Author’s Note: The title of this blog might seem like I am just saying that Bioshock sucks in a different way but I’d like to make clear that I believe that Bios hock is an amazing game which challenges you in plenty of ways that others games do not. What I am trying to say, as you will see, is that Bios hock is good enough to be held to a higher standard of storytelling and when you hold it there it doesn’t shine as bright. Really I just titled it that because it’ll get more clicks than “A Discussion on Stories in Games.”



Anyone who has ever written a story, book, novel, sonnet, etc., knows that it is incredibly hard to do. Great stories must peak and plummet, twist and turn, create suspense and surprise and truly engulf the reader/viewer/participant no matter what medium they are in. For most of gaming’s history the way to engulf the player has been simply to allow them to interact with a simple story. The point was the “physical” challenge of the game not an emotional one. Mario quested for the princess and not much else really needed to be known. Aliens attack earth, you defend it. While some games tried to develop further stories they were still strongly based around gameplay.

What I mean is this: A games story was based around bosses, levels and upgrades not character and plot development. Of course this made games more interesting and structured, especially in a time when graphics and storage space really didn’t allow for greater development of storylines or characters. Game’s stories then revolved around an end goal (Could a game with a story not have an end goal?) that was through these challenges and if you weren’t fighting or solving a puzzle then you weren’t really involved in developing the storyline in any way. For the most part gameplay defined story instead of working hand in hand with it. An easily generic example of this are the plethora of beat em’ up games like Double Dragon or Battle Toads. Play a level, beat a boss and then move on.

Clearly, as games have advanced so has their ability to tell stories. The advancements allowing this have been mostly technological but it should also be noted that the gaming industry and gamers themselves are demanding more well rounded stories from their games. For the most part the gaming industry is delivering. Games have deeper plots, better developed characters and stories that bring up actual issues. More and more games have branching paths that involve the player in the story. Game developers speak constantly about trying to tell a story and express an opinion with their games and game scripts and stories are increasingly dynamic. In fact despite Super Mario Galaxies amazing gameplay many critics questioned why a deeper story isn’t available, but that is another debate for another time.

The problem now with story development in games is that many modern games trying to have a full and in depth story still fall back on the structured gameplay design that older games followed instead of working their structure around the story. We are entering a point in gaming where levels are detrimental to a games story many times and final bosses don’t always make sense anymore within the context of a story. A simple case in point, and the one that really spurred me to write this post, is Bioshock whose ending, replete with final boss, goes a little like this:



Now many people had a problem with the short ending clips of the game, but where the real problem comes from is that the final boss battle is a complete disconnect from the rest of the game’s story, placed in the game to work more with the gameplay than the plot and feeling of the game. In a game full of questions about morality, the self and the power of family a big bad final boss does not fit in at all, especially when mind games have been the main focus of the development of your character and the two other lead roles. The developers betrayed their story in order to show off their gameplay. While Bioshock’s gameplay is amazing, because of the focus on story and choice this decision to turn the game’s end into a final boss truly ruins the story, debasing the moral decisions you made before by shoving a complex story into a cliché battle. Bios hock did a lot of things right, but if we hold it to a higher standard of storytelling then this ending would equate to putting a massive gun fight at the end of an anti-war war movie. Sure, you could see how it gets there but it doesn’t fit in with the style, theme or message of the film.

The point of making this example is to stress the point that in this generation of gaming storytelling must start to have a much stronger influence on how a game is designed. If a final boss battle doesn’t fit with your story then figure out what does, just because games from before this were developed around the idea of conquering the biggest bad guy of all at the end doesn’t mean that games of the future need to stress this. Super Metroid has one of the most well known, impressive and heart wrenching stories in gaming history and its “final boss” is more of an interactive cut scene than anything else.



This ending works so well, despite it’s actual lack of gameplay because it fits the story and the feeling of the game. Samus has been alone and isolated for the entire game, desperately trying to rescue the baby metroid which she had saved previously. Then when all seems lost it appears and saves her and basically makes her invincible, destroying that sense of isolation wonderfully. Sure a big boss show down could have worked in the game, as it has in other Metroid games, but instead the story took precedent over the gameplay and both features are better off for it. Here we can see a blending of storytelling and gameplay, where neither gains the upper hand.

This isn’t to say that final bosses are the only way in which gameplay often overrides story, far from it. The adherence to having levels in games, though quickly disappearing, is another great example of how an interesting story can get destroyed by the structure of a game. It’s also not to say that the plot and themes of a game are the be all and end all. One need look no further than Assassin’s Creed’s epically long death speeches to realize that forcing story and moral life lessons into something doesn’t make it a better game. It happens when the two strike a balance and it is even more important that modern games find this balance as they are looked upon by a wider and wider audience.



This wider audience, be it (for lack of a better word) casual gamers just getting into games or gamers begging for more depth to their games out of a games plot. The tired clichés of killing until you’ve won aren’t really going to satisfy people who want a bit more out of their stories and know that videogames can deliver them. Games (and many movies for the most part, if you really want to get into it) need to stop treating gamers like we’re no smarter than the five-year-old selves that first started playing games. They need to stop trying to sound smart in order to gain footing and actually be smart (yes, I’m aware of the irony, since I’m pretty much trying to sound smart here). We’ve grown up, and while the violence and storylines of games have grown up with us, often the intelligence and depth of the games have not and while I am all for just sitting back and having fun (Galaxy was my game of the year) when a game is meant to be thought provoking and challenging it has to deliver. If a film advertises itself as truly impactful and turns out to be trite and lame we would rip it apart but gaming seems to be getting a free pass at the moment since any deeper thought is seen as a sign of completely amazing plot. I’m sorry but Bioshock, COD4 and any RPG you can think of are still not written at a level where they’re doing anything more than desperately trying to look smart. Shouldn’t games have to step up to the same quality that great screenplays or novels have? How can we scream that games are art to the high heavens and then not demand the same type of quality from our games’ stories that we demand in other areas?

At the base of all of this is the how we think of what a game is. As I’ve said, in order to truly tackle the most powerful stories and ideas games need to break out of the gameplay modes and designs that their predecessors were defined by. Game designers need to stop fitting their stories into their gameplay and start considering what works within the context of their ideas until then games stories and plots won’t truly be as powerful as they can be. Some games are already at this point, look at Half-Life 2 whose episodic content demands a game that is both gameplay and plot driven, but at the moment this idea is clearly not at the forefront of game developer’s minds.