Gaming Narrative is still very far behind other forms of narrative, such as books or movies. This may be one of the reasons that many people (including most mainstream media) look down upon gaming and gamers as a whole. Those people want engaging, heart-wrenching story lines like No Country for Old Men or the Kite Runner. So far gaming has failed miserably in that area. Most games try to be very violent or quirky to appeal to the people who are gaming now: men in their 20’s and 30’s and children. But how is gaming going to evolve and expand if there are just two types of categories most developers want to fit into. First of all, developers have to fix gaming narrative as a whole.
There are multiple problems with it, but it all originates from the fact that developers are borrowing too many ideas from other forms of media. Developers are unwilling to forge ahead into new territories with their games, because the price of development has gone so high. But someone has to do it because the continual borrowing of ideas just hurts the nature of gaming wholly.
Cutscenes are taken straight from movies. They are used by almost every developer in almost every game. Games used to need cutscenes, as animation technology and graphics weren’t good enough to render people talking normally. Nowadays, the technology is so advanced that there is no need for cutscenes. All cutscenes do these days is detract from the experience and interrupt the gameplay. Why do you think so many people skip them?
There are ways of making good cutscenes. The key is to make these interactive But that doesn’t mean developers should pull an Assassin’s Creed and just give gamers a ten foot radius to mess around in. This distracts the players from the storyline and eventually bores them. Two great examples are Mass Effect and Call of Duty 4. Both had types of cutscenes in them. Mass Effect used a dialogue tree to keep you engaged and in the storyline and you never felt like you were not in the experience. Call of Duty, on the other hand, put you in very gut-wrenching situations like (SPOILER) when you were the President and were effectively killed under a coup or when you were crawling around before you died from a nuclear explosion.
But that doesn’t mean that all games need some sorts of interactive cutscenes to succeed. Bioshock and Half-Life are both very highly critiqued games and both give their narratives through in-game sequences. These are both games in which you can spend four hours in before realizing it’s been that long. That’s because they constantly keep you engaged in the experience and never interrupt it with cutscenes. The future of gaming is, in my opinion, cutscene-less.
Another example of being slammed back down to earth from your game experience is Lost Odyssey. Lost Odyssey has multiple short stories in the game. If people wanted to read a book, they would go to the bookstore, not their local Gamestop. This is a form of abuse on the media, because it just retracts from what games look like they will be in the near future: interactive experiences, in which you control a character or group of characters. All entertainment is supposed to help you escape into another person’s life. People just like to get away from their life and into the life of a virtual character for a few hours. Stopping the game and forcing the player to read pages of texts, just detracts that experience and the player gets slammed back to earth.
Developers are slowly getting better at narratives. With games like Bioshock, Mass Effect, and Call of Duty 4 out in recent times, it looks like games will continue to get better and better narratives. Hopefully developers that are continuing to use sloppy forms of narrative will read this article and realize that their forms of narrative are just other forms of media forced around gameplay. If they try to do a better job with their next games, we should see widespread results within a few years.
