As I’ve stated before, I work two jobs and don’t have as much time to play videogames as I would like, making me choosy about what I do play. I have a laundry list of factors I look at before deciding on what to rent and/or buy: how long is the game, did I like its predecessors, how is its buzz online, etc. I used to choose games that were short and sweet, and that I knew I could knock out in a weekend if I had to, but lately I’ve becoming more attracted to games that I’ve heard tell a great story, sometimes planning out which games to buy months in advance in order to find out what happens. In the words of Homer Simpson, I like stories.
I’ve always like stories. I like context for my gameplay decisions, and since I play videogames for escapism purposes, I want a worthy place to escape to. I’ve been having difficulty getting into non-narrative games like FIFA and Shantae, while mobile games with the most barebones stories draw me in helplessly (Tiny Wings is a perfect example of this, offering two or three paragraphs about how the birds dream about flying and how they practice gliding until nightfall when their mother comes and takes them home, a story that makes me MELT the more I think about it).
A good story in a game isn’t necessarily the same as a “good” story in a film; go event-by-event in some of your favorite game stories (“Niko jacked a car and shot a whole bunch of dudes and now looks miffed at something another character said”) and you may have to end up grading on a curve. “Good” stories in videogames often plays second trumpet (there were no fiddles in Belgrade High School’s symphonic band) to good storytelling, which are two completely different things—if a game’s story is the Wikipedia plot summary of what happens in the game, storytelling is how it happens. That is, good dialog and character interaction and moment-to-moment events will win out over, say, “Kratos stays angry for three full games, plus side stories.”
A degree of this has to do with the interactivity in games. Precise storytelling isn’t often possible on gaming, even with the degree of scripting and narrative options available. Even story heavy-hitters like Spec Ops: The Line don’t quite stack up compared to the best in film and story. With game stories, though, gamers can fill in the blanks of their play experience and use the you-are-there sense of place in games to own their stories. Game stories are often written in a broad, simplistic manner to accommodate for killer gameplay, which is a fair tradeoff to me.
Besides, even if gaming stories aren’t very tight, I find myself filling in all of the gaps between story “events” and mentally turn what is often a basic A-to-B journey and turn it into an epic Homerian tale. Take one of my favorite game stories, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. The Wikipedia plot summary is ridiculous: A bad dude uses unspecified magic to make everything awful for people unless a mute fairy kid collects several different-colored coasters. What it feels like, the actual storytelling, is an unlikely hero journeying through a strange land and positively impacting the lives of everyone he meets, culminating in the savior of that same land. Link, the hero, is deliberately made a blank slate, the better to encourage players to project themselves into Link’s persona, and the entire quest arc feels rooted in rewarding the player with their discovery, rather than telling a “great story.” A novelization of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time would be dreadfully dull.
Apart from interactivity, I feel like games accommodate for backstory better than nearly every other piece of media out there. Two of my favorite game stories make extensive use of backstory: 1998’s StarCraft and Brood War expansion, and 2001’s Halo. Both are sci-fi potboilers, and likely not noteworthy to genre fans more knowledgeable than myself, but they both have extensive universe-building that isn’t shown in-game, making their stories feel deeper, or at least more expansive than their Wikipedia plot summary would suggest.
Recently, I’ve even started playing games specifically for their stories, rather than gameplay. I’m playing through Mass Effect 2 on my Xbox 360 right now after hearing so much about what Bioware has done with the series’ emphasis on storytelling, and I just started Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos yesterday because of how much I enjoyed StarCraft’s single-player. I’m currently considering trying out Dragon Age: Origins for its fantasy narrative, though this is a half-formed thought at best.
Gaming and storytelling will only continue to grow closer and closer, just like movies did as storytelling techniques and technology progressed. Some, like David Jaffe, say that story-driven games are a waste of time, but as a gent who fancies escapism, I look forward to living out new stories in my games, and new ways for videogames to tell their stories. Simple or complex, storytelling is one of my favorite aspects of game design; I love being told a story, and I like telling my own story even more.
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