IGN Australia asked a wide array of video-game developers about the role of storytelling in games and got a lot of good answers. In this first part of a three-part feature, IGN asks “How has storytelling in video games matured over the last decade or so? Has it matured?” and “How sophisticated is video game storytelling compared to other mediums? Is there anything holding it back?”
If you’re like me, you’ll find lots of provocative material in this piece. Like this bit, from an answer to that first question from Quantic Dream’s David Cage:
I don’t think that storytelling in games has matured over the last decade. There are many reasons for this: the first one is that video games are still exclusively based on physical actions, whether it is shooting someone, destroying something or jumping on a platform. No decent story can be told where the hero can only do ten basic physical actions.
What do you think? What’re your answers to those IGN questions?
I had a list of videogames in which a central part of the plot is the player-avatars take non-physical, and sometimes even epiphenomenal actions, but then I realized that except for Alpha Protocol (where the important verbs are conversational postures), all my examples were all over a decade old, and thus didn’t escape Cage’s criticism (which I largely agree with).
I think one of the big things that holds back storytelling in games is hit-driven economics: stories too subtle or controversial are punished in the broadening marketplace, because most of the people who spend money on entertainment aren’t looking for that kind of thing*. Big studios need big successes, so they all rush to compete over the broadest common denominator. That’s a blocking problem they could avoid if they diversified more into “arthouse” or “fringe” projects, the way that movie studios do, but they haven’t figured out how to seed and scale those. I think they will, in time, and that will be a good thing.
I think that a lot of videogame problems are amenable to the solution of waiting while the industry spreads and matures. Movies are different from games in lots of ways, but not so much in their paths of production, so comparing the two industries seems like it could be useful.
*I have encountered self-claimed fans of the Elder Scrolls games who get genuinely angry when the plot of Morrowind is discussed, because it features hints that the player character is not being given the whole story, and questions that are not and perhaps cannot be answered, and a false history whose truth is hiddin inside a 36-chapter in-game cryptoreligious riddle-story. I think it’s fantastic, but I’ve had to accept that a lot of people dislike it specifically for its complexity. Not everyone can be Angry Birds.