The Great Novel approach & bad game writing
I ran across this article yesterday, where the author was discussing reactions to a previous piece where she expressed disappointment in an MMO storyline. She had received a couple of replies that went along the lines of this one: "Well, I guess because I have really, really low expectations of the storytelling in any video game. In thirty-five years of playing them I can’t recall a single example that goes beyond the standard you might expect in an example of a middling genre narrative in another form and even that would be the exception."
My reaction was the same as hers: she asserted that she'd played a lot of games with great stories and therefore wasn't about to lower her expectations. Frankly, if you haven't encountered any good game stories yourself (particularly in "thirty-five years of playing"), I really have to wonder what kind of games you're buying.
I think, though, that the "video games are stoopid" reaction also stems from a failure to realize that good writing takes many forms. I think the people who complain that "there are no good stories in video games" are looking for the stereotypical idea of a Great Novel: a lot of writing and a lot of dialogue that's delivered straight-on by characters in the style of a play, featuring a great deal of SAT vocabulary & circumlocution and a very elaborate plot with a lot of developments that discusses Things of Great Importance (though not anything too weird; let's not get all freaky here). The problem with this - the first problem - is that the shift in medium also entails a shift in the way stories can be told. I don't agree that Dear Esther tells a great story, but I think reviewer Maxwell McGee hit truth when he noted in his review of the title: "video games allow for pacing and discovery that would be impossible to reproduce elsewhere." You can ignore the medium and take the straight visual-novel approach detailed above, but you're missing out on storytelling avenues interactivity affords you. The secondary problems are ones that involve underdeveloped tastes and a misunderstanding of proper execution: Great Novel stories aren't the only ones worth telling, and the Great Novel approach isn't always the best one for a given tale.
Resident Evil's plot, for example, is very standard straight zombie horror (and no one needs to mention the voice acting), but the "Itchy. Tasty." diary is a killer piece of storytelling. The diary is written in prose that's sparse, direct, and pedestrian-decidedly not what anyone thinks of as "great writing," but it'd actually hurt the story if the diary were more elaborately penned. The simple account derives its power from its prosaic everyman perspective - the author unwittingly detailing his loss of humanity, and how horrific events unfold around him in contrast to (or, really, as part of) the mundanity of his working environment: first, he's seething over coworkers who cheat at cards; then, the dogs he's paid to watch are strangely quiet; next, his best friend is waking him up in the middle of the night and telling him to put on a "space suit," and then he's uncomprehendingly watching blobs of his own flesh fall off his arm as he scratches it. The events are scarier because the character doesn't know the significance of what's happening to him; if he had been a more educated or knowledgable character, his story wouldn't have worked. The method by which the player initiates this tale - how it's nothing more than a diary hidden in the corner of an ordinary room, and the player just happens upon this big scare unannounced, in the course of routine investigation, also underlines the horror in a commonplace environment and the virtues of self-pacing & discovery McGee mentioned - as does how the narrative is preceded by you having to execute the diary's owner, who first appears as just another zombie. But then, every zombie here was a living, thinking individual before they turned, weren't they.
For another example, Neopets thingamabob Flight Rising has no plot, but the writers put a great amount of effort into their 120-charas-per-entry flavor text, and I always check it whenever I get a new item. There, the writing is used to worldbuild and to give the player an additional little reward for playing the game, acquiring items, and expanding their hoard. Gone Home is a game-length examination of how found documents can be used in aggregate to tell a story of a household. Baten Kaitos deserves recognition for its immensely likable playable characters, but it also does smart meta stuff with its themes and the player's perspective on events, to the point where it actually involves her in acting out those themes through her reactions to its plot twists - [Spoiler (click to open)]one of the game's major ideas is the need for forgiveness, and though it never states the parallels outright, the game has you go through your own crisis of trust as you come to terms with your viewpoint character after he betrays you - not just the other cast members, but you the player, who is a character in the game in your own right. Phantasy Star II lets the setting do its talking, revealing the truth about its dystopia in the contrast between the bright, crisp cheery colors of its world and the clinical coldness of your discoveries - the nameless bodies of the once all-powerful "scoundrels" you find in Shure; the floating aborted experiments in the Biosystems lab with their malevolent, glowing glares; the matter-of-fact, blink-and-it's-over horror of the reunion between Darum & Teim.
Then there're the examples of just plain straightforward good writing. Lunar has excellent character writing in Ghaleon. 999 has great character dialogue writing. A Dark Room goes crazy places from the most modest and unassuming of beginnings. Ib is a sweetly-told children's horror romp. Chrono Trigger is a zippy, breezy adventure through time that's loads of fun.
Ironically, a number of the examples of notably bad video game writing that come to mind for me revolve around attempts to take the Great Novel approach. Virtue's Last Reward is a poorly-written game because (among many other reasons, but this is a big one) the writers mistook good writing for a lot of writing, resulting in a poorly-paced narrative that tries the player's patience and insults her intelligence. The new Castlevania games are stupid because they believe a story is automatically quality if it's Grimdark & Serious, and because they have no sense of humor or fun about their material. (The above also applies to Chrono Cross, but Chrono Cross has so much wrong with it storytellingwise that I don't think triage is possible.) It's relatively simple to be impressed into submission by an overstuffed Victorian-novel tack and refuse to be wowed by anything else; it takes a bit of understanding of how stories work - or maybe just enough of an open mind to engage with the media you consume instead of dismissing it out-of-hand due to preconceptions about media & genres - to see brilliance elsewhere.
.
My reaction was the same as hers: she asserted that she'd played a lot of games with great stories and therefore wasn't about to lower her expectations. Frankly, if you haven't encountered any good game stories yourself (particularly in "thirty-five years of playing"), I really have to wonder what kind of games you're buying.
I think, though, that the "video games are stoopid" reaction also stems from a failure to realize that good writing takes many forms. I think the people who complain that "there are no good stories in video games" are looking for the stereotypical idea of a Great Novel: a lot of writing and a lot of dialogue that's delivered straight-on by characters in the style of a play, featuring a great deal of SAT vocabulary & circumlocution and a very elaborate plot with a lot of developments that discusses Things of Great Importance (though not anything too weird; let's not get all freaky here). The problem with this - the first problem - is that the shift in medium also entails a shift in the way stories can be told. I don't agree that Dear Esther tells a great story, but I think reviewer Maxwell McGee hit truth when he noted in his review of the title: "video games allow for pacing and discovery that would be impossible to reproduce elsewhere." You can ignore the medium and take the straight visual-novel approach detailed above, but you're missing out on storytelling avenues interactivity affords you. The secondary problems are ones that involve underdeveloped tastes and a misunderstanding of proper execution: Great Novel stories aren't the only ones worth telling, and the Great Novel approach isn't always the best one for a given tale.
Resident Evil's plot, for example, is very standard straight zombie horror (and no one needs to mention the voice acting), but the "Itchy. Tasty." diary is a killer piece of storytelling. The diary is written in prose that's sparse, direct, and pedestrian-decidedly not what anyone thinks of as "great writing," but it'd actually hurt the story if the diary were more elaborately penned. The simple account derives its power from its prosaic everyman perspective - the author unwittingly detailing his loss of humanity, and how horrific events unfold around him in contrast to (or, really, as part of) the mundanity of his working environment: first, he's seething over coworkers who cheat at cards; then, the dogs he's paid to watch are strangely quiet; next, his best friend is waking him up in the middle of the night and telling him to put on a "space suit," and then he's uncomprehendingly watching blobs of his own flesh fall off his arm as he scratches it. The events are scarier because the character doesn't know the significance of what's happening to him; if he had been a more educated or knowledgable character, his story wouldn't have worked. The method by which the player initiates this tale - how it's nothing more than a diary hidden in the corner of an ordinary room, and the player just happens upon this big scare unannounced, in the course of routine investigation, also underlines the horror in a commonplace environment and the virtues of self-pacing & discovery McGee mentioned - as does how the narrative is preceded by you having to execute the diary's owner, who first appears as just another zombie. But then, every zombie here was a living, thinking individual before they turned, weren't they.
For another example, Neopets thingamabob Flight Rising has no plot, but the writers put a great amount of effort into their 120-charas-per-entry flavor text, and I always check it whenever I get a new item. There, the writing is used to worldbuild and to give the player an additional little reward for playing the game, acquiring items, and expanding their hoard. Gone Home is a game-length examination of how found documents can be used in aggregate to tell a story of a household. Baten Kaitos deserves recognition for its immensely likable playable characters, but it also does smart meta stuff with its themes and the player's perspective on events, to the point where it actually involves her in acting out those themes through her reactions to its plot twists - [Spoiler (click to open)]one of the game's major ideas is the need for forgiveness, and though it never states the parallels outright, the game has you go through your own crisis of trust as you come to terms with your viewpoint character after he betrays you - not just the other cast members, but you the player, who is a character in the game in your own right. Phantasy Star II lets the setting do its talking, revealing the truth about its dystopia in the contrast between the bright, crisp cheery colors of its world and the clinical coldness of your discoveries - the nameless bodies of the once all-powerful "scoundrels" you find in Shure; the floating aborted experiments in the Biosystems lab with their malevolent, glowing glares; the matter-of-fact, blink-and-it's-over horror of the reunion between Darum & Teim.
Then there're the examples of just plain straightforward good writing. Lunar has excellent character writing in Ghaleon. 999 has great character dialogue writing. A Dark Room goes crazy places from the most modest and unassuming of beginnings. Ib is a sweetly-told children's horror romp. Chrono Trigger is a zippy, breezy adventure through time that's loads of fun.
Ironically, a number of the examples of notably bad video game writing that come to mind for me revolve around attempts to take the Great Novel approach. Virtue's Last Reward is a poorly-written game because (among many other reasons, but this is a big one) the writers mistook good writing for a lot of writing, resulting in a poorly-paced narrative that tries the player's patience and insults her intelligence. The new Castlevania games are stupid because they believe a story is automatically quality if it's Grimdark & Serious, and because they have no sense of humor or fun about their material. (The above also applies to Chrono Cross, but Chrono Cross has so much wrong with it storytellingwise that I don't think triage is possible.) It's relatively simple to be impressed into submission by an overstuffed Victorian-novel tack and refuse to be wowed by anything else; it takes a bit of understanding of how stories work - or maybe just enough of an open mind to engage with the media you consume instead of dismissing it out-of-hand due to preconceptions about media & genres - to see brilliance elsewhere.
.