I’ve often said ‘Story in games, especially MMOs, are over-rated’. To be fair, sometimes I just say things to throw a grenade into the status quo, and it’s fun to bash story just to rile up Lee. Still, you can imagine my amusement when Ron Gilbert, a key designer on some of the great LucasArts adventure games of our time, essentially agreed with me.

First of all, I do think “games” are a crappy place to try and tell a story. That part I agree with, but rather than relegate stories solely to movies, I think we should just stop calling story-based games… ”games”. The word game brings with it a lot of connotations, the worst being that they are for kids. After all, kids play games. Not adults. Games also imply a whole structure of winning and losing that should be removed from story-based games. You don’t win or lose Monkey Island, you just play it.

It’s not exactly visionary to think that because it hasn’t been done well, it can’t or shouldn’t be done. What we should do is figure out how to tell stories in games. We should also realize that there are several different types of games, some want stories, and others don’t. A good FPS doesn’t need a story, and forcing one upon it just embarrasses everyone evolved (see: porn).

Ron’s post is in response to this article in Salon complaining about Cut-scenes (I guess, now that the election’s over, Salon needs a new audience to fill in for all the disappointed liberals who are drinking to forget). Both are well worth reading. Here’s a snippet from the Salon article:

Playing a game, any kind of game, is inherently open-ended and interactive. Whether you’re playing chess, Go, or Super Mario Bros., you don’t really know how things will wind up or what will happen along the way. Narrative, on the other hand, is neither open-ended nor interactive. When you’re watching a story, you surrender masochistically to the storyteller. The fun is in not having control, in sitting still and going “Yeah? And then what happened? And then?”

So what makes story so hard in video games?

The Empty Vessel Problem. Much has been made about how designers are forced to choose between handing you a character to play (a la Mario), or letting you create your own character (a la most RPGs). Both have problems, of course. In the former, what if you don’t identify with your protagonist? I sure didn’t identify with the main character in GTA:SA. Female gamers have problems identifying with their characters in both GTA:SA and Ultima: Ascension – but how do you build a story around a character if you don’t know who he is?

Subtlety. Good, strong stories and characters are built on nuance and chemistry. Friends worked because of the chemistry between Ross and Rachel – how do you, as a designer, build chemistry, especially if one of the two characters is an Empty Vessel. George Clooney can advance the plot by raising an eyebrow. But that doesn’t work for all actors – are we really far enough along in games technology that we can match that?

Pacing. Pacing is key to any story-telling. The difference between a joke being funny and being not funny can be a millisecond pause. Movie directors carefully plan their movie’s high and low moments. But in computer games, we don’t have control over that pacing. We have to cede some of that to the players.

Length. Most console games last for 10 hours, and some video games last as long as 100 hours. By comparison, even most good feature length movies start to feel like they’re dragging at the 2 hour mark, and if they can still be great and be longer, we note them as being exceptional. Could you make the original Star Wars movie 50 times longer and still make it interesting and comprehensible? Hell, the makers of Law and Order often fail at making a comprehensible 1 hour plot.

Does this mean that story should not be done in video games? Of course not. In many games, players need some semblance of story to latch onto and give context for their actions. And story has been done well before: Half-Life’s story was gripping, up until Planet Acidtrip. The story in Starcraft is exceptionally well-told and intriguing. And KOTOR’s story gets continually good reviews.

But in most games, the story becomes an obstacle to the experience. Did GTA: SA really need a story? For me, the story felt like hoops I had to jump through in order to unlock the promise on the box: a wide open sandbox of a world.

We will get better at telling stories, first and foremost, by realizing that the experience comes first. If the story does not enhance the experience (which it most certainly does in Starcraft), the story needs to get out of the way. Once that’s realized, it becomes a matter of finding out the effective ways, in our medium, to tell stories. George Clooney’s eyebrow is effective in the medium of film, but not so much on the printed page. Similarly, as we go, we will find ways to tell stories that are appropriate to our medium. Hint: neither Half-Life nor Starcraft uses conventional cut-scenes to move their plot along.

Ultimately, it’s how you tell the story that’s effective. Really, was Half-Life’s story really all that original and unique, especially given it came out after several seasons of X-Files? No. But the makers of that game figured out how to tell the story well. And that’s all the difference.