Video games: the newest, hippest, fastest growing entertainment medium in the world. More profitable than movies, by some estimates. They're mainstream now, don't you know. Your grandparents are probably playing them. We've moved on from the semi-mythical days when playing video games on your Commodore 64 would get you beaten up at school.
And yet while games continue to change and evolve in the breadth of gameplay experiences they offer (not always in positive ways, it needs to be said) the quality of video game storytelling has stagnated or even receded in the past decade and a half. Counter-examples to this trend can be found on every platform for every year, but they continue to be bright, shining pinnacles rising above a sea of mediocrity.
As someone who loves both games and well crated, original stories this situation has always bothered me. Over the years I've discovered that the problems in video game writing can usually be broken down into a handful of distinct flaws, many of them stemming from one original sin. In this post I'll go through them and then offer some constructive advice on how we as consumers can help to rectify the situation.
Note: for the purposes of this post I am mostly talking about western made games published professionally for retail, either in stores or downloadable, ie what most would consider the current "mainstream" of gaming in the America and Europe. Japanese developed and indie games have their own writing flaws, but they tend to be quite different.
"There are no new stories" is a phrase that often gets trotted out when it comes to writing. The intent of the statement is that certain genres tend to follow the same basic template- for example, romance will always involve people falling in love - so the writer must try to handle it in an interesting way. It does not mean that every story that could ever be told already has been and so we might as well stop trying to be original.
Nobody appears to have informed video game writers of this, because by God are they taking the concept at face value.
Picture the following scenario: you play as a lone agent operating in a dangerous situation. You're acting not on your own initiative, but according to the instructions of someone else isolated from the action. Maybe you return to a central location between missions, or perhaps your contact is a distant voice over a radio. You fight through hordes of bad guys and finally take out the villain. What happens next?
If you're at all familiar with video game narratives- if you've played even a handful of prominent games over the last five years- you should have been able to instantly guess the plot twist: the entire mission was a ruse designed to play into the hands of your mission control, who betrays you in order to further their own sinister agenda. You must then hunt them down to get revenge/rescue your love interest/stop the world from exploding. This has gotten so bad that when I played Dishonored last year I correctly guessed that the Royalist conspiracy was going to double cross me before I even bought the game. I spent two-thirds of Mark of The Ninja waiting for my ninja master to play his hand and reveal himself to be an asshole. It's like game writers have gotten it into their heads that this is just how you write a story, that if they crack open the Bible there'll be a bit halfway through Revelations where God turns out to be Satan in disguise and Jesus has to go on a one-man crusade to kick him out of heaven.
I think Bioshock is to blame for all of this. It used this formula so well that everyone rushed to copy it without realizing how much effort Irrational put into pulling it off. Did you know they went through several different accents for Atlas before making him Irish? They got test audiences to play through the opening of the game specifically looking for a voice players would trust, just to make sure the twist would completely blindside them. There are hints scattered throughout the game that he isn't who he appears to be, but they're subtle and very easy to miss if you aren't paying attention.
Now Irrational are making Bioshock Infinit,e and according to interviews with Ken Levine they decided not to go with the "voice over the radio" format partially because they knew players would spend the entire game waiting to be double crossed or to have it revealed that their unseen ally is actually a three headed sentient venus fly-trap. The twist has become so ubiquitous that it's impossible to pull off successfully. Gamers are going to expect it even if it's not in the game.
This is far from the only way videogame story-telling endlessly recycles familiar tropes, of course. There's the old Damsel in Distress scenario that's been going on since the early days of the medium, widely recognized as outdated and sexist but still a staple of the industry. Amnesiac heroes have decreased in frequency but still linger on as a cheap source of mystery. The rise of the gun as gaming's sacred totem has brought with it hordes of faceless soldiers hell-bent on destroying everything in their path for no obvious reason (Killzone, Gears of War, Resistance, Call of Duty, Battlefield: Bad Company, Battlefield: Bad Company 2, Battlefield 3, Medal of Honour, Medal of Honour: Warfighter, every Mass Effect game, damn near any game made this generation that involves holding a firearm). "There are zombies" is of course a concept that became over-used almost as soon as it appeared on the scene, now only considered acceptable when it's paired with innovative gameplay concepts or a story that's widely championed as among the best in the industry.
Sometimes developers decide that their characters shouldn't be empty cyphers, that they should have personalities. Horrible, horrible personalities.
I don't know why so many games force us to play as assholes. They snarl and scowl through all of their lines, they have no setting between "off" and "angry". They don't have friends, they have people they won't punch or murder on sight. Most of the time, anyway.
The violent sociopath that is Kratos in the second and third God of War games may be the worst example of this, but there are plenty of others. Sam Fisher, Jak in the post-Jak and Daxter games, Cole from InFamous, Nico Belic, what's his face from GTAIII, Wei Shen from Sleeping Dogs.....
Most of these characters are supposed to be conflicted or multi-faceted. I get that. You can write characters who are unlikable on many levels but still ultimately someone we can relate to and empathize with. Case in point- James Marston of Red Dead Redemption. We spend a lot of time at the start of the game not really sure what to think of the guy. He has a history of violence and a short temper, but he's also polite and corteous to ordinary people. We see him go out of his way to help people in danger but we also see him try to shoot someone for annoying him. He's got different sides to him and not all of them are good, but there's an underlying sense of something decent trying to come through. When he acts like an asshat it's tragic because we know he's trying to be someone better, and under the tough veneer he is better.
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