Truths about video game stories

It doesnt matter which writer, author, musician, artist, game designer, movie maker you pick they all hit an upper bound of how many chimps in the the whole troupe they can connect with.

But if we are targeting specific niches rather than the whole population its a great time to be a story teller. The kind of engagement you can get is historically of the charts.

I’d like to submit the Marathon series of video games on how to integrate story into a game without needing to change virtually any gameplay or include cutscenes. That the story is incredibly intelligent is just bonus. For those unfamiliar, it includes AI mental illness, AIs getting molested, subjugated alien races, infinite alternative timelines, and Lovecraftian beings. It might have been recognized as a better Doom if it wasn’t doomed to be a Mac-exclusive game series in the early 90s.

Anyway, what I did for a while - not recently due to a lack of good targets - is watch Youtube "playthrough no commentary" videos (and with story-less gameplay parts heavily cut out). That's usually 4-6 hours of game movie.

The Last of Us was good, but the very top #1 for me as far as story goes - ignoring the game play completely - was Horizon Zero Dawn. One of many such game movies for this game: https://youtu.be/W6jbYfmQAG4

That story seemed to be good but kind of stupid and the same as always, completely predictable, you already know what happened when you see the start and it's a bit stupid and too far-fetched - that kind. Until it wasn't. Turned out it wasn't just well-made, when you find out what was really going on it was THE BEST.

Not only does it have two very different stories layered (three, if you count the present time story): One about what happened to earth and its people and one layered inside of two people, the MC and a woman in the past, with seemingly no connection, until we find out the opposite is the case.

Both story-parts actually had me crying. When I found out after about four hours what had actually happened on earth, it was a great emotional shock. Same with the ending, that used the connection between the MC and that person from the past.

Even the machines and their (animal) forms make sense, there is a good and IMO satisfying explanation.

The stories in this game and in a handful of others are much better than most movies.

If you are in the mood for something really dark, watch a game movie of "SOMA". Underwater survival. Earth is gone - a giant meteor made the surface into a fiery hell, the only survivors are some researchers in a deep ocean facility. Best small detail: They get the "uploading your brain into a computer simulation" right, see the very ending of that game which shows it one last time (TL;DW: As someone who knows neuroscience, the idea makes no sense anyway, but let's forget that and assume it makes sense. What will happen is you still stand there in front of the computer, wandering what happened, after the "upload". Because you still exist, and the copy is not you. It's a copy. You still die, there is no magical connection between you and your copy.)

Of course, it can fail too, but in my humble opinion it is one of the best approach to game design.