Story in Video Games part 1 - Story's Purpose
Originally published July 2016Let's talk about story in video games for a moment. It's a tough thing to discuss because of how the medium itself affects storytelling, but it's also interesting to me for the same reason. A plot or story in a video game is barely comparable to how a story is handled in a movie or a novel.
Successful books and movies are typically reliant on the story being good, with the exception of Michael Bay movies or uneventful fan-fiction novels with grey ties on the front cover. There's certainly some room for aesthetics to help with those mediums, like how the somewhat boring academy-award winner The Revenant has a very basic story, but showcases more about the wilderness than anything else. There are a variety of factors to consider when critiquing a film or book beyond just the plot. Yet, if the story is poor or just absent altogether, the quality of the book or movie could suffer tremendously for it. For video games, it's a more relative situation.
Image: Electronic Arts
Games without stories can be just as successful as those that do. From the days of the old Atari home consoles, through the 16-bit era with the Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo, story in video games was more of a rarity and served a much less-involved purpose. Today, however, players expect a lot more out of their video games. Unfortunately, the stories rarely meet expectations.
Story in Video Games pt 1: Purpose
Story in video games serves a number of different purposes, from its most basic form to its most complex. It can be a simple backdrop to the game: alien invaders are attacking; a house is haunted and the hero must escape; a big turtle-dragon has kidnapped a princess and her only hope is some Italian plumber, etc. It can also be so involved that it's almost the entire purpose of the game itself: Heavy Rain, Metal Gear: Solid, Final Fantasy. Story serves a purpose in varying roles for video games, which means that when I find the desire to review a video game, I often take the intended impact of the story into account with the whole experience. I ask the question: What is the purpose of the story (or lack thereof) in this game?
Image: Cellar Door Games
The most basic purpose of having a story in a video game is to motivate the player to complete it. On the old Atari home consoles, during the ‘80s, it was rare for a game to have an involved story because most of those games were not meant to be beaten, just to be played until you couldn't or didn't want to play anymore. That was how the arcades did it to suck down quarters, so that's how game design was mimicked at home. It wasn't until the Nintendo and Sega consoles started picking up speed that game design started to change and it was more about finishing a game than playing till you were bored with it.
However, if you just plopped players into a game world and made them just go around punching guys in the street, or jumping on the heads of turtles without any motivation, how long do you think those players would stick with it before they got bored? The original Super Mario Bros didn't tell you right away. You were just jumping on rotten mushrooms and killing turtles for no apparent reason until you got to the first castle, where you were told the princess was in another castle. If you took your time for the first 3 levels, this would take you about 20 minutes, which is probably a reasonable guess for how long a player would still be interested in a game before finding out there's a plot. It was also common for games of that era to drop you in just as quickly, but provide some backstory to the lore and the characters involved via the game's manual. This was certainly the case for some of Nintendo's biggest franchises; half of the original Legend of Zelda's story was told through its user manual booklet.
Classic 2-D sidescrollers like Mega Man and Streets of Rage, meanwhile tell you right up-front in opening cinematics that there's some evil you've got to eliminate and that maybe there's a reward at the end. Are you going to physically win anything from a video game? No, of course not. And even when you did beat the game, usually all there was on those old games was a brief epilogue or just a black screen that said "Congratulations!" or worse...
So if you couldn't actually receive a physical reward for your victory, what was the point? A sense of completion and the sense of escape. Much like how we are able to imagine worlds as we read a novel and become immersed in the story, the developers ask that players become immersed in theirs, more so, in fact. The medium asks players to become involved in how the story plays out. Sure, the beginning and end may be set in stone, and there may be some big set pieces that are always the same, but the players are the ones making sure the story is told to completion. That sense of involvement and achievement when completing a game is why a good story, or just a well-utilized one, can make the experience that much more enjoyable.
However, as I said earlier, a game doesn't always need a well-told and in-depth story to be good. When a game doesn't have much of a story and doesn't need it, there's no need to criticize it for the smart decision of omission. It's when the story is the crutch of the game and it fails to deliver what it intended that things get messy.