Why are the stories in video games so bad?

boing
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As others have mentioned, the VaLVE games have had some of the best storytelling. HL (G-man), HL2 (We don’t got to Ravenholm anymore), HL2EP2 (Vance!), Portal (mm, cake), Portal 2 (Cave Johnson).

As others have noted, I think part of VaLVE’s success is casting the protagonist to be a silent “everyman” or “everywoman.” (also in this class goes The Stanley Parable). Granted, Chell and Dr. Freeman are white “everypeople,” but it seems a large part of their appeal is they don’t voice thoughts that might privilege one particular worldview. Indeed, Blue Shift and Opposing Forces explicitly shift the eyes of the protagonist to the supporting cast and the enemy, respectively.

When you write for a book or screen, you write for that character. But, when you write for a game, you need to write for a player who will inhabit that character. I think that’s a fundamental difference, and in some ways a more complex audience demand.

As noted, VaLVE tries to bridge the gap from player-to-protagonist by going the “silent lead” route. Some better-written RPGs (Morrowind, not Oblivion or Skyrim), use a captivating ensemble cast to tell the story, reducing the player to an interchangeable cipher.

Of course, some good game writing goes the Hollywood route, casting the lead as a full-bodied character, which draws the obvious comparisons to cinema (Mass Effect series, BioShock series).

Yeah, well some people like movies just for the special effects.

I love good gameplay. Shadow of Mordor has sweet gameplay. But, aside from a cameo or 2, the story is not all that special.

On the other hand, the combat mechanics in every Mass Effect and every BioShock is underwhelming and boring, yet the worlds they build and the stories they tell are wonderous.

The entire intro of BioShock: Infinite from the rowboat to the baseball is an utter classic for me. I can envision art critics dissecting it the same way people dissect the beach scene from JAWS.

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It really isn’t, though - one is descriptive the other is prescriptive. (1) Working in video games, I have to agree -the stories are bad. That is, they’re not given the resources, care and consideration they deserve. They’re not as good as they could be, given the form. Most developers don’t care, especially old-school developers (I know this because they tell me so, plainly); newer games that take more interest in story are still working within the low expectations created by the history of the form. The interplay of narrative and player agency hasn’t been given the consideration it deserves, dialog is an afterthought, etc. - other things have been considered more pressing issues (and, frankly, there’s not been the kind of academic exploration of the issues that’s happened in other mediums, either).

(1) Although I actually (almost) agreed with Ebert - not that it wasn’t possible for games to be art, but that it wasn’t, at that point anyways, true. Because - again - developers didn’t care about making games as art; hell, they weren’t even thinking about games in terms of art at that point. (This is still largely true.) Ebert was right in saying games weren’t art, but only accidentally (and temporarily) - ironically not because he didn’t understand video games, but because he didn’t understand what art is. (That is, games were rightly excluded from being art based on his definition of art - the problem was, his definition of art was a century+ out of date and also excluded actual art.)

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Chell isn’t white, actually /pedant

Complete agreement with you on everything else :wink:

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And some people want to see the game story instead of fragging another group of featureless mobs. Ex-Bioware writer Jennifer Hepler once floated the idea of a fast-forward or skip button for the combat-heavy aspects of a video game so you could carry on with the interesting story. That was considered heresy. It would be an interesting exercise, and I wonder if it wouldn’t create stronger stories?

But the sweeping statement made by the OP, isn’t fair either. There are games with good story, bad story, no story, just as there are films that feature good, bad or no story. The same for books. The same for any media. The sooner games are no longer treated as some monolitihic entity, the better off we will be.

@Bieeanda - OMG CoH and Architect Entertainment! Damn, how I miss that game. Such an excellent community. >.<

I vaguely remember the “professional” writers arcs. And, yes, they were either terrible (not getting it at all) or just meh. Some of the player-created stuff was, on the other hand, amazeballs! I recall one story arc that strongly implied your superhero career was a delusion and that the “villains” you were fighting were staff at a mental hospital. Really well written within the limited scope of the Architect system.

Hell, some of my students came up with better stories some of the time! I used to use CoH in a game-focused English class. Fun times.

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Colour me in the “fuck off and make me a game” club. Not all the creators are wrong. GTA V is the only game I’ve not clicked through the cut scenes, and even then my hurry-up finger gets a bit twitchy during them.

The majority of movies are poorly written. Good luck on fixing games.

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two words:

Sturgeon’s Law

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“Games aren’t stories” is the winter sleep of the mainstream game industry + its gamers + its representatives in Academia.

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Anything in a game that can be skipped without making the game collapse is an example of bad storytelling.

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Any information that is provided to us in a game without us really craving for it is an example of bad storytelling.

I could expand this list endlessly. But I’ll put an end to it here.

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Are you sure? Some people think this is what her parents looked like.

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It feels like you’re deliberately misreading the argument. Leigh is definitely not saying that a non-existent or unobtrusive story is inherently bad for a game. What she’s saying is that the tendency to sideline narrative as a priority - but still feel obliged to include it - leads to lazily-written or unprofessionally-written stories that are, in a word, bad. Or, in other words - hackneyed, awkward, predictable, embarrassing, unrealistic, melodramatic, forced, etc.

If you’re a gameplay formalist, then be a formalist - Tetris has no story, and is one of the most mechanically satisfying games in the world. But don’t slap on a crummy story out of some sense of obligation. Conversely, if you’re going to bother to include narrative elements in your game, then give them as much consideration as the other elements. Shit or get off the narrative pot.

Games are a medium where one of the most acclaimed and celebrated narratives is a completely hackneyed sci-fi trilogy whose story quality amounts to watching a 90-hour-long middling episode of Farscape. There are well-written games out there, but unlike film, television, and literature, they almost all lie outside of the AAA sphere.

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I’m going to choose to ignore the completely baseless sarcasm and your total characterization of the game and just go ahead and agree that a graphic novel of the game would be something wonderful to hope for, because Cardboard Computer have been knocking it out of the park with their experimental interludes to the chapters, and if they were to create some kind of beautiful, experimental, oddly-structured nonlinear book that captured the game’s idiosyncratic interactions and choices, I would snap it up immediately.

Anyway, if you really want puzzles, don’t worry. There are a zillion adventure games out there that eschew KR0’s style of interaction for more conventional puzzles, whether you’re more of a “rub everything in my inventory against everything else until the narrative moves forward” sort of puzzler, or a “this game is basically just a children’s brain-teaser activity book skinned with a half-assed narrative and setting” sort of puzzler.

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When stories are bad in video games it’s because the maker just didn’t care. Graphics (or whatever) was the important thing and it was just fine to slap some story onto the game so that the game has a story because OMG the game must have a story.

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Obviously her background isn’t touched on in-game (other than the fact that she’s totally fat ;)) but she was modeled on Alésia Glidewel in Portal 2 and had “a hint of Japanese ethnicity” in the first game.

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Couldn’t disagree more. “Bad” is perfectly useful and valid. We know what it means and who is saying it. What do you want? A universal rubric that can quantify these things? If “Your movie sucks,” was good enough for Roger Ebert to communicate an idea, then so is “bad.” My first reaction was much like yours, but then I realized that if I fine-tuned the statement in my head and changed it from “all games” to “most games,” I couldn’t disagree with it. Games like Deus Ex and Thief had some very good storylines, but games like Quake (through Arena and that abomination that was IV) and basically every RTS game ever, clearly have storylines arranged as an afterthought. The idea that all stories will be engaging to everyone isn’t what’s being discussed in the article.

The idea is that the stories can, and should, be more than an afterthought. Better still are stories that interplay with how the player plays the game. RPGs, at least the good ones, are excellent at making this happen. People who play RPGs aren’t all cut from the same cloth and don’t necessarily like all of the subplots in a game, but on some level RPGs only “work” through a narrative framework. Sometimes, even in a good RPG, the writing is abysmal, and is clearly a contrivance to put you through a dungeon crawl, and you know what? Players tend to hate it.

This is untrue for a lot of people. I love stories, and I love games, and I find I do those things separately a lot of the time because these two things refuse to mix, despite the ways in which they’re well suited to each other. I respect games a great deal, which is why I’m so happy when games get story elements right. The stories don’t even have to be complex. Metroid created a story with pixels and people’s assumptions about gender. That is a rock-solid bargain-basement type storyline that doesn’t need frills. I don’t respect most game stories for the same reason I don’t respect Michael Bay movies: The story exists almost solely as a way of moving me from Explosion A to Explosion B.

You don’t know many writers, do you?

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You’re treating your personal (formalist) biases as axiomatic truths. Someone could follow your exact same line of argumentation with any medium. You could say stories and paintings are opposites, and invoke circular logic that because [you think] narrative history painting in the Classical style is not very good in comparison to purely formalist painting in the Modern style, that…narrative history painting in the Classical style is not very good in comparison to purely formalist painting in the Modern style.

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I guess its kind of an obvious one and not some cool little obscure gem, but The Last of Us was a standout game for me, story-wise. I think the effort and attention to detail and character just elevated it above similar games in the same genre.The writing was great for the characters, but the layout and flow were also so important. I could imagine it working as an awesome tv series, each season divided into a literal season (Winter, Summer etc)… After playing it, I felt like I’d been through some stuff, and that made it an important game for me. I’d love more games like that.

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I really liked Unreal Tournament back in the day. The story was that it was a competition in shooting people and that was pretty much it.

Ah, those were the days! We packed someone’s car full of towers and monitors and hauled them to whoever had the most absent parents. I think by that time we had the fancy twisted-pair kind of ethernet and our networks were almost boring in their reliability. And then we spent 24 caffeinated hours straight shooting our best friends in the head.

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It may be an example of bad storytelling, but to many it’s an example of a good game.

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“Every picture tells a story, don’t it” is a great lyric, but not literally true. Though it is an interesting example. Any story experienced with a painting is generated by the viewer, which could also be said of looking at clouds. The painting (or the cloud) might suggest or remind you of a story, but it doesn’t actually tell one.