Storytelling and Video Games, Part 2

In this second post of a three part series, I continue to wax nostalgically about my love affair with video games and story in video games. You can find the first post of this ridiculous subject here. Below, I continue my list of my top seven examples of outstanding use of story and narrative in video games.

Also, I'd like to briefly note an article that a kind poster, David, pointed out in my last post, which explores the eloquence (or relative lack thereof) of story and storytelling in video games, written by Junot Diaz! Junot brings up some excellent points in his article, in my opinion, very much in line with one of the persisting fundamental problems with the video game business today; it's still such an immature industry, a medium where the voices and talent have had only thirty years to develop. Imagine how sophisticated the written word or the movie industry was thirty years after its inception. Find it on the Wall Street Journal website here: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121460385251911957.html


5. Half-Life (PC, 1998)


The premise of this game (as is the case for most First Person Shooters, FPSs) is hideously simple. You play in first person perspective with nothing but a gun and a cross hair, and are charged with shooting anything that moves. In reality, Half-Life is no different from the hundreds of other FPS that have come before or after it. You shoot things. You shoot a lot of things.

Half-Life makes its money in its departure from the video game standard of storytelling, rather than a reinvention of the FPS genre. One of the time-honored traditions of video games is the implementation of "levels" as an indicator of progress. This can be anything from the level your character attains when he/she gains enough experience points to the levels you complete with a tiny red, jumping Mario. Levels are great for video game designers because they make creating games easy (easier). Want to make a snow-based level with lots of monsters? Great. Done. What about a lava world with lots of jumping and dexterity-based puzzles? Easy. The discrete nature of leveling and level creation makes a game more diverse and interesting for the player. Where level design fails, in my opinion, is in the immersion of the player to the game. Simply, it's incredibly jarring to suddenly and arbitrarily end a scene, a situation, or a level just so you can move on to a different environment. It takes the player out of the game, and has a curious effect of "tearing down the fourth wall," to borrow a term from theater, which is something that would rarely be done (or done only with great intent) in other mediums, yet is done all the time in video games. And why would any self respecting story do that? Imagine getting to the castle where you're about to face the big bad boss to save the princess when the game suddenly pauses to essentially tell you: save here, perhaps. Drink a couple of strength potions. Enjoy this little movie cut-scene about how bad the big bad boss is. It doesn't make sense, and it removes one of the strongest qualities a video game has to offer -- interactivity.

So where does this leave Half-Life? Half-Life throws all old video game convention out the window, by giving you nothing to begin the game with except a character to control in first person perspective, and later, a gun and cross hairs. And that's it. There are no "levels" to speak of, no interruptions in the game where control of the game is taken from the player, and from the beginning credits until the the end, there is nothing except the survival of your character. You could conceivably play the game from beginning to end (all 20-30 hours) without stopping; every significant event is experienced real time, whether it is being attacked by an Apache helicopter to destroying a gigantic tentacled alien inside a nuclear reactor to eavesdropping on marines who are hunting you. The scenes of action are extremely exciting, and even better, they are defined by the player's reaction to what happens -- do I throw a grenade at the group of marines and then run in with guns a' blazing or do I snipe them from afar? -- which makes for great gameplay and even better stories.


4. Metal Gear Solid 2 (Playstation 2, 2001)

On the other end of the spectrum, we have one of the preeminent examples of video game interruption during gameplay -- Metal Gear Solid 2. Where you could call Half Life a minimalist exercise in storytelling, letting the player experience everything themselves, the Metal Gear franchise is perhaps most famously known for beating their players over the head with ridiculously long movie sequences, scenes of dialogue, and overt, heavy handed political commentary. To say that the last four or so Metal Gear games is almost akin to playing an interactive movie would not be so far from the truth. So why, especially after spending several paragraphs above deriding the problems with taking player control out of the hands of the player, would I nominate Metal Gear Solid 2? Because I love a good story, especially a story that can deliver with near Hollywood-like production values and effects. Check out the following intro movie to Metal Gear Solid 2:

So what's so important about Metal Gear Solid 2? For starters, it was one of the first games that truly attempted to bring a movie-like quality to the story it was telling. Metal Gear Solid (One) attempted to do this on the Playstation with its transition to 3D graphics, but at the time, the technology was limited and constrained in many ways. It wasn't until the sequel with MGS 2 debuting on the Playstation 2 do we get a game that fully exploits the technology of its day. To me, the above intro movie is something straight out of a Bond film or some spy thriller, complete with dramatic music and high-flying digital stunts. Even more tellingly, you can see how the series has evolved in terms of how the medium of video games (at least for this game) views itself in the intro of its sequel, Metal Gear Solid 3:

Credits? Theme music? If you were watching the above on the big screen, I bet you'd guess it was another Bond movie, for at least the first few minutes. While the gameplay was in general excellent and interesting, what most fascinated me about Metal Gear Solid 2 was its almost rigid adherence to making it seem like you were playing a movie, an extremely well made, well shot, and well financed movie.

Storytelling and Video Games

Yes, the title of this post is correct. I am, for better or for worse, an avid video gamer. While I don't game as much as I used to in previous years (I wasted the better part of my youth on the computer) I do still enjoy a good gaming fix every now and then. Besides the obvious fix generated from blasting baddies and buddies alike, as a storyteller, one of my favorite parts of playing video games is the incredible opportunity to not only spectate and experience fantastic narratives, but to have the chance to participate in them too. One of the huge advantages computer games have over their other media counterparts is their interactivity. Now, instead of reading or watching Superman save Lois Lane for the umpteenth time, you can actually do it. Needless to say, the potential for immersive storytelling in video games is incredibly rich, and experiencing story and plot is nothing like it is in a book or a movie.

Despite all this, the standard for storytelling in video games is still horribly low. A common (and frequently accurate) stereotype is that video games pander to graphical ability, violence, and sex with little to no regard to story or narrative in order to sell copies. If there is a story, it is often a cliched one, the most common being the hero's journey, a tale usually involving a busty female in need of saving from the clutches of a villain by a protagonist of superhero (or superhero-like) ability. But the industry is still relatively immature, and at almost thirty years old, the medium of video games is extremely new and has a long way to go. With this, I present to you my own personal top seven list of outstanding examples of story and storytelling in video games. This is by no means a complete list -- there are many other worthy candidates that I have not played that should grace this list -- but I hope to outline what the video game industry has to offer in terms of not only creating and developing moving narratives, but also forging new ground in what the medium can offer in the realm of interactive storytelling.


7. Chrono Trigger (SNES, 1995)


Chrono Trigger is an old school Super Nintendo Japanese console RPG. In it you control Crono, a silent protagonist, and his band of adventurers whom you pick up along the way throughout the course of game, a cast which includes a princess tomboy, a robot, an evil wizard, and Glenn, the sword wielding frog, to save the world from a creature named Lavos (a gigantic lava-like oval monster?) by jumping through various periods in time. Hence the time-themed title of the game, Chrono Trigger. If you've never played a video game (especially a Japanese-made console RPG), this may seem all very strange, but for the initiated, it's very much par for the course. And yes, Glenn is the frog displayed on the cover of the game above.

Despite of, and perhaps because of the story's obvious wackiness, there's a certain zeal and charm to Chrono Trigger's world and its characters. For example, in the game's future time period, the land you explore is drab and gray, with little to no human or animal life, instead populated with rocks, steel, and worn down machines. Yet this same world, except in the prehistoric time period, is conversely dominated by jungles of overgrowth and green. Animals are everywhere -- including dinosaurs -- and humans are the minority, struggling to survive in a land where they are prey to nearly everything. Chrono Tigger's ability to immerse you in a half a dozen deep and interesting worlds through its art and design is remarkable.

But what's most unique about Chrono Trigger is that it was one of the first of its kind to feature multiple endings (thirteen). Depending on what you do in the game, and how you did it, what happens when the credits start rolling will be wildly different. While the way you can acquire these different endings are somewhat arbitrary, depending mostly on when you decide to engage the end boss and with which characters, the idea behind "customizing" the way you can experience the close of the story was a remarkable idea for its time. That you deeply care for the characters and their situations made the ending that you finished with all the more important and, interestingly, it encouraged the gamer to play and replay the game to see all the possible endings. This kind of experience is really only something that can be found in the medium of video games, and as we'll see in my later picks, the ability to "choose" and carve out your character's unique story and ending is something that the industry had barely begun to scratch with Chrono Trigger.


6. Grim Fandango (PC, 1998)


Grim Fandango is what you could call one of the last "old school" adventure games, which mushroomed in popularity during the eighties and nineties. A game under the Adventure genre is one typically defined by perspective and action, where the character controlled by the player is on-screen at all times, interacting with the environment and other characters through dialogue and manipulation. An adventure game is rarely violent (by today's standards), and is one part puzzle game, one part movie. Dialogue is perhaps one of the most important features of an adventure game, and one of the unique mechanics the adventure game pioneered for the industry was the invention of the "dialogue tree." When interacting with another character, players are given choices on how they might want to respond or say, and thus makes subsequent choices until the conversation ends. Back in the day, this essentially meant choosing option "A," "B," or "C" to get a slightly emotionally varied, but essentially same informational response from Random Character D, but at the time, this choice typified the kind of freedom a video game offered to players. Want to be serious? Choose the straight-forward dialogue option. Want to be snarky? Tell the character to go suck a lemon. Even though dialogue trees were (and to a certain degree, still are) a very stripped down version of those "Choose Your Own Adventure" books, I really loved the unique opportunity to forward story, dialogue, and character development through non-violent means based on my own choices.

Out of all the adventure games I've played in my life, Grim Fandango is bar none, one of the finest games in terms of story, plot, and character that I've ever played. Grim Fandango takes place in The Land of the Dead, a world, heavily influenced by Mexico's "Day of the Dead" holiday, where recently deceased souls undergo a four year journey to their final resting place, the Ninth Underworld. It's all outlined in the game's starting intro below:

You play Manuel "Manny" Calavera (in the video above) who, through situations in the game, goes on his own four year journey to the Ninth Underworld while trying to save the soul of another character he falls in love with, Mercedes "Meche" Colomar (yes, it's the damsel in distress), and simultaneously foiling the plot of a crime syndicate. If it sounds like the game has heavy film noir influences, you'd be right. The art, the style, the story, and especially the music are all lifted from movies such as The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca. Simply, the game oozes personality with its unique blend of film noir and Mexican-influenced style, from the high-ceilinged and beautiful architecture to the calaca-inspired characters.

What does this have to do with story? Everything. Atmosphere is the video game's long paragraphs of description, music and dialogue its sense of pace and rhythm. A game is nothing without place, art, and style, which Grim Fandango has in the spades, and simply, it's easy to get absorbed in a narrative that provides a ready-made world rich with history. But my hands down favorite aspect of Grim Fandango are the characters and their personalities. The voice acting is Pixar-quality, and every main character -- Manny, Meche, and Glottis (an huge orange demon) -- is a fully fleshed "person." I fell in love with these characters while playing, and when the game ended and the credits started to roll, I felt a kind of loss that's so familiar to me when finishing a great book. I didn't want it to end, having journeyed so long and experiencing so much with Manny and Meche; I wanted to follow with those characters forever, which is, really, all you could ever ask of a great story.


I think I'll stop here. I still have another five games to go, but if I continued, this post would go on forever. Check in later, where I'll wax endlessly about more titles you've probably never heard of!