Whether They Love or Hate Story in Videogames, Gamers Agree: Games Are Boring
God of War and Twisted Metal developer David Jaffe recently caused a small controversy by calling narrative and gameplay
two great tastes that don't mix, like "chocolate and tuna fish". His recommendation is that developers ought not bother with a big story in their games unless the game's core feature is that it tells a story, like Heavy Rain or the entire genre of interactive fiction.
Naturally, the topic is a controversial one, and internet commenters argued both for and against Jaffe. I noticed an interesting trend, though, that even those who argued against Jaffe seemed to be acutely aware that modern videogame gameplay is repetitive, onerous, and not in itself interesting. From the comments section of the above article and others:
Oh right. Games shouldn't tell anything resembling "linear" stories. Guess we should throw KOTOR out then huh? What a waste right? Because it's not just randomized fetch quests like you get in most MMO's that aren't connected to the main story in any meaningful way.
Is that what gamers want? If so could you please hold this pistol for me? Ok now shoot me in the temple please?
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SO basically this guy wants all games to be go there and kill x many ala WoW?
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[heavy sarcasm] Mass Effect 3 would be great if it was just like Call of Duty, don't you think? [...] They would all be so much better without a gripping storyline to push the game forward. Yea, I just want a little objective marker on my radar that always says "Go Here"...
The recurring theme here is that both players for and against Jaffe are quick to point out how tedious and uninteresting gameplay is. Gameplay alone, as it stands today, is not memorable, worthwhile, interesting, or fun. Not for the popular blockbuster games of today. If you were to strip the story away from these AAA blockbuster titles, there would be nothing left except "Go here, kill X of Y, and bring me the MacGuffin." I certainly can't argue with that!
What I can and will argue with is the conclusion that, because the gameplay is tedious, the best solution is to dress up these bland games with fanciful stories. I can see how, with a limited frame of reference, this solution seems reasonable. Imagine that you lived in a world where every game was a re-theme of Monopoly. You would rightfully insist that all gameplay is boring and tedious, consisting of endless dice-rolls and meaningless piece-moving. Your favorite games would be those mutant forms of Monopoly which you found most appealing - Cthulhu Monopoly, Steampunk Monopoly, Monopoly: Knights of the Old Republic. You might write blog articles about the importance of forms of Monopoly which had characters you cared about, or praise an indie monopoly printing which replaced the central metaphor of "money and capitalism" with one of "the meaning of life given the inevitability of death." And so on.
Finally, a Monopoly variant with real emotions! Now games are art!
However, we live in a world where not every game has to have the same mechanics and the same, limited dynamics. It is possible to make a game that is, in itself,
fun to play. We don't have to spend our whole lives playing Monopoly, because there's also poker, football, fencing, Pictionary, chess, water polo, and paintball. The alternative to Mass Effect isn't Call of Duty - it's making a single-player FPS where the player has something more interesting to do for once than hide behind boxes and trade bullets with stooges.
For one, I won't buy/play a game without a good story. If there's no cocaine pellet after pushing the button, there's no incentive for this rat to push the button again.
This quote is most illuminating because, aside from the comical implication that a copy of
David Copperfield would be like a kilo of pure Colombian blow, the commenter also unknowingly emphasizes the emptiness, simplicity, and tedium of AAA studio gameplay: a button press, a unit of busywork to be performed so the player can get his reward. Why this guy doesn't save himself $60 and a lot of effort and just watch all the Mass Effect cutscenes on youtube is beyond me, but then again, the rising popularity of internet "Let's Plays" suggests that people are doing exactly that.
Just pushing the button for the next reward? Or is something more going on here?
The problem is clear: the games that developers are making today, the systems of rules and values and challenges that the player is able to interact with, are dull as rocks. Videogame developers aren't using interactivity to deliver fun - they're using the interactivity to establish a series of time-consuming hurdles for players to jump through so that they can get their next snippet of story or their next level-up.
If the game you've made is so tedious that it would not be worth playing without the periodic reward of story,
you need to rework your game. Similarly, if you have a story that is so thrilling as to be worth trudging through an hour of meat-grinder gameplay to catch a five-minute glimpse of it, maybe you should discard the game entirely and just make yourself a movie. Or if you're Bioware, just make one of those Japanese choose-your-own-adventure books that ends with a sex scene.