Spoilers - Do They Enhance or Ruin a Story?

[ケンジ]

While reading some articles around the Net, I came across this little detail.

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The Article basically says, and to quote Jonathan Leavitt and psychologist Nicholas Christenfeld, both of the University of California, San Diego:

“Spoilers may enhance story enjoyment by making texts easier to read and understand, leading to deeper comprehension, or they may reduce readers’ anxiety about what’s to come, allowing them to focus on a story’s aesthetic details,”

I find myself laughing with this idea, since I've been looking at spoilers everytime a Zelda Game comes out. I also see spoilers for certain novels just to put my curiosity drive on the max. It certainly has made me a bit more interested, that I can attest. But making them enjoyable? It depends on the person itself. I know people here hate to see Spoilers, since they want the "First-time Experience", which begs the question, how do people perceive spoilers, do they think it will make them more fun or worse? Sadly, I'm no psychologist, nor do I understand the concept of how our brain perceives things, but it's interesting to see the norm "Spoilers will Ruin everything" be countered with this study.

What are your thoughts on this study? Does this baffle you? Does this agree with your thoughts? Does our understanding tell us our limits on how we can know or feel the meaning of it?

The saying There's Beauty in Mystery. I guess that applies to this situation as well.
You saw the result, how it got there, is what makes it interesting.

 

[Ariel]

I've tackled with this issue internally before. (Wow, that makes this sound very serious, but it's a thread about spoilers in video games, how spoilt am I?)

Anyways, here's the situation: I have like no time anymore to sit down on the couch to play video games. Meaning, that often I have to delegate to some quick affairs, like a few games of brawl or some mobile games like on my 3DS or iPhone late at night. I've also been playing A Link to the Past for the first time.

Now, I started the game without a walkthrough, and made it in a few dungeons. But as the game has become harder, I've resorted to using the walkthrough up here on Zelda dungeon so that I can make it through a dungeon in my limited play sessions. I'm normally the type of person that would admonish others for playing a game with a walkthrough, especially games they've never played before, so needless to say I felt pretty guilty.

But, I really do enjoy playing the game even with the walkthrough. The story, which I already knew so no spoilers there, takes a back seat to the gameplay and it actually magnifies it for me. I appreciate the gameplay a lot now that I see how it's done right and I still have control of my character. Most of the puzzles are just slight variations on puzzles that I've already figured out so those epiphany moments of joy and wonder are not being missed out on. It's like watching a movie but more interactive. I lose the sense of exploration (as you can't dictate what happens in a movie) but I really get immersed in the gameplay.

So I agree with the study, to a degree. I've played 2D Zelda games before, I've done these puzzles before, I've even done the story before (OoT and TP are basically 3D versions of ALttP's story). I only lose the exploration that I wouldn't have been able to do due to time constraints.

I will NOT be doing the same thing for Skyward Sword. That will be an entirely new experience that I would hate to spoil. Subsequent play throughs will be left for critiquing the story and gameplay more in-depth. Thus, I think spoilers and walkthroughs may be appropriate under certain circumstances.

So I picked "unsure".

 

[Ventus]

Spoilers totally enhance the story text. You get the fullest understanding, and, like, you just completely know the story before you even play the game! /joke

Personally I believe spoilers can kill the story enjoyment. Everyone is different in what they believe, but spoilers honestly ruin the story more often then not though I'm not the type to pay particular care towards any story, video game or not. And the same goes for spoilers for the gameplay – if you watch too much of a walkthrough, you'll eventually know how all items work and the game won't have that same feeling as if you would have had played the game fresh without watching anyone else play. I've experienced that with Twilight Princess; I knew how every single item worked before I played the game, therefore the game was especially easy.

That's my opinion, spoilers *can* aide in story and gameplay departments depending on the individual in question. But for me, they eat away at the experience.

 

[Josh]

I find the word "Psychologist" to be a short version of the phrase "overpaid nutjob who thinks he knows everything about the brain and can therefore make any opinion he wants about it because he now thinks he's God"



But really. I don't think they ruin the game at all. When I play a new game, and I already know everything about it, I'm still just as fascinated by it as I would be without knowing anything. Each and every time I replay A Link to the Past, I don't hate the story because I know everything that's going to happen. If anything, I love it even more because I know the greatness of it and all the cool and snazzy stuff that's going to come.

Summed up, no, they don't ruin it.

/endbadpost

 

[Djinn]

Honestly I have never had any problems with spoilers at all. Actually plenty of time I will look for them just to see if a game is interesting enough for me to want to play it. I have never been bothered by learning certain aspects of a game story since I do not believe it would change the gameplay in any significant way at all.

But then again I do not treat the story of a game the same way as I do with a movie. I do not really play most games with story in mind and a general need to continue just to see how the heroes will do. So learning any important storypoints do not bother me at all. It very rarely bothers me with movies though. Unless it is something like the 6th Sense and the spoiler is too important to the complete story, than I would agree that it's ruined if you earned anything. But very few movies are built that way, at least few that I watch.

As far as not playing a game that has been spoiled? I don't think I would even consider it. A game is meant to be fun to play, not just interesting to see the story unfold. The story itself is a supplement to the gameplay. I cannot really see just how having the story ruined would make people just not want to play a game. The gameplay will still be the same if they know the story or not.

 

[ケンジ]

Yet people still fear to be spoiled. When studies like this proves it does not.


Does really not knowing make the experience better? I for one do not like that. Planning and knowing ahead is what we do to either assess the situation or to make the thing we are interested in more exciting. Why do even people fear spoilers in the first place? I don't really see a need as to why we should prevent spoilers from appearing.

But then again, spoilers in games and Books aren't that different. We know what will happen, but how it got there makes people more interested in it.

 

[Xinnamin]

For me, it depends on the game and whether the game is more impressive to me personally by its storyline or by its gameplay. The games where the gameplay mechanics are the obvious focus, spoilers don't matter to me in the slightest. I've played almost every Zelda game having already known the exact plotline beforehand and still enjoyed all of them thoroughly. That's not to say I was actively seeking out spoilers, but the fact that I knew the storyline didn't affect my enjoyment of the game.

I wouldn't say they enhance the story though. Comparing my feelings for the games I played with spoilers as opposed to without, I certainly felt more emotionally invested in the games where I didn't know what was going to happen next. But spoilers for a game are no where in the same league as say, spoilers for a book or movie. Whereas plot is the only thing driving other forms of media, games have the whole side content and game mechanics thing to fall back on, so spoilers make less of an overall impact because they only focus on the story aspect.

That being said, spoilers have killed my motivation to finish games where I liked the plot more than the gameplay around them (MM being my example of this). Even if what the study says is true, about allowing deeper comprehension and greater focus and whatnot, there's no point if the story itself is no longer engaging. Granted, in those cases where the story outweighs the gameplay, the player just probably picked a bad genre for themselves, so it's not the spoilers' fault.

 

[Majora's Cat]

I find this a very intriguing subject because of just a day ago I picked up TIME magazine and read an article in it about this very subject. The article was titled "Spoiler Alert! Seriously" and apparently confirms the fact that spoilers will not ruin a book, game or movie for you. I would like to type out and quote the small column from TIME magazine's August 29th, 2011 issue:

Forget everything you thought you knew about spoilers: they may not ruin a thing. A recent study found that knowing how a story ends doesn't curb a reader's enjoyment of the tale. So we've just decided to spoil some classics for you:

1. Anna Karenina (Anna dies)
2. The Great Gatsby (Gatsby dies)
3. Madame Bovary (Madame Bovary dies)
4. Dracula (Dracula dies)
5. Julius Caesar (Caesar dies)
6. The Picture of Dorian Gray (Dorian dies)

I think the reason that studies have shown that spoilers do not have a positive nor negative effect on a reader's enjoyment of a novel or a gamer's enjoyment of a video game is this: those who believe spoilers enhance a story and those who believe spoilers detract from and ruin their enjoyment of said story is balanced out. There is (perhaps) an equal number of those who like and dislike spoilers. This may be the case, but it's more likely just because people don't care if they know the ending of a story beforehand. As long as you're immersed in the reading or viewing experience and enjoy it, why is it a bad thing to know the details ahead of time?

Here's a good comparison: there's always information about a movie or book in an introductory column on the book flap or movie cover, right? So essentially you already know the plot. It can't be helped that the audience should already know something about the book they're reading or the movie they're watching, because then how would they know if they'd actually like to watch the movie if they didn't know what the movie was about? Now compare that to spoilers. If there were no spoilers or introductions, you wouldn't know anything about the book you're about to read or the movie you're about to watch. You just hope for the best. While I understand that some people like the element of surprise, the common people like to know what sort of book or movie they're about to dive into.

The notion that spoilers can actually spoil something for you is ridiculous. Granted, it doesn't necessarily make the story more enjoyable either. I like to think of it as neutral, it's something you can ignore if you truly don't want to know about. It's all in a person's mindset. If he/she doesn't want to know, they have a right to ignore spoilers and read it without having an former knowledge of the events. What I believe truly proves the study correct is the fact that the reader even continues to read the book even if they know the ending. Therefore, they did enjoy the book just as much than a person who did not know about upcoming events in the story - they're just in denial.

 

[SinkingBadges]

I have to say that I think it depends on the story and the person reading. But there are cases where the spoilers can indeed enhance stories and the storyteller (game developer, writer, filmmaker, whichever one you decide) knows it. I know of a few famous stories that are famous BECAUSE of spoilers, in fact.

I was reading through several film-related sites a few months ago, and a subject commonly mentioned was how many movies were so effective in key scenes because the audience already knew they were going to happen. Here's a rather clichéd example of that:

Spoiler

[video=youtube;Ps8H3rg5GfM]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ps8H3rg5GfM[/video]

The Alfred Hitchcock thriller "Psycho" from 1960. It's pretty likely that the one reading this already knows of the infamous shower murder scene. One would expect the scene to be so popular because of the surprise element, but the trailer already gave it away, as you may see at the end. That didn't diminish the impact of the scene or the whole movie in popular culture as it's actually considered a landmark in the horror/suspense genre. While I still think the people who don't like spoilers have a good reason not too, I can see the study being on to something.

Another example that comes to mind is where the spoiler is within the story itself, or should I say the way it is structured.

A good example is when the story starts at the ending and reconstructs the events that led up to it. Say, you know from the beginning that the main character is going to die and the rest of the story is how the build-up to that event. Is it still a spoiler if the story was supposed to be like that? Food for thought I think.

Still, I finish saying that spoilers don't necessarily make stories better but they don't have to ruin them either. I can see it going many ways so I voted unsure.

 

[Siniru]

Before, I thought beating OOT's final boss was impossible, so i looked up the ending. I so regret it.