by Tempest Sat Jul 21, 2012 5:56 am
I've come to the same realisation recently. I play games to enjoy playing the game, to achieve a goal, not to watch a narrative.
That's not to say that narratives have no place in videogames. If a game is designed well, that is, the narrative and the gameplay enrich each other and work towards a common goal, then narrative can be a worthwhile addition to a game. It doesn't have to be a good story either. I've recently returned to House of the Dead: Overkill. The story is very cliche and camp, but this is why it enriches the gameplay experience. A game where you shoot zombies (sorry, mutants!) will always conjure the clichés of that genre. Instead of avoiding the cliches, like good stories do, this game's narrative embraces them and turns their campiness up to eleven. It delivers the same type of gameplay and narrative as the previous games in the series. However, what makes it interesting and different, thus a good game, is how it delivers these elements. House of the Dead: Overkill uses the grindhouse cinematic style to parody that style of storytelling, making it different enough from previous games in the series. In essence, it pokes fun at itself. Few games do this (at least that I’m aware of), and rather than being a new genre, it’s a new take on the light-gun shooter and horror genres. Granted, the gameplay is mostly unchanged, but this new presentation of the genre enriches the tried and true gameplay, which was always fun, and makes it seem like a new experience anyway.
There are other games that do similar things, in different ways, to their own genres. Rez showed that audio in a game could be more than background music and sound effects. Goldeneye showed that we didn’t always have to kill aliens in first-person shooters. This works at any level within a game: visuals, audio, gameplay, narrative, and so on. And this is where we will always see innovation in games.
New genres are rare in any medium. Instead, we get innovation within a specific genre. This does not mean adding a few new features. It means taking a previously used concept and rebuilding it. It’s about stretching the boundaries of what has come before without straying too far from the original concept. Yes, there is less of this in today’s safe, highly money-driven market, but it is still there, even in minor ways. The Wii, DS, and Kinect changed the way we interact with games. They are simple concepts, yet they (mostly) work.
The best concepts, narrative, game, or otherwise, are simple. In the original Sonic the Hedgehog, players were instructed to stop Robotnik from turning innocent creatures into robots. In the original Mario games, and indeed most of the current games in that series, the narrative instructs the player, as Mario, to rescue Princess Peach from Bowser. They are simple concepts, yet they work. And that’s all you need from a game narrative: an incentive to play the game, to make the player want to take on the role of the protagonist, and accomplish their goals. Current games over-complicate this. Recent Sonic games are a good example because they add too much superfluous material to make the narrative and game appear bigger and better than it is. Yet, this only serves to make the narrative less and less important to the game, thus the player.
I’m not saying that games need to go back to narratives that are this simple. What I mean is that if developers can’t get the basic elements of narrative correct, then why bother trying to make the narrative more complicated?
Narratives, at their core, are simple, and each is essentially the same: a protagonist encounters a disturbance to his normality, goes out to rectify the situation, encountering many allies, enemies and tests along the way, before, after seemingly being beaten, overcomes the odds and returns things to normality or makes them better than they were before. Despite this sameness, we return to narratives to see how the protagonist overcomes his odds, and how it is different from the last narrative we experienced. Unfortunately, many game narratives don’t try to make these narratives unique.
Some people say that games are better without narrative. Well, games have always had narrative, even the earliest ones. They gave you, the player, a reason for playing the game, even if it was as simple as beating another player or the computer. The purpose of Pong was to score points. It’s not much of a narrative, but it’s still there, driving the player into the game.
The difference is that these days, narratives are bigger, more complex beasts. And perhaps, in their desire to make their game unique, some developers have lost sight of the core purpose of narrative and its simplicity. If complex narratives are going to remain in videogames, then developers need to have more respect for players. They can’t continue to rehash the same sci-fi/fantasy narrative clichés. They need to come at it from new, unique perspectives. How can we accomplish this task we’ve done a thousand times before without doing it the same way?
The trend in current games is for developers to just give an established concept a fresh lick of paint, usually through graphics and narrative. They believe players will enjoy it. To some extent, some players always will because they don’t know any better. However, a good game, a classic game, avoids this approach and finds something unique that will make players want to continue playing. This needs to come at both the gameplay and narrative levels. The same theories I’ve mentioned about narrative apply to gameplay. A good game is one that takes previously used core mechanics and adds something meaningful to it. Each new game should rework a known concept in its own unique way. It’s about innovation of what’s already out there. Sometimes that’s a big step outside what we’re used to, and other times less so.
To me, a game needs to put gameplay at the forefront, because otherwise, why not develop the narrative as a film, novel, play or something else?
VVV
