Changing culture, one gamerscore at a time.

It’s been almost half a year since I started my column on narrative in videogames. Since then the site’s gone down and I’ve missed four columns, which will be written when the site reappears. It’s made me think a lot about narrative, as did the podcast I made a guest appearance on yesterday which you can find here.

The thing with narrative in videogames is that there are so many obstacles in the way of actually producing one that’s going to be both enjoyable and memorable. Sure, it’s feasible enough to assume that with history-dependent titles such as Call of Duty a narrative isn’t actually needed, that we can depend on gameplay and worldly knowledge to tell us Hitler is the antagonist in this particular situation.

But how do you tell a story set in space, full of aliens and severely lacking in realism in any immediately identifiable form? Mass Effect teaches us that if we’re going to put the player in an environment where they’re going to need to absorb a lot of narrative and character information if they’re going to know where to head next, it’s important to ensure the way in which they absorb this information is both interesting and enjoyable.

You have infinite ammunition. This is something about a lot of videogames I’ve always found inherently ridiculous, from Space Invaders onwards. But Mass Effect goes out of its way to explain that, in fact, each bullet you fire is a tiny sliver of metal sliced off a block in the ammunition chamber, rendering a normal-sized clip capable of millions of rounds, which, by then, you’ll be back on the Normandy and your weapons are in lockers, presumably reloaded. That hardcore attention to detail is comforting, and immersive.

On the flip-side, there are games that encourage you to learn its narrative through the sheer lack of it, and the morsels of storyline offered to you in the form of audio diaries, and the occasional walkie-talkie monologue directed at your protagonist. I am, of course, talking about Bioshock. It’s a title entices you into discovering its storyline and its characters simply because it means you can apply knowledge to all the insanity taking place in the underwater utopia of Rapture. When you enter a broken room, your brain is going to assess the area you’re in in two ways: one, you’ll think about battle-damage, or at least the likely cause for the room’s dilapidated form. Two, it’ll encourage you to find out why it happened, and whether, in a room surrounded by billions of gallons of water, someone has decided to make it leak.

Dialogue seems to be the biggest obstacle. Mute protagonists always seem to get more done in the way of storytelling simply because it’s not relying on the player to tell the story. Gordon Freeman, the unnamed (no spoilers is a good thing protagonist of Bioshock, even the little lads and ladies you pilot around the various continents in Pokémon, not to mention Cloud Strife and a thousand other player avatars over the years. It almost indicates a lack of confidence, doesn’t it, from developer to player? Almost like we’re idiots, not to be trusted with the delicate aspect of videogames that is storytelling. Surreal, really, when you consider everything else we manage to mess up along the way, from not hitting the enemy base with the right type of rocket, to killing the population of Feros when we could have simply knocked them unconscious, but apparently that’s a “moral” choice.

Moral choices are… it’s hard to speak about them in a negative or positive light, really. On the one hand, it’s seriously lazy storytelling. If you want to be either good or evil, simply just interpret the character the way you think they should be interpreted. For some, Cloud Strife was a hero, someone who overcame a lot of mental instabilities in order to save the world and get the girl. On the other hand, some people thought he was a deranged, violent amnesiac who went completely nuts and killed everyone who ever questioned his true identity. Admittedly the game’s film sequel and various prequels and spinoffs did a lot to expand on his personality, but when you need at least two other narratives just for the one you’re playing to make sense, is that really a working storyline? Or is it co-dependent on titles the player may not even be aware of, let alone own?

Fable 2 drove me up the wall simply because the good and evil choices were so obvious, and to me it really did ruin a believable narrative at times. Don’t offer two donor characters in the form of a criminal and a cop, offer them in the form of an honest beggar who stole a loaf of bread so his children won’t starve, and a policeman who’ll lose his job if he doesn’t get the bread back. That’s moral choice. That’s storytelling that relies on the player for the more dramatic, controversial twists and turns in the plot. I’d have lost sleep over that choice. However, giving information on criminals to a criminal, or giving it to the police, isn’t a moral choice. Players won’t help the bad guy because he’s bad and they’re bad. They’re helping him because they want a district of the city to turn out differently, because they want the horns, because the black dog looks like their black dog. Moral choice gets mired in the long list of aesthetic implications of your actions, and renders it pointless.

I’ve spent my life pondering on narrative, to the point I’m now actually qualified in the subject. It’s taught me many things, but if anything it’s taught me that it wasn’t wrong to value narrative over gameplay. The same people who value narrative are the same people who value games by Tim Schafer. You’re not playing them because they have the same inherently amazing gameplay and gentle difficulty curve as the latest 10/10 FPS title. You’re playing them because the man is a master storyteller, and his characters are funny, his universes believable, and because he makes Tim Burton look so uninspired.

You can come up with the best storyline ever for a military FPS, but you’ll never make me lose sleep the way I have over Mass Effect 2‘s potentially changed character roster.