So I was playing through Crackdown 2 the other day and thinking about the mind meltingly pathetic story that had been puked up before me when my ego decided to have conversation with the rest of my brain. This is what he said.
“You know, between the countless rural villages you’ve saved, the space stations you’ve defended, the creatures you’ve beheaded and the devils you’ve made cry you’d think that god himself would be compelled to pay you a visit and say ‘well done.’ Then give you a big pat on the back like the awesome son he always wanted.”
And you know what? My ego was absolutely right. In pretty much every video game with a running fictional narrative it seems as though the entire stinking planet was at stake. It’s happened so much now that saving the world really isn’t a big deal anymore.
“No pressure (insert “hero” name here) But if you fail this mission your enemy will come closer to taking over/destroying/demonically redecorating the world!
Then again it doesn’t matter if you do fail because we’ll just pick you back up and make you try again….(notice I said ‘make you’ as opposed to ‘let you’) and even when you DO succeed the plot will be such that our villain will eventually get closer to his diabolical plan anyway until the grand finale.
You see my major gripe with video game stories isn’t the dialogue because after all that can be fixed and game writers are slowly getting better at it all the time…
It’s not characterisation and character design because we’ve seen it come a long way since the early days. The real problem is ‘Theme’
Drama has been described as ‘The art of making people worry’.
Creating a character we like, giving him/her a goal he/she wants to achieve and placing hurdles for our protagonist to overcome.
It’s a simple formula but with near infinite possibilities, why then does the games industry stick to just a few of them? Why, when asked ‘what should we make the stakes be in this game? Do writers then say ‘why the world of course!’ *cue maniacal laughter*
Of course not every game is victim to this Saturday morning cartoon philosophy. Games like the Ace attorney series present an interesting story by giving us a lovable cast of characters and focuses on a lone attorney trying to defend his innocent clients from being wrongly accused of murder. The ‘worry’ factor comes from looking at the case yourself and thinking ‘Dude even I think you’re guilty’ I mean it always looks like a pretty open and shut case from the outset and so your only hope is to hear the witness testimony and point out anything that appears inconsistent with the evidence.
To an outsider this hardly sounds like a fun game to be playing but trust me playing as the young, naive attorney beginning to understand the TRUE circumstances behind the murder and beginning to turn up the heat in the courtroom by going on the offensive, using a witnesses own testimony against them, pointing out more contradictions, presenting your own theory about who REALLY did it and then nailing the evidence to the culprit and screaming TAKE THAT! Is all part of the appeal the game draws out dramatic tension in a way no other game in the industry currently does.
Of course as a text & sprite based adventure game on a portable platform is never going to have the wide reaching triple A marketing appeal of a gears of war. However, if we’re looking at our beloved video games industry as a media only now entering maturity and as one that might even one day be considered art. Then It’s about time writers start drawing drama from some place other than the latest episode of inspector gadget.
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