Stories in Games Part 1: Or, Bioshock is Chutes and Ladders, not Requiem For A Dream

[Editor's Note: I've been working on this article a while now. Excuse my tardiness. I've been thinking a lot about stories in games lately. To be more precise, I played through Heavenly Sword and had a serious disconnect between the gameplay (which was basically filler) and the story (which was excellent). That lead to this article, which is tentatively a three or four part EPIC, discussing video games as a storytelling medium, past present and future. Of course, I'll sporadically make fun of Sonic the Hedgehog just so you'll know you're still reading Joe Q. Gamer.

This is sort of an introduction, an immense and baroque thesis, and I'm aware that I'm leaving a lot of obvious holes in my arguments. Rest assured that I'll be addressing them in upcoming installments.

It's gotten to the point where I really should just say "fuck it" and write a book. In fact, I might do that anyway. Until then, though, you get my rambling for free. Ain't the internet grand. ]

Everything that we call 'media' -Books, films, plays, and even comics- exist solely to impart a story. Anyone who's read Sartre, Aristophanes, Dostoevsky, or Faulkner knows that storytelling can be more than simple distraction; it can teach. Properly told, a story imparts a moral. Expertly told, a story can change the reader's perception of the world. Authors and directors of traditional media have always understood this, and the best of them strive to impart their personal ideas and beliefs on to their chosen canvas, be it on film, a stage, or the written word. Now, I admit that the continued careers of Danielle Steele, that "Twilight" woman, and Michael Bay seem to contradict my point here, but even a trashy romance novel or summer blockbuster has at it's core just a little bit of the good 'Ol Joseph Campbell. They may be shit, but they're shit with a story.
Games, on the other hand, are different. Games originated as simple tests of reflexes and skill. Pong and Space War do not compare to "Nausea" or "The Grapes of Wrath"... Or even Transformers 2. Grand Theft Auto is a pale, ugly shadow of The Godfather. Final Fantasy XVLLFM is not Tolkien or Borges. The truth of the matter is that traditionally, games are their mechanics first, and their stories second, and they have little to do with traditional media in that regard. You play a game: you experience a film, play, or book. As such, games barely resemble traditional media in the method by which you interact with them. In fact, they most closely resemble card and board games, activities where what you do is more important than what you take in. This fundamental difference in purpose and interaction is often ignored by the pundits arguing for the cultural importance of video games, and it's something that the industry is just now starting to overcome. Are they overcoming it? Yes. But it's slow going.

(Wait, wait wait.... I can smell the defenders of Final Fantasy and it's ilk opening up their email accounts to send me hateful words. I can hear herds of World of Warcraft fans rustling in the dark, sending me witty rebuttals. Do yourselves a favor, and stop. I don't care, and you shouldn't care. Go back to hanging wall scrolls and reading fan fiction. We're both happier that way).

Considering that we now have games like Bioshock and Mass Effect, you could argue that my point is ultimately meaningless. Regardless of the origin of games, developers are injecting their creations with the same infusion of ideas and beliefs as film, novels, and plays. "Moral choice" is one of the hottest industry buzzwords, and game reviewers raise or lower their scores in relation to a game's story. You COULD make that argument... But you'd be wrong. Games have made great strides towards legitimacy in the story telling department, but they have a long way to go, for one simple reason: games still need to be FUN.

Consider films such as Hotel Rwanda and Shindler's List. No one sane considers these movies to be fun experiences. They hurt to watch. They remind us that not everything in the human condition is sunlight and roses. Indeed: that's the point. Orwell and Huxley warn of dangerous trends in human behavior in their books, forcing the reader to confront ideas they hold dear and judge them in a harsher light. Their purpose isn't to entertain, or amuse, or distract. Their purpose is to teach.

Let's put it another way so I don't have to deal with a mountain of hate mail from Sonic the Hedgehog devotees. Consider how much fun it would be to play through "Requiem For A Dream: The Game". (Consider also that the publisher would probably demand that the developer put in quick time events during the "ass to ass" section of the final level, and that you'd be forced to replay it fifty times in order to memorize the sequence. DLC would include a replacement arm for that guy from "Party of Five" for subsequent play throughs, and you'd unlock a custom needle and cooking spoon item for your Xbox Live avatar if you ruined more than five personal relationships during any given level. I don't even want to think about multiplayer, but you know it would be in there. It would probably be called "Smack Down". And the whole shebang would be published by Activision).

Developers both independent and big league are coming up with interesting ways to bridge the gap between storytelling and mechanics and deal with the 'fun' problem. Bioshock uses it's environment to tell a story in ways that even film hasn't equaled. Silent Hill plays with your mind in interesting and media-specific ways. Pathologic, which we're going to come back to quite a bit during the course of this series, bends and breaks so many rules that it's hard to classify it as a 'game', exactly: it's more of a forty hour mind fuck followed by three minutes of extreme satisfaction that happens on your computer. These kinds of games are still a rarity though: most games opt for explosions and player empowerment, and use the story only as a device to logically string the levels together. Is that bad? No. But it isn't Shakespeare, and games have a long way to go before they can hang with the Bard.

In the next installment we discuss why some genres of games are better at telling stories than others, and speculate on how mechanics themselves can tell a story. I can literally smell your excitement.