Why Bungie gets visual storytelling wrong (Destiny)

by Ragashingo , Official DBO Cryptarch, Sunday, July 26, 2015, 20:50 (3408 days ago) @ Cody Miller

Not bad. Not bad at all.

I'd agree that Destiny misses tons of opportunities to give the story weight and meaning. The three Tower Vanguards sum up Destiny really well. Bungie gave us three fantastic and distinctive voice actors and then... had them stand around a table uttering mostly throwaway lines while never leaving their spots. Just like the Vanguard, Destiny itself has huge potential. It's universe seems custom tailored to convincingly support any type of story (from space zombies to political intrigue to anything else) in both epic and up close and personal fashion... and we mostly went around having our Ghost open doors while giving us between one to three sentences of exposition that, at best, had to be pieced together connect the dots style to understand what was going on.

But, while Destiny's storytelling (really, its in game storytelling as we all agree the Grimoire is pretty fantastic) fails on a lot of fronts and in a lot of ways, I do think you take it too far by concluding Destiny isn't about anything. The things that are happening in Destiny's in game story are great concepts. An alien race pillaging unprotected areas of the Earth, a second race ramping up invasion plans after they destroyed and drove us from our moon, a third race of robots who transform planet after planet to support their own life at the expense of ours have already taken over Mercury and are right next door working on Venus, and a fourth super militaristic race has set up a large presence on Mars. These concepts are communicated to the player and the game is about ending or turning back those threats in order to protect the last safe city on Earth. That these good concepts are not conveyed with anything near sufficient emotional weight or shock value is a disgrace, but even so the game is still about something.

You’re reading a book. How does the book engage you with the story? Not the way the author writes, or the situations and structures of the narrative, but how does the actual medium draw you in? Like everything, the answer is emotions, but the way, and the kind of emotions are specific to text. It appeals to your emotions through imagination, since everything that happens is happening inside of your head, with no real sense of time, chronology, or any sense that it is beyond your control. Your mind can stop, go over details you find important, and focus on particular things. A moment can hang in time or even reverse until you have processed it to your liking.

What about the visual arts? These engage your emotions in a completely different way. They work by simulation. We react immediately and viscerally to things, because the representations seem real. We see it. We hear it. It plays out in real time mimicking the way we perceive the world. The illusion is very convincing. If you stop reading a book for a second, nothing happens, since the book does not depend on the continuous nature of presentation. In fact, very few books are even meant to be finished in one sitting. But pause a film? The illusion breaks down completely.

So your emotional reactions to audiovisual media are intense, spontaneous, and more cathartic. Has a book made you cry? Maybe. Has a film? But has a book ever made you jump out of your seat and scream in fright? That I doubt. What’s on screen comes at you wether you want it to or not. With a book, since it’s all inside your head, you have the final say…

While it is true that a book has a very hard time getting the instant shock that having the scary clown pop up on the computer screen can easily elicit, I question whether that kind of shock is worth much. Further, while I've rarely heard of people jumping up out of their seats while reading a book (though a well done twist can cause that) I havel heard of people putting the book down and not wanting to read any further because the events coming in the next paragraph or page are sufficiently moving or frightening to the reader. I'd argue that writing a situation or character so well that your reader slams the book down because they've gotten too involved or jumps up to tell a friend what just happened (which again I have seen before) is the written word's version of the shock or surprise that a movie can bring. They're not exactly the same, of course, but then the mediums are entirely different so that's no surprise.

Personally, I find the flash of a scary image accompanied by a burst of loud scary music to be worth far less than a story written well enough to get the reader highly involved. The movie is basically cheating, playing on uncontrollable biological responses while the well written scene in the book is doing so so much more to actually engage with its audience.

For all the talk of how valuable books are, they are simply unable to tap into emotions as completely and as viscerally as visual media. That’s why audiovisual media are the most popular way to tell stories in the modern world, and why huge groups of people connect with them. So yes, Lord of the Rings had devoted followers when it was just a bunch of books, but folks who were engaged with the Lord of the Rings did so in a very different way than those with Star Wars.

I think its fair to say a movie (and also sound) can far more easily touch certain emotions and get certain responses, like shock and instantaneous fear, but books are also very powerful and can do a great job of tapping into emotions. As well as a movie? I'm not sure. That might be a question for the scientists. But I do feel you're unfairly discounting the power of a good written story.

Text is best for the unspecific. What exactly did Kabr do? It wouldn’t really make sense to actually see it in its discrete steps. It works as a legend. It works because it’s supposed to prime us for the Vault. It works because our imaginations and minds are turgid, non linear, and unspecific.

The story of Kabr works as a legend because it was written as a legend. I think it could be written as a closer up, more real time, more personal story and also work. Would it be tougher? Sure. The author would need to come up with a series of interesting events and would need to put a lot of work into pacing all to keep the text from dragging on, but it's not like movies or tv shows never have pacing problems.

The problem of course is that Destiny is an audiovisual work. It had better be working as one in the way it engages us emotionally. It tries. The image of the traveler is at the forefront. But it doesn’t work. People are more attracted to the grimoire than the story the audiovisual tells. Why?

Because so far the Grimoire has done a much better job at storytelling than the game has. The hope is the game is getting better.

Bungie always used text and lore to emotionally engage. Marathon and Myth did it because, let’s face it, the audiovisual elements of games at that time was crude. So Bungie rightly fell back onto lore and text to make us engage with those games, and it worked. But we’ve moved on, and our games can give us convincing audiovisual stimulus which creates the illusion we need for visceral emotional engagement. So why not do that? Why is the grimoire not a support for the game, instead of the game being a support for the grimoire?

That is indeed the question. Especially since this was the same studio that gave us Halo. Now, Halo also was not at the forefront of storytelling. Generally it did a passable job and made up for the rest with great gameplay. As much as we Bungie fans have made of Bungie's storytelling capabilities I think there have always been games that did a much better job. But it was often the case that Bungie games were more fun. And since it was a video game we bought and not a movie, the game being fun is very important.

And so we get to the biggest problem with Destiny: it’s not really ABOUT anything. When nobody in your world has even the slightest hint of feeling about it, I can only conclude that the work isn’t really about anything. None of the characters really stand for or represent anything, so what ideas are actually presented in the work? The characters all have jobs and stuff, but nobody places those jobs relationally. Having one guy interpret the will of the speaker has some pretty heavy implications, but nobody cares so apparently it means nothing and stands for nothing. All you needed was to show people eager to hear what the speaker has to say. He comes out, makes a speech to eager onlookers, then talks to you. Simple. That would tell you everything you need to know about how he is viewed. So when Brother Vance tells us Osiris thinks he's a fraud, it means nothing, because we don't see anybody believing him in the first place!

But the implication that people believe him is there. And that another character has told your Guardian they think the Speaker is a fraud does raise questions in your mind. Why is he allowed a choice place in the Tower? If he is a fraud what is his real goal? He does send us on urgent missions and does (sorta) let us know that our defeat of the Darkness in The Black Garden had a positive effect on The Traveler. He does even speak to people who pay attention to him at the close of the game.... which is before Brother Vance tells you his is a fraud. Should his character and his actions have been shown significantly more? Absolutely! Same with all the characters. But, as someone who does apparently care about Destiny's story, it is wrong for you to claim it was all about nothing. You and I and others who care about Destiny know it is about something... just, for some unknown reason, that something did not make it into the game with anything as close to the weight we were expecting.

Even the most basic stories are about the growth of the hero via the hero’s journey. Destiny seems rife with setup for that. The unlikely hero, resurrected into a foreign world, learns the ways of being a guardian and fights off evil. Sounds good right? Except that’s not realized in the game at all! Your character DOES learn new skills via the mechanics, but that is not realized at all in the game narrative. Nobody trains or teaches you or even comments on it at all. The evil is just this ‘thing’, and doesn’t really stand for anything either because it doesn’t affect anyone in the game. It fails on even that level.

I agree that the reveal and implications around The Darkness in The Black Garden was horribly mishandled. Of all the problems with Destiny the part where our Ghost says (and I'm paraphrasing here): "I got a text message from the Speaker. He says: 'Traveler all better now. K Thx Bye'" infuriates me to no end. The biggest, more important result of all our actions in the entire game lead up to that point and its resolution is a short text message read to us by our Ghost while the return to orbit countdown starts up. But we were also told in that mission that the fate of The Traveler, the one thing that is protecting our last city, was hanging in the balance of our actions. It's there in the audio and in the subtitles. Is it terrible that it is conveyed as badly as it is? That we don't even know why it was critical we stop that blob of Darkness at that specific moment? Sure! But you can't ignore that it was there.

You might say that we do get context through character motivations and feelings in the grimoire, and you do. But remember the point above. Text primes you differently in terms of emotion, and the grimoire functions as world building. But all that stuff is basically off limits. Do you know why? Because when you put it into the game, it will immediately fail at its job of world building and mystery precisely because it now goes from the unspecific, imagination driven land of text, to the specific, reaction driven world of the audiovisual. Why do you think Darth Vader went from being completely awe inspiring and transfixing in the original trilogy, to just lame in the prequels? Because in the Original Trilogy, he was the last Jedi who hunted down and murdered all the rest. The most powerful. That Legend hangs over you whenever you see him. But when you actually see that legend happen? It becomes concrete. Specific. It no longer hangs over him, but collapses down like a quantum wave.

No. Darth Vader became lame because the prequels were absolutely horrendously terrible from start to finish, not because we saw the specifics of his origin. If his origin had been good and well told and well acted, if he had been a worthy hero corrupted and forced into darkness instead of a whiney jerk with too much power and not enough sense, then the specifics of his fall from the brightest light of the Jedi Order to its dark, terrifying destructor would have been awesome! Just one specific, in the original movie we were told that Anakin Skywalker was a great pilot. We did not see that in the prequels! We saw young Anakin accidentally blow up the one important Trade Federation blockade ship in Episode 1, we saw no piloting of his in Episode 2, and we got that one pretty opening battle in Episode 3 where for the most part Anakin flew in a straight line and the only thing he really shot was the shield generator on that Star Destroyer.

And I think this is as true with Halo and the specifics of the Forerunners as it is with Star Wars and the specific of Darth Vader. Revealing the specifics can work if the specifics are well thought out and well told. It's just all too often the specifics are neither of those things and we get stupid vampire Didact wanting to kill all the Humans instead of retake his place of being the protector of all life, and we get: "NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!" instead of an actually compelling story about Anakin Skywalker. :(

But because visual storytelling is built upon specific sights and sounds, it has no place for legend other than to color the things you don’t see. But if Destiny has nothing to say, it all has nothing to color and so we fall back on the text for emotional engagement. But this throws out the raison d'être of visual media in the first place! So why not get Tolkien’s estate to write a series of Destiny books, make LotR in space, and call it a day?

Because Destiny is also a fun game. It would be a heck of a lot better if it were a fun game with a compelling story, but it is still a fun game.

But the focus of everything in Destiny so far has been the Legend. This is clear from the marketing, and it’s clear from the fact that the Legend is the only interesting thing about this universe given the completely mishandled state of the narrative in game. But Legends are incompatible with the actual content of audiovisual narratives. because when you see it, it’s no longer a legend but a specific thing… it’s just what happened. It’s why games like Lunar 2 that take place hundreds of years after the first, and have the legends of the original characters part of the fabric of the game, ultimately fail. Those legends sound ridiculous, because I was there. I actually did it…

As I mentioned elsewhere, I think you are wrong about Destiny being about becoming a legend. The marketing was never meant that to be a part of the story. Nothing in the story or the Grimoire shows that it was. Become Legend was merely a marketing slogan meant to suggest that Destiny is something fun you can play and will give you stories you can share with your friends, which for most of us it accomplished.

I'm not sure what you mean by the second part. Did Lunar 2's lore contradict the actions of the character you played in Lunar 1? If not, then you've really got no complaint unless they so screwed up their storylines that you played the same character hundreds of years apart when he had no reason to live that long. That you the player played two related games has does not mean the character you play in the second game was there in the first. You're smart enough not to confuse those two things...

Destiny is never going to suddenly become about something just because the characters now talk to each other in the first mission and have a bit of a misunderstanding. The fact Bungie is using that to assure us is indicative of the bar being so low initially. The characters need to say, do, and believe things. They need to stand for something.

Maybe the characters will stand up for something during gameplay and in well done cutscene? My hope is Bungie hasn't shown us that happening because they are Bungie and have always liked maintaining story secrecy. Maybe that will happen and maybe it won't, but we have no way to tell from what they've released about The Taken King so far...

At the end of the day Destiny is just a game, and the fun comes from the moment to moment shooting. But, even that is improved, even just somewhat, if we know why were are shooting. As Cyber once said, “Sometimes I wish Bungie would just say they don’t care about the storytelling and just leave it at that”.

Agreed. I wish Bungie would either come out and admit that they simply screwed up but will try to do better (if that's what happened) or come out and say delays with the Destiny engine and pressures of shipping for four consoles unfortunately had a unintended impact on the initial storytelling (if that's what happened) or tell us that the way things are is all part of the plan, that players who just want to shoot stuff can and players who want to dig deep into the universe also can (if that was their intention all along.) Right now, we're unfortunately left bewildered at how our favorite developer continued its gameplay excellence but failed quite badly at in game storytelling. :(