Story modes or nope?

In the first blog that I read was in regards to having games without stories as this caught my attention right away. I’ve been playing video games since the original Nintendo 64 from there to a GameCube, Xbox, and Xbox 360 and so on. Honestly I have played more video games than I have probably read books, and because of this I have experienced majority of my story telling and imagination from these experiences. Hearing that certain people find the stories within these games irrelevant and less interesting than the most mild of story books I found myself in confusion. By removing stories from games it would eliminate the option for a lot of single player video games. Now there can be objectives and goals setup throughout to make the game interactive and enticing for single players but even that would run dull as the player will not have an overall reasoning or goal for playing. A specific game that comes to mind is Grand Theft Auto, not only does it have several stories throughout the game but they intertwine together which helps the player become even more involved and explains the reasoning for why you completed all the tasks in the story mode.

Granted the stories in majority of the games I have played aren’t “critically acclaimed” or require the highest of intelligence, but without these stories in the games, the games seem to lose the “glue” that really holds the point of them together. Take the Halo video game series for example; without reasoning behind the fighting it seems like random super soldiers fighting aliens because they can rather than the idea that they are defending the earth, or what is left of earth like habitats. I came to the conclusion that I disagree with the ideology that video games don’t need stories and they should continue to make games with stories.

Continuing with the talk about the stories in video games, the difference between being immersed and an observer tends to be a very thin line. As discussed within the article, the difference talked about players trying to figure what has happened and what is about to happen. I felt that both of these types of stories need to be present in a well thought out storyline. Stories need to have a build-up or background and in some games it puts you in what may be the aftermath of this background. Then throughout the game you need to discover what has happened while also getting ready to figure out what is going to happen.