Games Are the Reason Why Story-Telling in Games Sucks

A weird article appeared on The Escapist. The author is generally right, and yet he got nearly everything wrong.

The key quote is this:

Games are constantly expecting you to just go ahead with the action without knowing why you’re doing what you’re doing, and it’s not just jarring, it leaves players with no investment in seeing the tale through.

That is sometimes true, but it is also an insane generalization. Who had any problems understanding who you are and why you do what you do in Watch Dogs, Call of Duty: Ghosts, or Grand Theft Auto V? Or, if we take a few smaller games, Banner Saga, This War of Mine, or Never Alone?

Nobody, that’s who.

I’m not saying that every single one of these games is an example of a great story-telling. I’m saying that when you play them, you know exactly why you are supposed to engage with the story. The set-up, the inciting incident — all there. We can argue about the quality of it all, but not whether these things exist or not.

After the author stated that players could not invest themselves in the story of Bioshock because…

[…] you swim down to a ludicrous underwater city after a plane crash and it turns out you’re from there-something you don’t find out until the last act of the game.

….I should have just closed the browser and spent the day more productively. Basically, except for Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, all examples given are incorrect. Also, bias is introduced, giving us movies as an example of how to do it right, as if Sixth Sense did not suffer from basically everything the author accuses the video games of.

(To be clear, it’s not that Sixth Sense has done anything wrong, it’s just that the author is biased to the point of blindness, e.g. claiming that Gone Home never gives us any “character-driven reason” to explore the family house).

And these are not even the worst parts of this article. But while I could laugh at the assertion that stories in games are a necessity (please tell that to Tetris) or that Her Story cannot engage properly (I guess that is why I wrote a book on it)…

…here’s the thing. Some video games do have a problem described in the article.

(EA meaning Early Access in this case)

The problem goes even deeper than that. Many games rely on revealing important details about the protagonist in a wrong way.

Here’s the right way:

I know who I am and why I am supposed to go on → then surprises happen, some of them might be about my identity or my past or the world I took for granted

Here’s the wrong way:

I have no idea who I am and why am I supposed to care → then it’s slowly revealed to me

Of course, as it’s always the case with fiction, we could find great counter-examples, especially those that appeal to our love of mystery and mysticism:

But in general, not being able to properly engage the players and expecting them to keep playing just because there is a game to play is a sin that many games commit indeed.

Seriously, even Mario, with its tiny ghost of a story, does it better than a lot of games full of supposedly advanced story-telling. “A pretty girl was kidnapped but I can save her” is a better set up than “I guess I can move forward, so let’s see what happens.”

This could be a very long essay or a short blog post, and allow me to go for the latter this time. But I do want to leave any game designer with the following question:

When I play your story-telling game, do I know why am I supposed to care in a way independent of the mechanics spell?

It is a fairly awkward phrasing, so allow me to explain. Novels or movies heavily rely on the quality of the story-telling. When that suffers, the reader or the viewer usually disconnects.

Games have a different kind of problem. Interacting with stuff is magical. It’s so magical that people often keep on interacting with the game despite its story-telling layer sucking harder than a nuclear vacuum cleaner. It is one of the reasons — if not the reason — why the improvements in the quality of story-telling in games are much slower compared, say, to the cinema’s first decades.

So if your game is supposed to let the players experience a great story, ask yourself if they would continue playing if your gameplay layer was weak. They most likely would not, but that is not the point of this mental exercise. The point is to see if the players could find a reason to go on.

In other words, if your gameplay is fantastic, imagine what happens when it’s enjoyed by the players deeply invested in the surrounding narrative. And they will have a hard time making that investment if they do not understand why they should care.

There are other things to consider — like: if you actually can separate your gameplay from your story then you’re doing it wrong — but let’s leave that for another day.