Games Do Need Strong Narratives. Sometimes.

Ben Tyrer over at 7bitarcade posed an interesting question today. Do games need strong narratives or is gameplay the be all and end all?

When playing the recent zombie slaughter simulator Dead Island, I found myself rather enjoying the brutal melee combat, but often struggled to actually appreciate the game as a whole, constantly being ripped out of the experience by poorly written characters and some incredibly weak exposition. It had a solid gameplay concept and, for one of the first times in my life, it wasn’t enough.

The polar opposite of this situation also seemed to happen to me earlier the year as well, where the repetitive structure of LA Noire may have put off some, I found myself looking past this gameplay flaw and invested in a story that had gripped and intrigued like the Noir forefathers it desperately wanted to be.
– Ben Tyrer, Do games need strong narratives?

Obviously, the correct answer is “It depends on the game.” Would Tetris be vastly improved with the addition of a storyline and characters? Would emphasising the pathos and agony felt by Straight Line Block as you nibble away at his body piece by piece make you any more likely to go for the bonus points of clearing 4 entire lines at once, thus giving him a painless death?

Of course not.

On the other hand, Infinite Interactive’s Puzzle Quest has traded very well by wrapping a basic game mechanic in a classic fantasy tale. A Prince traipses about his realm defending his people from bandits, thieves and invaders by challenging them to… a game of Bejewelled? I do them a disservice, of course. There are plenty of nice little twists to the classic format which help make Puzzle Quest a much richer experience. At its heart though, this game is Bejewelled with added swords and sorcery.

I’m a big fan of stories myself but lately I’ve come to realise that my interests are far more skewed towards characters and world than plot. I absolutely adored the little stories you’d come across while exploring Fallout 3. There were little character moments that you’d find everywhere in the world but were never explained. Others have said the same – Greg Zeschuk of BioWare talked about environmental storytelling in our recent interview.

World building is much more important to me than action. GTA IV is widely regarded as a great game but for me, I missed the excitement of coming across a miniature dune buggy race in GTA: Vice City, or the pizza and post delivery quests from Bully. GTA IV’s world felt very static to me and the idea of blowing up cars and civilians just to get a 5-star wanted rating doesn’t appeal at all.

What surprised me most was the Ace Attorney games proving to me that I actually couldn’t give a stuff about game mechanics if the characters are good enough. Playing Phoenix Wright as a game is abysmal. All you do is poke menus and jab at pixels until you find all the right hotspots. Sure there’s a little bit of paying attention to the arguments. Given that you can just repeat conversations and press a witness over and over until you’re beaten across the head with the right moment to shout Objection!, it’s not exactly a challenging game.

When it comes to pure plot-focus, every chapter in every game is the same. Wright potters about his office making odd comments. Somebody dies. Wright investigates. Prosecutors bully him. Wright prevails. Rinse, repeat. I love the games anyway for their emphasis on telling an entertaining story and the fact that the characters are all bonkers. Wright’s wry self-effacing commentary coupled with Edgeworth’s unshakable confidence in everything he does make them a fantastic counterpoint to the utter madness of rock stars, circus performers and recurring oddballs like Wendy Oldbag.

In short… strong narratives are good. Strong gameplay is good. But for me, strong characters outweigh everything. Can you have just one of these without the other two? Absolutely. Should you? Debatable.

With games studios spending hundreds of millions of dollars on development, would you rather games strive for balance or pick one thing to do really well? What’s your favourite single-player game and why?

2 Comments