In-game narratives need work.

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What’s the Point?

These last few years the concept of story line has been digging its claws deeper and deeper into game design. Sometimes this may entail a silly adventure, and others a long, fleshed-out plot riddled with social commentary tucked neatly into a sweeping epic. But is all this really necessary on such a large scale? The last time I checked, video games were meant to be an interactive experience, yet more and more we’re seeing games that have us watching rather than doing. Sometimes it’s nice to know that the fate of the world isn’t resting on your hero’s shoulders and all that you need to do is save the princess, or blow up a giant space cruiser in a shoot ‘em up boss battle. It seems that in recent years many developers have forgotten, or at least chosen to ignore, the concept of having a premise in place of a story.

A big part of the problem is publishers’ tendencies to gravitate towards a “winning formula”. When one game comes along and sells through the roof competitors stand up and take notice, seeing an avenue to make a tidy profit on. It’s the nature of business to take a profitable idea and exploit it until the market is utterly saturated with similiar product and demand dries up as a result. We’ve seen it in the auto industry and music – just turn on the TV and you’ll be inundated with reality television; the game industry is doing exactly the same. With the continued popularity of RPGs and the success of such narrative driven titles such as Metal Gear Solid and Splinter Cell, going beyond the confines of a premise and into the realm of story lines stories have become the Belle of the Ball these days and there’s no sign of them going away anytime soon.

Unfortunately, because of this many plotlines that have been appearing in games are largely interchangeable. The names of the characters may be different, the enemies may not be the same, and the motivations often only differ slightly, but the overall structure has become a cookie cutter. At this point the words are different

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but the song remains the same. We have the same tools and the same plot devices showing up again and again. A lot of this can be attributed to the fact that so many games are based on some sort of conflict. For a time simply being told you had to stop an evil empire from taking over the world was more than enough reason to play, but now developers feel a need to have some sort of justification for seemingly every little thing the hero does in a title.

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Therein lies the rub.

How many reasons can a person or persons have for wanting to put a stop to an imperialist nation or to infiltrate a military installation or to become the best fighter in the world? Really each of these scenarios has only a limited reservoir of motivational factors to draw from and we’re already starting to see that in many genres as these factors slowly get mixed and matched ad nauseum.

Steering clear of this pitfall will prove quite the challenge. The nature of design today is so integrated into the concept of conflict-based gaming that it will be very difficult to break free of it. We have seen some successful attempts in the forms of the Sims and Tycoon franchises as well as the many life experience styled simulation games lurking on the shelves of game shops in Japan. (Cooking simulator anyone?) Still, these get lumped into the realm of simulations. Getting away from these regurgitated narratives is going to take a lot of work to truly get off the ground. How do you make a gaming equivalent of The Sweet Hereafter, or Guess Whose Coming to Dinner? These sorts of stories are so foreign to conflict-based games that they simply cannot work. While it would be nice to see developers and publishers take a stab at going in a new creative direction to pull something like this off, it is a huge mountain to climb and the costs and the risks involved would be more than enough to scare off many. As such the industry continues to saturate the market with likeminded spy stories and other related plots.

So why not have more games that only use a premise and not a story? Gamers are far more willing to accept a premise being used again and again than to have the same rehashed story appear repeatedly. We want to be sucked into a world and experience it, while not necessarily being yanked out to have an explanation for what we’re doing. Surprise us with a new way of approaching combat or strengthening our on-screen alter ego. Focus on doing and not saying. Focus on immersion and not narration. Focus on the gameplay and forget about weaving a fine narrative tapestry, because frankly, that tapestry is being mass-produced with soulless factory machines and not the loving hands of a skilled tailor.

- Mr. Nash

May 7, 2003


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