Now that we have some idea of what goes into a great story, the types of game stories out there and the ways in which game stories can be structured, it’s worth asking why developers-and players-should care.

Warren Spector in “Next Gen Storytelling”

No, it’s not. It’s the wrong question.

Games are only one possible way of creating art with interactive media. To assume that you have to make a game is not necessary. The question should not be whether we can add stories to games but whether we can add games to stories. The answer to that question might be yes or no. But should not impact the desire to tell stories with interactive media.

The real question is not why but how.

Games allow us to tell stories. Stories make games more desirable. But the very nature of games limits the kinds of stories that can be told. Games are about overcoming obstacles and challenges. So if you want to tell a story through game interactivity, the story needs to be about that. This why most protagonists in games are heroes who save the world.

To achieve more diversity in interactive stories, we need to abandon the idea that we should be making a game. While interaction as such probably implies a certain playfulness, there is no requirement for this playfulness to take place within a game structure.

If you want to make a game, please go ahead and make one. If you need a story as mental lubricant, don’t let me stop you. I enjoy pretending to be superhuman once in a while as much everybody else. But, please don’t make any claims as to the artistic merit of your story. Your creativity is enslaved by the format you have chosen. You might get lucky and end up making great art, but chances are slim.

If you want to tell a story, please consider the rich interactive medium. It has enormous potential for telling new kinds of stories in entirely new ways, for creating experiences that no one has had before. Tell your story through interaction. Find ways for the interaction to express your theme, your character’s personalities etcetera. Use game concepts where they suit this purpose but reject them where they don’t help the telling of the story.

Note that I use the word “story” in its broadest possible sense. By no means should the concept of story be limited to linearity or the requirement of a plot. We’re not writing books here.

The original Tomb Raider is a classic game. It is one of my all time favourites. And apparently not just mine. Eidos has released its second attempt at recapturing the greatness of the original. But as my ongoing side-by-side comparison shows, they have failed once again. I’m still trying to discover exactly what it is that makes the original Tomb Raider so great, but it’s fairly easy to find out why the new one is not.

In 1996, games were about having fun. More than that, thanks to technological advances, games could tell stories, present situations and allow us to play as interesting characters. Somewhere between then and now, the designers seem to have forgotten all about this. They discovered the Ancient Roots Of Game Design and decided that it was “all about the gameplay”. So while the publisher was pumping all this money into creating believable worlds and realistic characters, the designers were more or less sabotaging the effort by reducing the interactions in games to very abstract and systematic gameplay. Where in the past, games were about experiencing adventures and having an exciting story to tell afterwards, over time, games became about overcoming challenges and achieving goals. Not narrrative challenges or emotional goals, mind you. No: just simplistic mechanical stupid things like pressing the right combinations of buttons on time. And making that really hard to do.

Where older games gave you an environment and the means to interract with it, the new games feel more like arm wrestling with the game designer, once in a while poking a fork in his hand to force him to tell you what to do next because the virtual situation was too obscure or overwrought. The experience shifted from the wonder about a virtual world filled with magical creatures to a mundane bar brawl with some overweight nerd in a black hard rock T-shirt.

Whatever happened to Ernest Adams’ design philosophy?

“The fundamental goal of a game is to take you away to a wonderful place, and there let you do an amazing thing.”

We seem to have lost the wonder, the amazement. And I blame games! At some point in the 1990s, we were well en route to developing a Great New Medium (Tomb Raider, Myst, Ceremony of Innocence, Doom) and somewhere along the line, we lost it. We could have overtaken cinema and pushed away television. But we didn’t. And from what I can see, we lost it because we started navel-gazing and obsessing over game rules and spreadsheets, over mechanical interactions and completely abstract structures. We disconnected the player from the adventure. Overcoming the obstacles became the goal, rather than a means to an end. The end of letting our audience do an amazing thing in a wonderful place.

I think the industry is rapidly becoming aware of, if not the missed opportunity, then at least the missed potential. Nintendo is paving the way for a return to fun with the DS and the Wii and broadening the audience immensely while doing so. They’re even inspiring core gamer central Microsoft to say things like

If we don’t make that move, make it early and expand our demographic, we will wind up in the same place as with Xbox 1, a solid business with 25 million people. What I need is a solid business with 90 million people.

( Peter Moore in Gamesindustry.biz). Ernest Adams himself is feeling a “a shift in the wind” at the industry’s mammoth Electronic Arts. Even Cliffy B.’s own brother is getting worried:

If Nintendo has its way, young males will no longer be the dominant segment of the console audience–and this transition appears to be happening faster than I expected.

OMGZ0RZ!

The massive production costs of contemporary games will require a bigger market. And the core gamer market is completely saturated. Diversification is a necessity. In many different directions. One of those directions, inevitably, will be back towards the ambitious path that was set out in the nineties by games like Tomb Raider: to become the entertainment medium of the new millenium.

Discussing games earlier today -as Auriea and I often end up doing, even to the point where we run out of gas on the highway- we became aware of a difference between computer games and other games that we hadn’t noticed before. It’s related to the fact that most non-computer games tend to require multiple players, while computer games allow you to play on your own.

It’s hard to believe that despite of all the potential that interactive technologies offer, the most prevalent structure in games is the binary one: you win or you lose. And much like the computer’s binary system, it is a false duality because the couple simply consists of a single possibility and its negation, a one and a zero. As a result, for all the talk about meaningful choices, most games only lead to a single outcome: winning.

Because you can’t really lose a computer game.
At least not the typical linear sort that is still the bulk of the offer.

There is only one way to end such a game. And it’s by winning. Or only one way of winning and it’s ending it. If you fail to win a level, you cannot progress in the game. If you stop playing after this, you haven’t really lost. You just gave up mid-way.

In games we play without computers, you generally lose when somebody else wins. This concludes the game. You have really lost. The virtual opponents in computer games cannot replace actual players because they tend to be part of the story, and as such not on the same level as the player.

This diffference does not necessarily make computer games inferior, but it’s another illustration of the fact that many game designers are trying hard to deny: that computer games are an entirely new form of entertainment only vaguely (and probably temporarily) related to traditional games.