Video Game Stories Must Find Their Way

Gaming has always been my favorite medium, it has been since the moment I first started zerg rushing my friends while saving Meryl from the deadly Sniper Wolf, and gaming is the only entertainment medium that has kept my attention going since I discovered it. One of my main points as to why I love gaming so much is that it isn’t just one medium anymore. Like film, it incorporates multiple mediums into itself, becoming the sum of many different mediums. Games that I love like Metal Gear Solid and Starcraft are not just great games to me because of the gameplay mechanics, but I also love them for their music, their cinematics, and dare I say it…their story.

This is where we arrive to our problem. Among gaming developers and hardcore gamers there has been a growing self-realization that stories in games for the most part are lacking. That they are trash, soap operas, shallow action stories, etcetera. Though I highlight games like Metal Gear Solid that have good stories, I can still say that stories in most video games do, for lack of a better word, suck.

Now why is this? Many gamers blame the youth of our medium; games are still quite young and unrefined. Perhaps it is true that gaming isn’t so much a bad medium to carry a good story, but it just hasn’t quite reached the maturity where developers have figured out how story mechanics can work with gameplay effectively.

Valid point. Though I agree that it is one of the reasons, I do not believe that is the sole reasons for our shallowness in video game storytelling. No, I believe that the one insurmountable barrier to good stories in video games that we face is our very definition of what a video game story is.

Now stay with me. Look at all our traditional popular mediums; film, music, photography, literature, and more. Each of these mediums tells a story or illustrates a point in their own, unique way. Though one medium may borrow some storytelling mechanics from another, each medium will still rely on its own unique storytelling mechanics to be the main driving force to their story. Each medium has found its own storytelling devices and video games need to do the same.

Take the previous game I mentioned, Metal Gear Solid. Though I love this game dearly and it is easily one of my favorite video game series out there, I can understand most people’s distaste. Each installment to the series is very cutscene heavy, with some cutscenes getting close to the one hour mark. Though I personally enjoy this series for all of its mechanics, I cannot support this method of storytelling in video games. It borrows too heavily from film to justify it as a good gaming story. Not only that, but because Metal Gear Solid relies so heavily on another medium’s method of storytelling it detracts from what it actually is: a game. A lot of people’s complaints to me about the MGS series and many others like it are there is not enough game to play, and though I am a diehard fan of the series, it is quite hard for me to come up with a good argument against them.

Nowadays you see a lot of gaming companies hiring outside help. In Gears of War they hired screenwriter Chris Morgan. 38 Studios hired fantasy author R. A. Salvatore. Though hiring professional story tellers is a great idea, the execution usually disappoints. Nobody plays the Gears of War series for its story, and they have good reason not to; the story is shallow and plays like a cheap action movie.

If the gaming industry wants to be taken seriously as a storytelling medium then they need to take cues from ThatGameCompany (Flower) and the many indie developers out there who aren’t just trying to push graphic fidelity in games and making action packed cutscenes, but are truly pushing the limits of what gaming could be, and in the process of doing so, are discovering what real video game storytelling actually is.

I believe video game storytelling can be something new and special for people to experience, because you are the one controlling the plot as it unfolds. Game stories shouldn’t just be a cut scene, or a text box, or a quick time event. And though I do not truly know how to make a video game story truly mature myself, I am looking forward to the day where I get the chance to play one that is.