Super Nerd Sundays Presents: The Story Problem!

It’s a bit surprising that I’ve never broached this topic directly on this site. It seems like the most obvious thing in the world. But it took the release of Section 8, a game with its focus centered squarely on multiplayer action, to make me consider in general the state of storytelling in games.

Part of it is also tied to Leigh Alexander’s pieces of late about the way that we seem to be repeating the same stories over and over again in games, the way that space marines clash and zombies rise and we keep on dealing with it. The Campbellian archetypes have been reduced in number to the tiniest of ultra-masculine handfuls and we define our taciturn, heavily armed protagonists by the specific nature of their armament and the morality which they apply to their Herculean struggles. It’s not terribly helpful in proving that we’ve grown up as a culture or a medium.

Section 8 exemplified the worst of these habits. Whilst to its credit the game’s story mode doesn’t claim to be anything more than a glorified tutorial it seems to aspire to do something more, to beckon us into a world so general, non-specific and riddled with clichés as to be largely indistinguishable from other science fiction settings. It introduces us to a series of generic soldiers, asks us to inhabit one, and expects us to give a shit as the others are picked off one by one.

It might not be so bad, but they’re all drawn so facelessly, each invoking a North American or European character archetype and cramming it down our throats with hackneyed accents and generic “specialities.” The only value I perceived in my teammates was their role as indestructible bullet shields who would, on rare occasion, hold the attention of enemy mechs long enough for me to empty my rocket launcher into them. Even the DIY epic moments which emerged from Section 8’s gameplay, and are indeed a huge part of what make its multiplayer so great, were undone by its attempted storytelling.

An early game boss fight where I beat off a berserking mech who had just killed my generic commanding officer ended when I fired a rocket at point blank range, destroying the vehicle, its rider, and throwing myself from the blast, dead or unconscious. However, thanks to Section 8’s removal of fail states from its single player experience instead of savoring the moment or even considering the events I was simply treated to a generic cutscene as the game haphazardly attempted to respawn me in orbit.

I’m not saying that games need to account for situations such as this, although Far Cry 2, a devoutly non-linear title with some top notch storytelling certainly managed to do so, but I do think it endemic of a larger problem with storytelling in games, that they don’t consider the player or the player’s mortality important to the story. The player is all too often looked at as a member of an audience rather than a figure interacting with and shaping the story. Hideo Kojima, upon whom so many criticisms can be leveled, should be celebrated for pushing the meta-textual envelope of games and doing some impressive things even as he maintains an almost slavish devotion to traditional game-narrative. Even if he is book-ending his gameplay segments with lengthy, non-interactive cutscenes he is at least trying to make players feel like they’re inhabiting the game world by playing the game.

I should also point out that a number of titles have already started doing this. The Half-Life series, Fallout 3 and Bioshock all lock the player’s perspective into a first person camera which all information must pass through. Sure, they all occasionally take over the game to force us to play through certain elements and they’re still, even in Fallout 3’s case, mostly linear, but they make the player and the player’s actions significant.

The elements a player pays attention to in a scene inherently take on meaning when they are given this sort of freedom. The manner in which they approach the environment shapes the story the environment tells. In Fallout 3 players can even dramatically influence the story, although certain characters must survive for the game to “go right” and certain events must eventually be fulfilled in order for events to conclude. Still, the manner in which these games allow you to accomplish these actions, the freedom they give you in interpreting the content and context of these actions is impressive. Depending on your actions during its cutscenes Gordon Freeman could be a taciturn scientist or an ADHD afflicted prick who can stop touching shit. Bioshock’s Jack could be a quiet young man seeking answers or a mindless, violent automaton who knows only violence. And in Far Cry 2 your faceless mercenary could be a divided soul who thought he was doing some good in the world or a psychotic prick who takes relentless joy in what eventually amounts to mass murder.

It’s great that people build this sort of narrative and this sort of narrative framework, but it remains limiting. Games, by nature, have trouble being open ended. Even the most robust programming team can’t create thousands upon thousands of endings for consumption. Chrono Trigger hit its limit over a decade ago with an impressive 15. But it is something to aspire to, and it’s something indie games are pushing. The Path, for example, literally forces players to insert their own story by interacting with preset objects. Blueberry Heaven may or may not have an actual ending – I’ve personally only noticed that it allows me to simulate stacking random objects as a bird man. And each of these iterations is a step towards allowing players to write their own stories into the games they play and eventually create a narrative all their own.

The real bone I have to pick with games and their stories isn’t that we’ve yet to reach this narrative nirvana. It’s that games, by and large, don’t trust their players to help them pen their stories. And developers are, of course, gamers by and large. They should know that the best moments in playing games come from the emergent elements, the occasions where the player and the persona blend together and you truly experience the narrative and feel as if you’re a part of it. Yet they do all they can to draw us out of these moments.

For example, Section 8, halfway through the game, offers up a lengthy cutscene where Corde runs rampant through a clutch of enemies, tearing them to ribbons like some sort of mad beast. It’s interesting to watch but it leaves me wondering “why can’t I do shit like that in game?” It makes me feel like the story that I’m a part of between these moments is just less cool than what the developers came up with, like I’m not worthy of playing the game that they could’ve made if only I was a better player. It makes me feel a little cheated, to be honest.

And this is the norm in games all too often. Halo’s cutscenes are entirely divorced from its gameplay, even if its gameplay does allow you to feel like a mad, cyborg devil committing alien genocide, an accurate portrayal of the Master Chief in the context of his world. Final Fantasy is infamous for treating the players like retarded children, forcing them to play the story the right way, god damnit, if they want to play any more game. And there’s a standing tradition in real-time strategy games of making sure that the story plays out entirely outside of the game itself, relegated to book-ending cutscenes informing us of why it’s so important that we build up our base and roll over the enemy base on the other side of the map.

These choices aren’t bad or wrong in and of themselves, but they fail to take full advantage of the amazing power that games have, the power to make players feel like they’re part of a story. Games all too often seem like they’re trying to ape Hollywood blockbusters, giving us big stories and pulse pounding action at the price of immersion and sensibility. They seem like they’re, to put it as pretentiously as possible, suffering from a general lack of books in their lives.

And that’s a shame, because games are really continuing the author-reader love affair that books started so long ago. They demand collaboration between players and developers, they tell stories even when they don’t mean to and those stories, even when they seem intensely cut and dry, can be debated into the ground. And that’s really really cool to me, and key to making a good game in my book. A compelling framework is good and well, but the ability to tell my own story, whether it’s a skirmish in a multiplayer game or an epic struggle against seemingly unbeatable odds in a single player game, is key to my gaming experience. Call me a pretentious ass, but if a game’s story is intractable or absent I’m not interested in playing it. If I want to master a mechanical system in order to gain some sort of ephemeral “props” I’ll play pinball, or some variation thereof. But if I want to experience some of the weirdest, most surreal, occasionally embarrassing storytelling in the world I’ll play a game. Preferably a good one.