entropia

I have never been interested in the story of a game I was playing. Never. Ironically, the option of letting a player play a story and become a part of a story detracts from the experience of the story.

The closest I’ve ever come to being sucked in to a game’s story was when I watched my roommates play Resident Evil 2, or GTA 3. Even with a game like Final Fantasy 6, which I’ve played a few times, the story only feels relevant when I’m watching, not playing.

It seems strange when you first notice it - that being a part of something takes away from the experience as it develops - but it makes sense here. Game stories are predetermined and descrete. Even in the most advanced games with the most freedom, like Fallout 3, you’re not free to actually do what you want. There are always a set of options you can choose from, paths you can take, and decisions you can make. And if those options, paths, and decisions aren’t the ones you want, you realise that you’re not a part of a developing experience, you’re just playing a game.

But when you watch someone play a game, like when you watch a movie or read a book, you don’t have the illusion of making decisions. You’re a third party. So when a choice isn’t available, that’s okay, beause that’s how the story goes.

But that doesn’t mean a game can’t have a great story. It’s just that the player cannot be the main character, or the decision maker, in the story. The closest I’ve gotten to appreciating the story of a game I was actually playing was with Bioshock (but even there, the illusion was destroyed towards the end).

In Bioshock, you play the role of a stranger in a strange land. You find a place where something went wrong, and throughout the game you learn what that something was. You don’t make it happen, or prevent it from happening. You don’t even try to make things right after it happened. You’re ancillary. And so, there are no illusions. The game doesn’t pretend you’re in control. It gives you two options: run through the levels until you get to the end, or stop, look, and listen while you run through the levels until you get to the end.

And that’s what more games need to do. Let the player experience a story with the focus on someone else. Maybe the player does make a difference. Maybe he does have choices that affect the outcome. But it’s not presented that way. There’s no, “You can push the guy off the building and kill him, or you can save the guy and say you killed him, but you can’t kill the bad guy who told you to kill the guy on the building.”

What I’d really like to see is an RPG like this. Where it’s not “you’re an average kid but wait now you have to save the world from the ultimate evil”, but “the ultimate evil is trying to destroy the world and you just need to stay alive until the hero saves the day and hey if you want to save a few other people while you’re at it go ahead.”