Truths about video game stories

I came to this thread to read a thread about videogame stories. Imagine my surprise (wait, this is HN), when the first thing that I see is your comment about videogames that isn't really about videogames it's a way for you to sell your book, which you admit you are shameless about.

But I just wanted to reed about videogames. If you were more subtle, if you knew how tll me a story without telling me that you are telling a story, then it's not wasting my time and I can get what I came for as well as what you want me to learn.

Wolfenstein and Doom have literally zero story choices of any kind. Not even inconsequential ones!

Clearly, Half-Life has superior story telling to Wolfenstein or Doom. Not by much, can be argued, but it clearly does. And at the time, the little bit felt like a whole lot compared to literally nothing.

I'm in the opposite camp. Movies are not good vehicles for plots, because the right pacing and timing is subjective. They almost always fail at storytelling, because they proceed at the same pace for everyone. The best you can do is to watch the movie alone at home. Then you can at least pause the film when you need time to think, or jump back to rewatch a section.

Cutscenes between gameplay sequences tend to make the game and the story worse. Both because they break the pacing, and because they are often used to show things that would not be possible in the game itself. The game already tells one story through gameplay, dialogue, and player choices. That story should take priority. The gameplay should be expressive enough that the writers can tell the story they want within the framework, instead of resorting to cutscenes that break the logic of the game.

I can pull Mass Effect (lets say ME2, as its oftentimes cited as the strongest entry in the trilogy) as a nearly inassailable example of this dichotomy games are faced with (and this post does have spoilers for ME2, though not horribly big ones)

One of the biggest issues with ME2 narrative structure is a direct consequence of the open world design; the ludonarrative dissonance of talking with a crew member, being told "the ship my dad died on just started broadcasting a distress signal, ten years later, Shepherd we gotta go check it out right now", then agreeing to check it out, then waiting ten quests or 10 real world hours to go check it out. The narrative introduces urgency; the open world gives the player the agency to ignore that urgency. It would be powerful if the game recognized this, and tweaked dialog to say something like "well I would have liked to check it out sooner, but this will have to do" once you finally get around to it, but it does not; instead, it leaves us with the ludonarrative dissonance of everyone pretending like this is priority #1, has always been priority #1, even though I just spent thirty minutes in the captain's cabin trying on some new armor.

Same game: You speak with Samara, she says something like "its so refreshing to work with a crew of friends again, and to help you with your mission." Not once did I take Samara on a mission; she says this dialog no matter how often you deploy on missions with her.

Same game: Grunt is complaining about having an insatiable need to kill stuff, and his loyalty mission is to get him checked out by the Krogans. At first, I was like; woah! I also never took Grunt on any missions, not even once; is this the game reacting to him being locked up in his room all day, creating dynamic content in response to my gameplay decisions? A true integration of open world and narrative, player decisions impacting the way the story progresses in a deep and meaningful way? It isn't. He'll do that even if he's by your side for every mission killing thousands of mercenaries.

Here's the gist of it: When games try to integrate an open world with strong narrative, it is possible to do it in a fantastic and meaningful way, where the open world actually supports and builds upon the narrative. Imagine if refusing to utilize squad mates led to their desertion, which led to more missions to win them back, or spending all day side-questing leads them to ask questions about what their mission really is and why they joined.

By and large, games fail to do this, because its VERY hard. Open world games are exponential multivariadic systems; the player has a thousand things they can do at any time, trying to account for every thousand of those things, write dialog lines, record voice-over, in twenty languages... its impossibly difficult. Games which go beyond competent in this regard (and Mass Effect is FAR BEYOND competent; its VERY good) should be held up as paragons of the artform, because they attempted to integrate the thing video games do best (open-ended interactivity) with a more traditional narrative structure. But that doesn't mean sacrifices weren't made, and ultimately for me it comes down to: Mass Effect is a FANTASTIC game... but its narrative isn't.