As Human As Human

As Human As Human

Use my brain…

Steve K Peacock wants more life in his games.  He may also be crazy.

DESPITE THEIR nature, videogames are inherently poor at being imaginative. For every genuine step forward we get a swarm of games that take that new and exciting idea and repackage it for their own ends, adding nothing but still getting away with it. I don’t begrudge them this, they’re a business at the end of the day after all and exploiting what has been shown to work is just good sense for them. But when you can boil down the entire industry to more or less a single plot line per genre, there’s only so long I can maintain this position.

The prime offenders are Role Playing Games and First Person Shooters. Both of which will claim engaging and powerful stories but fail to deliver time and time again. FPS games usually degenerate into Space Marine vs Aliens or just Marine vs Nazi/Terrorists. Or Nazi Terrorists. RPGs, on the other hand, are usually more about the mechanics of the game than the plot itself.

But I’m not trying to rant about actual plots of games, not really. It stands to reason that there will be exceptions to these rules that are astoundingly good – Mass Effect 2 immediately jumps to mind for RPGs, if you can even call it one – but even then the story itself is told in the same way. Cutscene after cutscene, taking you out of the game and stripping you of control of your character, making you watch what is – in essence – a film.

I can’t think of any other media that does this, changes itself into another at certain points. The Metal Gear Solid series has come into a mixture of criticism and praise for this, the obscenely long cutscenes being defended by the argument that “if we must have cutscenes they might as well be awesome”.

That, I suppose, is true. That does avoid the question, however, of if we need cutscenes at all. A cursory glance over the Half-Life series would contend that we don’t, that we can tell a story in a way where we don’t need to remove player immersion. While this is a step in the right direction, I don’t think that your ability to walk around while someone is reeling off exposition makes for that much of a change. Ultimately, what you are experiencing is a cutscene. You have no direct input on what is occurring other than the ability to dickishly run around the character in a circle, or stare blithely at Alyx’s arse. You, as the player, have no real interaction with these moments. That said, there’s not much further to travel to find a form of storytelling that I find genuinely intriguing.

Left 4 Dead’s approach to the story was that, while it may have had one, it most certainly wasn’t going to tell you what it was. The in-game moments of conversation between characters were there largely to do little else but establish the characters themselves. The actual plot of the game was left for you to work out. Clues were provided, graffiti on walls for instance, but if you wanted to know then you had to think. Oddly, Left 4 Dead 2 took a step back in this regard, openly stating to you certain facts about the universe and the characters’ journey.

Perhaps this is why I like adventure games so much. I like working for my story in games, the sensation of earning progression that doesn’t really seem present in so many games. And while adventure games give you only a limited way to interact with the conversation, just as RPGs do, the fact that you have got there without the need for stabbing twenty Kobolds or murdering a warehouse full of thugs gives it a slight edge. But it’s still not far enough.

Continues…

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