Super Nerd Sundays Presents: A Lack of Color!

Narrative in games is a strange beast. All narrative is strange in its own way, but no genre fights its own narrative quite as thoroughly as games do. Where other arts forms with narrative elements which are inherently non-linear, forms such as poetry and painting, embrace and play off their digression from the norm games fight it tooth and nail. They mistake their framing techniques for their story telling techniques, they try to force you into a story instead of allowing one to develop. The end result is an experience akin to reading bad poetry: the author figure’s objective remains constantly in the forefront of the work, the execution is sloppy and aggressive and by the end if you feel anything at all you know you were manipulated into it. There is no moment of co-authored epiphany between reader and writer, no confidence in the creation’s ability to express itself. There is only the message, the School House Rock lesson we’re intended to draw from the story.

Games are situated uniquely to take advantage of experience-as-story. See, many people misinterpret cutscenes and scripted dialogue and scene as the tools which games utilize to tell their stories. But these aren’t really the tools at all. Instead they’re the frame by which the story is set. The game’s story isn’t that Niko Bellic comes to America, it is his experiences within America, each car jack and shitty date, each awkward sexual experience. The gamer’s ability to interpret these experiences exists in Niko’s silence between beats, between awkward professions of feeling and snippits of backstory. These set the scene within Niko’s head, give us a frame through which to interpret his behavior, but they don’t tell us anything about his story as we make it. Instead that story unfolds as we move through the missions, the world, the structure of play. The scope of the story, its setting and detail, is set by a group of authors, but just as is the case with any book worth reading or writing the real profundity of the work comes from the feelings evoked by the reader, the subtext with which they infuse the work. I chose Grand Theft Auto IV as my example because Grand Theft Auto IV simultaneously provides this frame and undermines it through its every turn.

It gives us a wide open playground, a familiar set of tools and cast of characters with which to interpret the world around us and develop our own story, and then it completely eradicates those objects with meaningless, ridiculous choices. It provides us with overwrought emotional beats, forcing us to like or dislike characters, deigning only occasionally to allow them to emerge on their own. And on the rare occasions it succeeds it annihilates its own accomplishments, turning up its nose as what it made you feel, taking your attachments away from you with no payoff, explanation or reasoning. It ends one of the most interesting narrative threads in the game without any sort of satisfying resolution, and when the events of GTA IV have closed the game world is completely unchanged. You can see more of it and easily access plenty of random parts, but really who gives a shit? You can buy shitty clothing and custom paint your car. Whoop de fucking do.

This topic comes to mind because of late I’ve been consuming games without strong narratives. Dead Rising 2, Darksiders and Spectromancer, all fine products, have dominated my single player play-time, and they all have no idea how to actually tell a story spare, perhaps, Dead Rising 2. Spectromancer and Darksiders both tell story entirely in interstitials, in their framing moments. I have less attachment to War in Darksiders now that I’ve nearly completed the game than I did when before I loaded it up. My connections to the characters have actually been eroded as the game develops, my interpretation of him cheapened by his dialogue and interaction with other characters. Rather than being presented with a vibrant world in which to establish myself I am instead finding my choices being eliminated slowly, the game losing its cache as the puzzles fade. It was well worth the ten dollars I spent, don’t get me wrong. But I won’t be thinking about Darksiders after I put it down, and while the game is a fun experience I certainly won’t recall the moments within the game that brought me joy. There’s no “remember the time” in a game where every time involves hitting that demon thing with my big sword, or whatever.

Scratch that, the worm-fights were pretty memorable.

Spectromancer can perhaps be forgiven for doing the same thing, given its incredibly low fidelity and its almost purposeful lack of “remember that time” moments. Spectromancer is, after all, Magic: The Gathering without other people. It’s a rote, mechanical card game wherein you compete with yourself to overcome challenges, build up your ultimate deck and essentially solve the puzzle of each fight. Of course you can’t actually build a deck, the experiences are all the same and you’ll likely develop a style of play that has less to do with recognizing each card’s function and more to do with which cards you think look and sound the coolest. And the “story” is actually a set of typo-ridden text chunks that shit out after certain fights, forcing you to click the troublesome “continue” button in order to get to your next card fight. There’s fuck all to the card fights themselves, no connection or emergent story to be found. It’s just patter.

And Dead Rising 2 and its storytelling could be an essay all to itself, a tale of conflict between a wonderful framework for the unexpected and a set of hilariously derivative establishing beats for various events. Dead Rising 2 is actually a bit brilliant from a storytelling perspective, but it will never stand among the ranks of Half-Life and System Shock 2 for its ability to make us a part of its story. Rather, like GTA IV, it is a flawed masterpiece, a game with objectives, many of which it completes handily, many of which it fails at miserably.

My point here isn’t to round up or accuse games of succeeding or failing at telling stories, although this essay could be called an indictment of many of the poorer RPGs on the market. Instead it is to mention how I’ve been relating to story in games of late: specifically, I haven’t. And this lack of narrative is starting to bum me out.

I don’t always play games to immerse myself in a story. Sometimes I just play them for the sake of mastering a system. I’ve spent many an hour on Spectromancer, playing it over and over again, relishing each victory. But games that ignore what makes their art form great do slowly start to wear on me. They’re like junk food: fine in small amounts, but suffocating when it’s all you consume. And games, of late, have seemed like junk. Perhaps there’s a rich well of narrative clinging to the underbelly of Dead Space, just yearning for me to remove its limbs and then stomp on its chest until I discover it, but there’s nothing to imply that this is the case.

I’m tempted to turn back and play some good old new-classics to sate my need for story, but I’d feel guilty turning to Bioshock 2 again before I’ve finished all the games that remain on my plate. I haven’t even touched Just Cause 2, which promises to be more narrative-free fun which involves doing awesome shit. Perhaps I’ll find some solace in games like Civilization, or in my multiplayer bastions, places where the true nature of storytelling in games cannot help but emerge. But until this feeling shakes, until I can balance it against my desire to finish the titles I’ve started before I move backwards or forwards, I’m going to remain a little bit diffident about the fact that Darksiders still isn’t over, and that I’m still slashing through enemies, still being given really silly reasons why.