> “It took me so many years to realize that the power of all games are not with the characters but instead the actual environment.”
This is an interesting thing to read from the co-creator of a game franchise with a deep enough lore that multiple novels have been published in its universe. The characters in the Myst series are not insignificant – certainly the specter of Gehn in Riven, even though you actually meet him only briefly at the end of the game, is ever-present as you explore the world he ruled and bent to his will.
And yet, that seems to be exactly what Robyn Miller is talking about there: The character of Gehn is important, but the player gets to know him not through direct interaction, rather through exploring the environment. Gehn's screen time is an afterthought to the character development that derives from observing the obsessive details of the places he frequented and shaped. The environment is the character development.
Myst marked a turning point in environmental storytelling, and its effects have been felt all the way from the golden age of first-person shooters into the modern age of "walking simulators." Even when today's games take the overused shortcut of audio logs to fill in the details, the stages they set all track back to those curiously broken chairs in Sirrus' study that made you ask "wait, what happened here?"
My preferred model for describing games is: a simulation of some universe, and a way to interact with it. In such a model, learning a story/plot through interaction (with the simplified simulation) is only natural, and storytelling through direct means in the fashion of books/movies, in a game, is clearly a hack, directly conflicting with the nature of a simulation.
And ofc myst was no innovator in this — environmental/interactive storytelling was well established by interactive fiction (IFs), MUDs, text adventures, etc — but it is the quintessential example for modern video games (but thats not saying much imo, since few modern game developers seem to even believe games actually existed before 1990, let alone learn from them)
And thats not to say that all games fit my described model well (eg asura’s wrath has almost no simulation/interaction at all, but derives decent impact from the qte mechanic) but at the same time, a lot of games that don’t fit the model were doing a job in the wrong medium (the uncharted series has a sufficiently engaging plot [kinda], but it was really just an action/adventure plot told very innefficiently, with a sufficiently engaging but almost totally seperate third-person shooter game interspersed. Both plot/gameplay would have been better served by their own mediums, instead of being composed into an awkward hybrid)
I think the true innovators in that realm are games like Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies, both of which were heavily influenced by Raph Koster, who came from a background of roleplaying in MUDs.
There have been lots of "sandbox" games before and after, but those two really captured the right balance between creating a rich world to explore and giving the player(s) the tools to shape it and create their own stories. They really understood the concept that "it takes a village" of different players and playstyles to form a dynamic community. I think they were really ahead of their time and hinted at what might be possible in terms of creating compelling alternate realities in VR.
Riven really was the pinnacle of this in their games. The mark of a man on an entire culture, subtle yet unmistakable. One of the games that made the most lasting impression on me over the years.
I really want to play something like this in VR. PSVR’s resolution is too low for me so I recently bought an Oculus Go. Great device but I can’t find anything Myst-like. Any recommendations?
Take a look at Eclipse: Edge of Light and Relic Seeker: Hypogeum. I've finished neither, but have enjoyed playing each for a few hours. Eclipse in particular has good storytelling through environment, I think.
This is an interesting thing to read from the co-creator of a game franchise with a deep enough lore that multiple novels have been published in its universe. The characters in the Myst series are not insignificant – certainly the specter of Gehn in Riven, even though you actually meet him only briefly at the end of the game, is ever-present as you explore the world he ruled and bent to his will.
And yet, that seems to be exactly what Robyn Miller is talking about there: The character of Gehn is important, but the player gets to know him not through direct interaction, rather through exploring the environment. Gehn's screen time is an afterthought to the character development that derives from observing the obsessive details of the places he frequented and shaped. The environment is the character development.
Myst marked a turning point in environmental storytelling, and its effects have been felt all the way from the golden age of first-person shooters into the modern age of "walking simulators." Even when today's games take the overused shortcut of audio logs to fill in the details, the stages they set all track back to those curiously broken chairs in Sirrus' study that made you ask "wait, what happened here?"