Sadly, one of the most neglected elements of video game design is the story.  As a society immersed in television, video and movies, you'd think a brilliant story would top the list of important game features, but many best-selling video games carry only the thinnest of plots.  Why?

It's easy to blame the lack of creativity on programmers, since it's their job to crunch numbers and write code all day.  Although there's plenty of creative puzzle solving, programmers aren't forced to question the ethics of a deposed prince's methods in his quest to regain power, or any other traditionally creative type of brainstorming.  I'm not saying that coders can't also write great stories, but that's always been an excuse.  The problem is that, although many people are satisfied with lackluster writing in a game, many aren't.  I include my self in the latter group.

In the early days of gaming there wasn't often room for a complex plot.  "Save the Princess" or "Shoot a billion of those triangular ships that scroll past you so the world can be saved" were common practice.  Text-based games and RPGs appeared on computers and consoles to make things better, but action games still miss out on the spark of brilliance they could often capture with a little more story.

Let's look at some examples of storytelling in games to see what's going wrong and what's going right.  It really cheeses me off when graphically stunning games have a dumb and cliched plot.  It's even worse when that plot has a stronger presence in the manual than in the actual game itself.

Consider Total Annihilation, a 3D robot strategy game that offers features and playability that many other games (including its own prequel) haven't delivered.  The background story sounded fantastic:  A race in the galactic core has advanced itself so far in science that it can achieve immortality by "patterning" conscious thought into machines.  When it became legally mandatory for the "protection" of people's minds, those who objected to such dehumanization at the galaxy's arm rebelled.  As the sides became the Arm and Core, they used either patterning or cloning to duplicate their best soldiers' minds for fighting, destroying the galaxy, losing all the civilians, and effectively continuing the fight for no other reason but momentum.  Yes, it resulted in TOTAL ANNIHILATION.

At first glance, this sounds fascinating.  In a unique sci-fi attempt to save their society, each side had a plausible reason for their belief and their actions tragically resulted in an aim neither wanted.  The entire galaxy is completely wasted and the only living bits and pieces of their worlds remain in the cloned brains and patterned processors of soldiers who know of nothing but war.  Like the opening FMV sequence said, with both sides crippled beyond repair, each side seeks the complete obliteration of the other.  That is a dark and interesting premise, and the manual even had a bunch of stuff about the nanolathing technology involved.

On further inspection, the whole plot fell apart upon the realization that there were no characters, no motivating reason to continue on beyond vengeance against these non-characters, and a campaign structure that usually said "Go there.  Get the gate.  Repeat" explicitly and "Stick with multiplayer, it's better that way" implicitly.

The mission briefings could have added a lot of personality with that James Earl Jones-like announcer, but often fell flat.  Sometimes the scrolling text didn't match up with the announcer's words, sometimes the text was straining for new ways to say "we fight them, they fight us," and sometimes the planets were given really bad names like "Barathruum."  I kept thinking of ways to substitute that planet's name in ordinary conversations like "I had five of those bean burritos so I really have to go to the Barathruum."

Thief: The Dark Project really kept its story smooth by keeping Garrett's personality throughout the entire game.  Introductory plans looked as though they might as well have been written as personal notes ("take the gold and redistribute it to yourself"), the map had great information written in a believable way, and the POV of a social miscreant was reinforced by the behavior of those he watched.  The designers at Looking Glass knew a thief would disrespect the people he looted, so idiotic guards and parchment to or about the victims all described the scenarios so the crime wouldn't feel immoral at all.  It was a subtle but brilliant immersive technique that allowed the player to feel a part of Garrett's life, and this helped the storytelling tremendously.

Half-Life was another game that brought the player very tightly into a complex world in the opposite way.  Instead of letting the player feel Freeman's personality as they did with Garrett's, Valve removed all traces of their protagonist's personality.  Instead they showed how the world changed around him and as a result of his actions.  

As to Half-Life's story itself, it actually sounds a lot like Doom and just about every other game id has released since:  "Some kind of portal opens up, monsters appear, and violence ensues," but the depth and breadth of the action in Half-Life made the player feel important and created the need to continue on.  Who was the guy in the suit?  Why are those soldiers shooting at us?  How can I undo what we did?  Am I going to launch the same rocket I saw in the opening tram ride?  The story was told in such a brilliantly engaging manner that no one cared if it was a rehash of familiar ideas.

Hearing that id chose to make Quake 3 a multiplayer-focused game didn't really phase me at all after seeing the games of 1998.  So id plans to create a first person shooter with top-notch graphics, an intense multiplayer focus, less of a single player game and absolutely no plot...was that really a radical departure from id's usual behavior?  I don't think so.

For me, Shogo: Mobile Armored Division had a very refreshing plot and presentation.  In addition to all the eye candy a game based on Anime robots could provide, the game really moved along smoothly.  The notable exception would be when a character says the following across a half-dozen missions or so:  "Please come to the club!  Catch a train on your way to the club!  See the sights on your way to the club!  Find new and exciting reasons not to have the next mission actually take place in the club!  And once you get there..."

Of course the dragging part in the middle was only noticeable because the rest of Shogo: MAD's story was so much fun to behold.  Not just for the action and variety of play mechanics, but because it *didn't* have the total immersion factor.  I never once felt like I was Sanjuro himself, but it was great to know I'd be helping him out because it would usually result in a hilarious exchange of dialog between believable characters.

Plots, characters, interesting situations...are these too much to ask for?  They may not be known quantities that are guaranteed to move X number of games off the shelf, but they're always a sign that someone put real thought into the creation of the game.  Isn't that what makes it all worthwhile?

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