but you have to remember that fact shaped the standard for a industry that was in it's infancy in a way people who grew up with the super nintendo or later might have a hard time grasping.
Story in an old game might amount to a little flavor text in the intro, because that was all you could feasibly get into the game at all. Of course story is going to take a back seat.
Storage capacity grew, the standard lingered for a while, and for the people growing at the time the sentiment favoring it is still valid.

>Carmack is such a programming savant that he just hacks reality and escapes the lawsuit by noclipping through a wall

I'm 90% sure that was something Romero said

He's viewing "story" in very limited manner more befitting to literature and film and not an interactive medium. If you look at some of the games most associated with idea of "gameplay first" and look at why people play them, turns out people don't play something like Europa Universalis because they enjoy the act of shuffling through menus and clicking stuff but because they enjoy roleplaying a sovereign and taking part in the whacky emergent narratives taking place in the game. Indeed, most games would be damn boring without the associated worldbuilding and emergence, and these aren't things that are just there but require conscious efforts from developers in order to be interesting. Never mind that there are games in which story in its more traditional capacity is obviously a core component (consider something like a detective game: how can you even have such a thing without involved "whodunit" story?), I think worldbuilding and designs responsible for good emergent narratives should be considered a key part of vidya storytelling.

He was right at the time but not now. We've gotten to the point where a half decent story is more necessary. Depends entirely on the game too.

I hope he is super sued.

tough shit
Carmack used iddqd and no law can stop him from doing what he pleases

As I recall the top of the list was various executives from Activision, Microsoft, Rockstar, etc. and a couple of actual developers, one of which is Notch. Don't think there's any Sony or Nintendo stuff in there but the source is the official xbox magazine or something like that.

Berserk's Eclipe.

EVERY GAME IS DOOM OR QUAKE FUCKING IDIOTS OH ALSO CONSOLES USE THE SAME HARDWARE BETTER THAN PC ;^)

I suppose he's correct.

If you take a game like The Last of Us, the story was pretty good but the game was kinda average. TLOU could have been a movie or a book or something and lost nothing, the game was just a way of progressing through a story. It's a step or two up from a walking simulator.

Mario, with the exception of the RPGs, throw story to the wind keeping it exceptionally simple; go rescue the princess. Yet the gameplay and level design is always good and varied and pretty nice to look at.

RPGs are the problem to Carmack. The idea of an RPG is to play a role, to be a part of the story. Not like TLOU, where you watch what is happening, but develop a character with certain strengths and weaknesses over the course of the game. A story is very important. If they used Mario's design method, with clever enemies and levels, it would be difficult to be a part of the story as you would ending be represented as simple numbers on a stat card rather than someone in that stories world.

TLDR; Carmack is right and wrong at the same time.

Or worse, written out-of-order in the manual because there was so much of it that they couldn't fit it in the GAME.

In all seriousness though, Carmack was the engine/graphics guy, of course he didn't know shit or give a shit about story. It's an unfortunate case of the left hand not knowing what the right is doing that's been given too much credence.

maybe he just didn't experience what games today have to offer, because before the games were all about gameplay. HL, Portal, Bioshock, Jak and Daxter, MGS, COD, Hitman, etc. wouldn't be what they were if they didn't have story.

he's probably a nerd who jacks off to computer parts anyway

He's perfectly right. Read a fucking book if you want a good story. Games are made for GAMEplay. Otherwise you end up with garbage interactive movies like The Last of Us or Unsharted.

This.

See, what Citizen Kane did for film was truly prove the uniqueness of film, as distinct from any other medium: it was a display of film's distinct storytelling mode, not just a stageplay recorded by a camera.

So when we talk about the Citizen Kane of gaming, it's not really something like The Last of Us, which mostly is just a movie with some gameplay parts, the same as we've been seeing for years.

The Citizen Kane of gaming is something that would emphasize story/setting immersion and the agency of the player. The story should be something experienced, not something told to the player, and some of the best video game examples are where the setting IS the story. Not a linear story, but a world that fits a "gestalt", and a presentation that mixes sound, visuals, movement and player interaction into a "gesamtkunstwerk".

I think the closest things we've ever had was Far Cry 2, it's a deeply underappreciated game.

F/SN.

But then again all it's sequels were SFW to capitalize on it's setting, so it may be an example of a porn story so good it transcended pornography.

A good story compliments a game, it doesn't make it worse.
Bioshock had a great story and cool gameplay.

He's right and it's provable by one succinct fact.

The value of story in a bad video game immediately becomes zero, no matter how good the story is. While the story in a good game, is immediately lauded, despite how bad it may be by itself, because the gameplay sells the story.

Mario is a good example. Nobody will deny Paper Mario 64/TTYD are the best video games ever written, but that's cause they're also good games.

I don't think your first point means he's correct.
For example imagine someone who can enjoy both a good story and the challenge of a game. Making a game where the player can experience both things will only make the game better. The people who don't like story can just skip it.

Also, in TLOU for example the story would probably need a good amount of work to make it into a movie or something, and the game alone would be boring. So, story and gameplay came together to provide an enjoyable experience

VNs are kind of cheating though

With them it's more like the porn is expected to be there but is not important

you're thinking of Romero

He's right just look at dark souls it has a shitty story and people enjoy it lol

The value of a story as related to game play is mostly a matter of how well the final product turns out. There are games with shitty gameplay but amazing stories, games with amazing gameplay and shitty stories, and extremes in either direction. Its mostly a matter of reward mechanic. People stopped giving a shit about points in the 80s. The proverbial mechanic to keep people hooked became finding out what happens next.

That and the fact that when you gauge the value of a game, something that costs 50$ and takes a few hours to beat and then you get bored with feels like less of a value than a game that can keep you occupied for a month.

There's nothing special about Far Cry 2. It's just a sandbox game with a linear story, player agency is no different for it than it is for any other sandbox game.

It's funny that you criticise other games for just being "a movie with some gameplay parts" and then praise Far Cry 2 considering Far Cry 2 was basically a failed adaptation of a couple of books.

The real Citizen Kane of gaming is Thief: The Dark Project

By those standards there's no shortage of Citizen Kanes in gaming though

For MOST fps games, especially at the time, yes. He was talking about the cawadooty genre of games where you play mainly for the gameplay, not the story.

It all depends how you interpret it and I must say people throw this quote way too much, thinking Carmack meant to make a big statement with it. It's in a book about Doom for fucksake, not in a speech about game design.

>gestalt
>gesamtkunstwerk
Blow away, windbag

True, except a distinction to what you said, I hold that a bad video game can't have a good story just on principle. Never seen it happen, and probably never will.

How good/bad the story is, is always reflective of the quality of the game to keep me invested in it.

No, players need a reason to do what they're doing.

A game can be fun for a while, but without a purpose, you'll drop it after a few hours.

Such as?

So story is a crutch for bad gameplay? Gotcha.

Are you just going to pretend that the entire competitive gaming scene doesn't exist? How about all those puzzle games like Tetris and Lemmings that were immensely popular?