"Wasn't it your own Hartley who said 'Nothing reveals humanity so well as the games it plays?'
Almost right. Actually, you reveal yourselves best in
how you play.
- Q to Riker
Star Trek: The Next Generation - "Hide and Q"
I was 14 years old, sitting on the gray twill area rug that sat in the middle of my parents' finished basement. The soft, high pitched whine and click of a spinning disc emanated from the little gray PlayStation that rested next to a 19" CRT television older than I was.
On the screen was a grungy slum. People milled about next to their make-shift homes and an eerie green light permeated everything. A lone hero in dark blue outfit and bright yellow hair ran haphazardly around the screen, pestering everyone he saw.
Who knows exactly what he asked them. Based on the answers people gave, the question was probably something like "What do you think of SHINRA?" or "Do you know anything about AVALANCHE?" or "Are you worried about the MAKO reactors?"
It was me who was really asking those questions. At least, vicariously. I paged through the answers dutifully, talking to the same person at least twice, sometimes three times, to make sure I had absorbed absolutely everything I could about this strange world.
One day my Mom sat down in the fluffy gray recliner that was perpetually pointing at the TV host to my venerable PlayStation. It was during one of these story sessions where I was scouring the locals of Neibelheim for more information about Vincent Valentine or Dark Materia or some damn thing.
"So are you... learning about the story or something?"
I craned my neck around behind me to see my mom staring at the TV with a skeptical look on her face. "Yeah." I mumbled. "This game's story is pretty cool."
In the back of my mind I chuckled. She didn't understand!
Learning about the story! Wasn't that the whole point of this game? Why
else would I play it? Why else would I spend dozens of hours staring at a glowing tube with 27 cents of chinese plastic in my hands?
Final Fantasy 7 was the first Japanese role-playing game that I had ever played. I have since played plenty more RPGs, some from this side of the pond, and I've never lost that fascination with the the video game as a vehicle for narrative.
In fact, I'd say that's the primary reason I play video games. If you asked my friends behind my back how good I was at video games they would probably say "He's OK."
Which is true enough.
FyamanD,
copilotlindy and some others regularly stop the comps in a variety of games in a variety of genres. I generally pull my weight, but I am rarely the top scoring player.
That's OK though, because the scores aren't really the point for me.
I play games to explore new worlds. I want to engage my imagination and get lost in this alternate universe where humanity has been conquered by a race of mysterious aliens or where a human kingdom finds itself caught between the machinations of gods and madmen or where... well, you get the idea.
Whether or not I stick with a game to its conclusion has a lot to do with how invested I am in the story. In fact, my sense of accomplishment from "beating" a game is more akin to the feeling I get when I finish a good book as opposed to the triumph I feel beating another person in a challenge of skill.
But a game doesn't have to actually have a plot to satisfy my thirst for a good narrative. More on that later...
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But overall, I find most games to have somewhat contrived, tacked on stories that try to hard to mirror Hollywood. To look at a current example, if Uncharted 2 were a movie and not a game, I'd write it off as a generic "The Mummy" or "National Treasure" style blockbuster and that doesn't really do anything for me. Gaming is still a young industry, and I don't think developers have completely figured out how to tell stories using the tools they have. I think the pendulum is beginning to swing the other way though, especially considering the shite hollywood is spewing out these days.
Nice read!
The games storyline takes a far back seat to its incredibly intuitive tactical setup and gameplay. It left us in a position to really be assuming just what people were even trying to relay! (Personal favorite: The Italian man who had additional a's on the end of words to give it a more Italian feel!) While we favored from playing the game as a 3 player team, I feel like it is a strong example of gameplay shining over story.
I play games for the story, but that's not the ONLY reason I play them either. If a game has an interesting narrative but a crappy control scheme I doubt I'd waste my time on it. There's a balancing act there, but I am likely to give a game more leeway if I find the world it presents as interesting.
I agree with you that it's a young industry and that there's a lot of room to grow. I think Bioshock was one of the baby-steps towards better understanding interactive media as a narrative vehicle for the way it challenged assumptions the actions you take as you play a game. I hope more games keep plowing this soil, for it is fertile beyond imagining.
@FyamanD: Actually, the only reason I stuck with Ring of Red was because we all had so much fun playing it together. I don't think I would've played through it on my own and I thought that without the spin that we put on the game because it was a group activity for us it would've been a pretty boring experience. For me, anyway.
Having said that, while the execution of the story itself was pretty bad in the game, I was truly fascinated by the world the game presented and the general scenarios envisioned by that world. I hear the Japanese version of the game had some pretty provocative ideas about nazis and nuclear weapons and all sorts of things that got cut from the US release; it would've been interesting to play through the game and experience those things as well. Ultimately though, I've always wanted them to release a second game in that universe with more tightly focused strategy and control scheme. (One that didn't rely so much on the player waiting for the next thing to happen.)