The Importance of Story in Games – Or, When Does a Game Become a Film?

I had an interesting chat over cake with a few friends recently (because that’s just how we roll), and the topic of cutscenes in games came up. Opinion was split over whether they were a ‘reward’ that enhanced gameplay, or a nuisance that got in the way of the whole experience.

This got me thinking; do we care about the story in the games we play?

This cake is not a lie.
(Source: bbcgoodfood.co.uk)

Some of the most popular games have no story at all; there’s a reason you can’t recall the epic story arc of ‘Tetris’. At the other end of the spectrum, popular and critically acclaimed franchise ‘Metal Gear’ has been going for twenty-five years, and all of the ‘Solid’ titles have more cinematic footage than your average feature-length film.

A game needs an objective, a goal that gives structure to your playing time. This can be as simple as ‘get all of your coloured counters home before the other players’ or as epic as ‘Escape from a POW camp without being caught by Nazis’. I remember playing ‘Frustration’ with my gran as a child, but ‘Escape from Colditz’ is the game that sticks in my memory. Hiding in the safe house, obtaining corned beef rations, hoping to get the jeep card that multiplied your dice score by six… 

Sunday afternoons with my dad.
(Source: cookdandbombd.co.uk)

Really, the gameplay itself is quite simple; move around the board to collect items and reach ‘home’ while avoiding your opponent. What sticks with you is the story that the board game conveyed of Allied POWs working together to escape their prison and fight on another day (Interestingly, the designer – Pat Reid – was an escapee from Colditz himself).

So, it stands to reason that a game with little story would be boring and unmemorable, right?

Tell that to Nintendo. Their biggest franchise is Mario; he’s their mascot and their biggest earner, having sold over 240 million games to date featuring the moustachioed plumber. What’s the compelling story that players are swept into as they run, jump and grab coins throughout every game?

The princess has been kidnapped; find her.

That’s it. That’s the whole premise for every single game. People can’t get enough of Mario and his adventures, be they 3D or 2D, and the story is thinner than a catwalk model.

'Surprise! Now we're going to unleash our dastardly plan to-'
'I know, dude. I know.'
(Source: Hooked Gamers)

Think back to Tetris. The game designed by Alexey Pajitnov in his days off from working at the Dorodnitsyn Computing Centre has sold over 125 million copies. His colleagues loved it and, to cut a long story short, it became a worldwide phenomenon. I bet you’re humming the in-game music right now. I also bet you can’t tell me what the story is, chiefly because there isn’t one. There are blocks, you need to tessellate them before they fill up the screen. End of.

Possibly the greatest marketing slogan in the history of mankind, not counting 'Don't push me, push a Push-Pop!'
(Source: Wikipedia.com)

All of this surely means that we don’t want story in our games. Story gets in the way; keep stories out of our gameplay!

Yeah. Tell that to the fans of the ‘Metal Gear Solid’ saga, the twenty-five year old franchise (if you include the first two ‘Metal Gear’ games) comprising twelve games, with the exclusion of the myriad of remakes, online missions and portable instalments. The complex, overarching storyline of the entire series spans a fifty year timeline and covers the morality of war, loss of humanity, PTSD, bioethics, the paranormal, the control of social zeitgeists, deception, broken hearts, homosexuality and sacrifice; and that’s just for starters. The epic cinematic cutscenes that run through every game have a length that would put most films to shame. In fact, the games often feel like frustrated films; when you find yourself being interrupted every ten minutes of gameplay in order to be shown a cutscene of equal length, you start to wonder if director and franchise creator Konami really just wanted to make a series of films, and is sitting at home feeling increasingly frustrated that you’re ruining his experience because you keep accidentally making Snake climb out of his hiding place and alerting the guards.

'Damn it, player! You're destroying my vision!'
'Umm... Oops?'
(Source: IGN.com)

Perhaps you’re thinking, ‘I would never want to play a game where I spend so much time just watching cutscenes; I go to the cinema for that!’ Well, given the franchise has sold over thirty million games, I’d wager plenty of people disagree with you. A quick search on Google will turn up hundreds of websites where people spend plenty of time debating the story, the characters; or even write fanfiction and produce fan art around the many characters and storylines of the ‘Metal Gear’ franchise. Clearly the huge complicated story has touched people in many ways, which seems odd when you think about those popular games that don’t even bother.

'Ah, that's better. You can't spoil my story; just sit there and don't touch anything.'
(Source: IGN.com)

Story can be a great way to make people remember a game, but there seems to be two major risks if you want to do this:

Not Another Cutscene – Let Me Hit Every Button Until I Find One That Skips This…

Some players love to watch those long, lovingly animated cutscenes with clever dialogue and interesting plot points. Others feel such events are disingenuous; they came to play a game, not watch a film. So, how can you create a compelling narrative that makes a game stick in the players mind without running the risk of them avoiding your efforts by skipping it?

Story doesn’t have to involve hours of epic cutscenes; you can convey a strong narrative in a game using very few non-playable moments. I distinctly remember playing ‘Sonic 3 and Knuckles’, the game SEGA made in 1993 that was too big for one cartridge, so they developed lock-on cartridge technology in order split it into two. That had a truly compelling story for the time and genre; Sonic and Tails find themselves on a mysterious floating island in the sky where lone inhabitant Knuckles the Echidna seems hellbent on destroying them. As the game progresses, you discover that the evil Dr Robotnik (AKA Eggman) has been playing you all off against each other in order to steal the island’s precious Master Emerald – which keeps the whole island afloat – in order to use it as a power source for his copyright unfriendly Death Egg. Sonic, Tails and Knuckles team up to stop him and save the day. This whole story is conveyed in – at most – around three minutes of silent animated in-game sequences, all of which allow you to control your character.

Knuckles has been betrayed by evil Dr Robotnik? Le gasp! He's mad as hell, and he's not going to take it...
(Source: own)

A more modern example of this is in ‘Donkey Kong Country Returns’. Here, Donkey Kong’s island friends are hypnotised by bad guys and are used to steal all of Donkey Kong’s precious bananas. When the Tiki villains try to hypnotise Donkey Kong in the same way, they are met with a rude awakening that the player is able to deliver themselves. The cutscenes are not in-game, but they are silent and economical. These tell a humorous tale with an element of threat, and do so with limited interruption of your gameplay experience.

'Dude, what are you doing?'
(Source: NintendoWorldReport.com)

‘Show, Don’t Tell’ Versus ‘Do, Don’t Show’

Games are meant to be a completely interactive experience, whereas stories are generally a rather passive medium; you control the progress of a game, whereas your progress is controlled by the pacing of a book or film. As these two notions seem at odds with each other, surely the story runs a risk of impeding the gameplay?

A pivotal moment in ‘Metal Gear Solid’ involves a brutal torture sequence where you can control the game’s ending; if you submit to the torture, then rookie soldier and potential love interest Meryl will be killed. If you resist it, she will be spared and your character can sled off into the sunset with her. Which is great; as the player I am controlling the story by my actions. 

Quick! Press 'A' to resist! The startlingly accurate recreation of surviving interrogation in 'Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes'
(Source: IGN.com) 

However, this is seriously negated during the major twist in the game. Your character Snake has been instructed to deactivate the nuclear capabilities of Metal Gear REX by use of a very poorly designed emergency shutdown. This system works on a toggle mechanism and can only be set once; if the nuclear missile has been activated, use of your PAL key will deactivate it. If it is dormant, use of the PAL key will activate it. Either way, there’s no going back.

At this point in the game, it’s fairly obvious that your character is being duped into arming Metal Gear REX’s nuclear missile, but there’s not a damn thing you can do about it. If you want to finish the game, you have to go along with it, even though you know it’s stupid. Suddenly, the story is actively pulling you out of the gameplay.

Am I getting direct insight into what it's like to be an unthinking government tool, or am I just having to go through with this because the game demands it? I think it's probably the latter.
(Source: funwithboxes.tumblr.com)

What if you want to create a compelling narrative, but without breaking up the gameplay in any way? This is where utilising the gameplay itself to convey the story comes into play. Can you allow the player to uncover the story by doing?

‘Metroid Prime’ seemingly drops you into the middle of gameplay with relatively little set up; after a brief tutorial level, your character Samus crash lands on an alien planet. However, most of the backstory and plot is revealed through scanning various artefacts and log files. The more interested you are in the story, the more effort you can make in scanning your surroundings and reading tales of Phazon madness as recorded by the Chozo who once inhabited the planet. The game is set up so that you need to scan certain items, so the chances are that your curiosity will be piqued enough to keep searching. Another interesting aspect of this is how the various log files and diaries that are available to you will often forewarn you of specific hazards, adding an element of dread to proceedings as you travel through the areas. Fighting a huge boss is all well and good, but when you’ve spent the past five rooms reading records of how it has killed several of its Space Pirate handlers, you’re really left feeling a little nervous.

Metroid Prime - a game with biology field notes!
(Source: Metroid.retropixel.net)

This mechanism is used throughout the Metroid Prime Trilogy, and isn’t restricted to simply providing exposition or hyping up enemies. In ‘Metroid Prime 2: Corruption’, there are a number of diary entries you can access from the helmets of the dead crew of the GFS Tyr. As you can access them at random they seem relatively unimportant; especially the amusement of one of the crew when a rookie had regaled them with tales of your character’s derring do, and the grousing of one trooper fed up with not getting to do anything useful and voicing the opinion that Samus wouldn’t have to put up with being sidelined. When you put the pieces together, you realise you’ve read the story of an eager young female rookie who, inspired by your example as a Galaxy-famous bounty hunter, joined the Galactic Federation to make her mark on the world and was killed on her first mission. Makes you feel proud to be alive, huh?

There are also moments of black humour in ‘Metroid Prime’; there are Space Pirate log files that wearily remind the crew that ‘Metroids are not pets; Metroids are not to be used for target practice’. I personally found the useful files pertaining to successful attempts by the Space Pirates to reverse-engineer your weapon technology (thus creating enemies that can only be hurt with specific weapons) very funny when they dispassionately chronicled the failed attempts to recreate Samus’ morph ball technology:

Okay; I laughed.
(Source: GamesWeLike.com)

Speaking of black humour, ‘Portal’ also builds a compelling narrative without using cutscenes. In this game, your character Chell wakes up in a laboratory testing facility; there’s no backstory and no clue what you are doing there, except for the computer which introduces itself as GLaDOS and instructs you to complete the tests laid out in the environment. As you keep playing and working out how to get through each puzzle room, GLaDOS makes increasingly darkly humorous comments regarding the perils of going outside, as well as the callousness of the Aperture Science facility you are currently in. As well as being written in a blackly comic style, these messages are pertinent to the game. You swiftly realise that GLaDOS is also clearly a little damaged, given some of the nonsensical things the computer spews out over the intercom. As a result, the twist ending does not come out of left field, as you have received several hints of just how much danger you are in at the hands of the nefarious operating system.

The moment that launched a thousands memes...
(Source: Gameinfomer.com)

There are many compelling reasons to include story elements in any game where this will enhance the experience; most notably the fact that, when done well, it will create a memorable experience that will stay with players long after they’ve switched off their consoles or PCs. There are also pitfalls, as it is equally easy to put players off with overly complex stories and cutscenes.

Having said all of that, for every player that doesn’t want even a five second animation to get in the way of their gameplay, there are those who eagerly watch film-style cutscenes every time they replay a game. The trick is presumably to find a happy balance that works with the game you’re trying to create, and to realise that sometimes it’s okay to break the rules.