Why I don't like stories in games (usually)
Explaining my ongoing crusade against cutscenes, story and anything non-interactive in games.
No More Stories in my Games
Whenever I review a game on this blog, I talk about everything but the story. I might mention the basic plot if it provides context, or make a comment about the cutscenes or dialogue, but only if they affect gameplay. Take Bulletstorm, for example. I couldn’t play more than five minutes without the game yanking the controller from my hands and making me listen to the second worst dialogue in gaming history (first place goes to Borderlands). When it comes to games, I take gameplay into account first, then everything else, then at the very end, dead last, as just an afterthought, is the story. I don’t feel too bad about this, since this is how most games treat their story, too.
I thought I’d clear the air on why I think like this. A lot of people like getting a story with their game. I’ve heard multiple people tell me how good the new God of War or The Last of Us is, because of their story or how it’s like watching a movie. Whenever someone talks about a game, they talk about the story first. I can see how someone would be moved by a game’s narrative. They spend over 30 hours with these characters, and they see them go through trials and tribulations. If it’s a Sony game, they see them get mangled and mutilated, all while killing others and delivering incredibly deep, moving messages like “violence is bad”. It’s all really cerebral, high art. I get that. I just don’t like it.
It’s just that I think there are better ways to get a story than through a game. Most of their stories are crap, for starters. Then you have to wait for the story to drip feed its way to you through 40 hours of gameplay. I really want to know more about Kratos and his son, but first I have to do these lever puzzles. If you’re really invested in the story, the gameplay just gets in the way of the next plot point, and if you want to play the game, the cutscenes just interrupt your fun. If you’re invested in both the gameplay and the story, you get half of both.
I’m going to explain why I don’t like them. Why I think there are better ways to get stories, and why I’m constantly disappointed with how games treat narratives, and how they could be better.
Narratives in games tend to be of low quality
Even the most impressive game stories tend to be a little mid. That’s a bold claim to make when there are games like The Last of Us, Mass Effect, Metal Gear and every JRPG, right? How could I say that when Bioshock exists? The deepest, most intellectual game that has deals with deep philosophical concepts, and what about that twist at then end? Sublime. What about Spec Ops: The Line, where you’re forced to commit heinous war crimes, then the game calls you a war criminal? I felt terrible, man. I felt like… like some sort of criminal… during war.
I’ve gone through several lists of “The best stories in gaming”, and haven’t found much in them. Sure, I haven’t played a lot of them, so my opinion is instantly invalidated because come on, how could I comment on videogame stories when I haven’t played any of the Telltale games? How could I know what a good story is if I haven’t played a game from a company known for story games? They have the word TALE in their name, for Pete’s sake! THEY MAKE CINEMA.
I have played through some of these, to be fair. Mass Effect, Final Fantasy, Xenogears, Yakuza, among others. I’m shocked when I see a game I’ve played in one of these lists. Really? This is what’s considered among the best?
I played the entire Mass Effect trilogy. I couldn’t tell you what I remember about it. There were a lot of characters, and I remember liking some of them. Garrus was alright, he was just a cool dude who wanted to calibrate his guns. I could relate to that. The overarching plot was low rate sci-fi drivel. There are big, scary squid aliens that want to destroy humanity to make more squids.
“Reductio ad absurdum, Roger! You’re just restating the plot like an idiot to make it sound dumb”
Fine, I am. It’s not really about big, scary robo squids eating people. It’s about humanity’s place in a cold, uncaring universe. The Reapers represent entropy, and the slow, unstoppable march of death. They’re an eldritch thing older than the universe. They come in, devour everything, and continue their march towards a goal that’s incomprehensible to the human mind. Good thing they’re weak to bullets, right? You’re telling me the other species didn’t try shooting at the giant metal death gods? Wow. Maybe they deserved to be turned into squids. It’s considered one of the best stories in games, but the plot would be considered corny and trite if it were in a low budget sci-fi movie. Not to mention the incredible ending that undoes everything up to that point.
Yakuza gets mentioned a lot, too. I’ve played Zero and Like a Dragon. They’re both great games, and I can see where they’re coming from. The games have a lot of story. There are a lot of plot points and characters. A lot of things happen in them. Notice how I said a lot of things, but no mention of the quality of the things. That’s because the stories in Yakuza are interesting at the moment, but fall apart when you think about them a little. In Like a Dragon’s case, you don’t even have to think about them for them to stop making sense. It does that all on its own when it starts introducing body doubles, evil twins and baby switching. It’s the kind of thing you’d find on a soap opera; big, emotional, dramatic and convoluted. Popcorn entertainment, with no real deeper meaning or substance. It’s not terrible, but it’s not something I’d consider among “the best” of anything.
I played and really enjoyed the Yakuza games for their gameplay. The stories just worked to drag everything down. The plot in both games overstays its welcome by around 10 hours, making the games drag near the end. I wanted to finish Like a Dragon and see how the story played out, but when I thought it was over, they introduce an entirely new plot thread and it kept going, much to my dismay. I eventually finished the game, but the last few hours of the story served only to sour my experience and cheapen anything I might have experienced in the 40 hours before.
Same thing happens with JRPGs. Their stories are long, and a lot of things happen in them, but they’re not particularly good. They’re entertaining, sure, and that’s what a game should be, entertaining, but not something I’d go out of my way to experience. I wouldn’t say the reason I played Skies of Arcadia was for its deep, moving story. I liked the game and the story sort of eased me through it. It was a good set up that justified why I wanted the different colored crystals. It was like watching an okay adventure anime. Wait, why didn’t I just watch an okay adventure anime instead?
To counter all the negativity, I’ll talk about a game whose story I did like: Red Dead Redemption. The original one. The plot was fine. Like in every Rockstar game (except for the Table Tennis one), the main character is manipulated by multiple factions who promise to help him in exchange for some favors. It works in a gameplay sense, as it gives context for the goals you’re pursuing. It’s also interesting on its own merit, and it has a lot of exceptionally written dialogue and excellent cutscenes.
The reason why I like it isn’t because of its plot, it’s because it’s trying to say something. It’s an interesting story on the surface, but then the subtext is still good. It has actual themes, and it explores them. There’s a recurring motif of failure, where every side mission ends with a kind of failure, the same failure John is going to experience at the end. There’s a looming inevitability over everything. Mass Effect tried to do this with the squids, but, ironically and in line with the themes in Red Dead Redemption, it utterly failed.
The inevitability in Red Dead is seen in the game’s world and setting. It takes place just at the end of the cowboy era. The car is replacing the horse, men in suits replace men in cowboy boots. The power of bureaucracy and “civilization” have conquered the land. There’s no more need for men like John. We’ve moved past that. The same way the government uses him to get what they want, while giving him nothing in return. They promised him freedom if he gave himself up to the law, but they gave him nothing but death in return. He was already free, in a sense, living as an outlaw, but not in the eyes of the government.
This isn’t a dissertation on Red Dead Redemption. I’m not even going to explain how the game’s setting reflects the different eras of cowboy media; the age of cowboys as farmhands and heroes, then the era of spaghetti westerns and finally the end where they’re seen as outlaws and relics of a bygone age. I’m saying that the reason why I love Red Dead’s story isn’t the plot or what happens in it (which is interesting), it’s because of what it means and what it’s trying to say. A lot of games have stories where a lot happens, but they don’t say anything.
Too bad about how John gets killed at the end. He died in a cutscene, so he’s dead for real this time. Nevermind the fact that you saw him shrug off bullets and bear attacks. He’s fallen off cliffs and walked it off, been in multiple duels and survived, gotten blown up by dynamite and such. If he had taken a breather after getting shot by the federales, he could have regenerated his health and killed them all, but that’s not how it works.
Why doesn’t it work like that? Because of…
Ludo-narrative Dissonance
Ludo-narrative dissonance is a big word games journalists use to sound important. It means “when the gameplay and the story don’t match up”. Rockstar games are great at this. Red Dead Redemption has the whole ending fiasco, sure, but it’s also full of other gameplay contradictions. John is a man who wants to do good, reform himself and stop being an outlaw. He wants to give up his life of crime and live with his family in peace… right after he ties five prostitutes to the train tracks and watches them get turned into tomato sauce. He has to go report to the Federal agents and do their bidding because he’s a criminal who wants his record cleaned. Cleaned of what? Of the crimes he committed in the past before you started the game. Not the twelve men he killed in the saloon right before coming here. You meet the agents in the cutscene and they talk to you like normal, completely ignoring the fact that you have a man tied to the back of your horse just outside, and once the cutscene finishes, you’re going to go chuck him and the horse into a ravine. For fun. Like a good law-abiding man should.
This is another reason why I don’t care much for stories in games; they’re usually at odds with each other, not just in how they interrupt each other, but how they function mechanically. Maybe there’s an important, time-sensitive event happening. A giant meteor is going to hit the earth in 2 hours! You have to hurry! Wait, if the meteor hits, that means I’m locked out of this one area of the game. I know we’re all going to die soon, but I think I have enough time to finish these side quests first. What if a character dies in a cutscene? They’re dead for good this time. Can’t you use an item to revive them? No. Those only work outside of cutscenes.
My favorite (or most hated) example of this is Borderlands 2. I hate this game. The gameplay is terrible, the constant dialogue is like having a drill in your brain 24/7 and the story sucks. The main antagonist comes in and starts killing off characters. Oh no! What a tragedy! Not the loveable Borderlands crew! They get killed in a cutscene and they’re really dead for realsies. There’s no way to bring them back. Not even the respawn stations that are… justified in-game. The same respawn stations that you’ve been using all this time. That upload your consciousness and create a clone body every time you die. The same respawn stations that are an actual, physical thing in the game, that costs money and have a company that manages them. The same one the main villain himself acknowledges in a mission where he makes you kill yourself and respawn.
Not to mention the fact that the people who die in Borderlands 2, the original cast of the first game, have already died and come back to life hundreds of times. Roland gets killed, and it’s played like a huge deal. I played as Roland in the first game. I’ve seen him die and respawn multiple times. He can do it. Why doesn’t it work now? Because he died in a cutscene, and gameplay and story are in two separate rooms, and never shall they meet.
Imagine if you had to actually consider the implications of a game’s mechanics when writing a story. That’s too much work, isn’t it? You might even end up writing something interesting. Yikes! Can’t have that now, can we?
It might seem like a petty complaint, but to me it completely eliminates any stakes the story might have. The things I’m seeing on screen don’t match what I’ve seen through dozens of hours of gameplay. This leads me to believe that either the story isn’t real or that what I do in the game isn’t real. Or maybe it was written by a complete hack. That’s when I stop caring. Or at least care less than I already did.
Ludo-narrative dissonance can be overcome with good writing, but like I said, that’s too much work. We’d rather have the story make no sense when compared to the game. Another way this could be fixed, and the way I prefer it, is if you got rid of the story. Can’t have ludo-narrative dissonance without the narrative part, but that’s a bit of a cop-out. Sure you won’t have problems with your story if you don’t write one, in the same way you won’t get food poisoning if you never eat. You can remedy this by merging gameplay and story together more, which games don’t do.
No Interaction
Games are interactive. That’s what sets them apart from every other form of media. No matter how much you scream at the screen while watching a movie, the movie won’t change. No matter how much you try to change the story in a game, the story won’t change. This is fundamentally at odds with how games work.
Sure, you can say that the story serves to ground the game and give it some sort of structure. A goal to work towards and a logical series of events to follow. If there is no goal in the story, there’s no failure state, and a game without a failure state is a toy, not a game. I get that, I just think games could implement their story better if they had some element of interaction.
They don’t have to be massive, sweeping changes. I don’t need every game I play to have 50 different endings, or have branching paths or things like that, but make the story react to the gameplay, even just a little. Acknowledge the player’s efforts.
Another source of ludo-narrative dissonance (I’m sick of this term.) is when the story/cutscene effort doesn’t match the game’s effort. You fight a boss in game. He’s supposed to be the biggest, baddest dude ever. The most powerful force of evil. You play the game and completely trounce him with your skill. You beat him into the ground in a few seconds and you don’t even take damage. Then the cutscene plays and your character is suddenly on the ground getting curbstomped. What? Didn’t you just use that guy’s face to practice your tap-dancing? Now all of a sudden you’re the one being used as an improvised dance floor?
It’d be nice if a game would acknowledge the fact that you completely destroyed the boss. It doesn’t even have to change the course of the story, but give it some element of interactivity. Maybe you beat the boss easily and he goes “Heh. Nice work, but you still won’t be able to stop me” and the story plays out the same, but you get a quick little nod to what just happened. It wouldn’t completely solve game-story no-no, but it would make the story feel a lot more alive.
Take advantage of the medium. You wouldn’t like it if a movie was “just like a book” and it was just two hours of slowly scrolling text with no sound. Why do you think it’s acceptable to have games that are “just like movies”, where most of the interesting stuff happens when you’re not playing? It baffles me.
Diluted experiences
These mismatches between story and gameplay, and the constant interruptions of one over the other, make for a very diluted experience. If you’re in it for the story, you get a crappy little story interrupted by gameplay. If you’re in it for the gameplay, you get some limp gameplay interrupted by constant cutscenes or walking sections.
Notice how I mentioned how I liked Red Dead Redemption’s story, but didn’t say anything about its gameplay. That’s because the game itself is a bog-standard third person shooter that’s lousy with walk-and-talk sections and filler. I mentioned how I disliked Yakuza’s story, but played it for the gameplay. Whenever a cutscene came on, I tolerated it to get to the next fight. I started skipping after a certain point because they were getting in the way of my enjoyment of the game, and they were devolving into complete stupidity.
A game that perfectly encapsulates my feelings on this issue is Scarlet Nexus. It’s an action JRPG. At least that’s what I think it is. It calls itself that on the store, but it doesn’t play like a JRPG. It doesn’t have any of the things I associate with the genre; no long dungeons with random encounters, no overworld, no party system, etc. It has some things, but it’s not what I would think of if you asked me to name a JRPG. Is it an action game, then? It is, but it has the same slow pace and progression of a JRPG, and most importantly, all the cutscenes and dialogue of one.
I played the game for 90 minutes and was completely dissatisfied with both the story and the gameplay. The game’s slow progression makes the first hours of the game feel underwhelming. You’re fighting against easy, basic enemies, with a limited tool set and no cool moves to use. You’re doing the same combo over and over again. Then the story keeps interrupting, but the story is paced like a JRPG, so nothing happens in the first hour. It’s all set up. It’s nothing. Sure, you need to set everything up in a story for it to work, but when the story is being interrupted by weak gameplay, you can’t set anything up in a reasonable amount of time.
In that 90 minute play session, I played a crappy game and saw one part of the start of a story. If you want gameplay or story, you’re out of luck because you get neither. Imagine watching a movie for 90 minutes, and it never starts. It’s one long first act. On the flip side, imagine playing a game for 90 minutes and not getting anything other than the most basic enemies.
You might be thinking “that was just the start of the game, dummy. It gets better after that, obviously, when the story gets going and you get all your moves and powers”. Sure, that’s true, but how long do I have to play it to get to that point? Does the story really start 7 hours in? Does the gameplay get better 5 hours in? Why didn’t I play something that gets good ten minutes in? Why didn’t I spend that time watching something with a complete, coherent story?
I’ve heard people say they like these slower-paced story-driven games because they like to play games to relax. “I play games to chill, bro. I come home from work and I can play a chill game, bro, not everything has to be balls-to-the-wall gameplay, bro, I just want to chill, bro”. I don’t see how you can get a positive experience from a game like that. I came home from work, played an hour of Scarlet Nexus and thought to myself “I could have been doing anything else with my time”. If I wanted to chill, I could have watched some TV. I could have read a book, watched a movie. You come home from work and play an hour of one of these slow narrative games and you get fed the crumbs of a story and play some filler gameplay. That sucks, bro. Do something better with your time, bro.
There are better ways to get a story
I keep mentioning alternatives to playing a story-driven game. In that same 90 minutes of Scarlet Nexus, I could have watched any movie and gotten a better narrative experience, because games are a terrible way to deliver a story. It takes around 20 hours to beat God of War: Ragnarok. 20 hours of chipping through a game to get one mid narrative. Do you know how long it takes to read a novel? It depends, but it’s usually around ten to twelve hours. You can read TWO entire novels in the time it takes you to beat God of War: Ragnarok, and you’d get two full, complete narratives that are of a much higher quality. You could have read 100 Years of Solitude, Catch 22, The Iliad and The Odyssey.
The “greatest game story ever” still pales in comparison to most paperback novels. Discounting Wattpad fanfiction and those romance novels about dinosaurs, there’s an almost 99% chance that a book has a better story than any game you could play.
Take pulp novels as an example. David Goodis is an author whose work helped pioneer the noir movement. His work was published in pulp magazines, which were seen as low-brow, brain-rotting entertainment for young men, which is how a lot of people would describe video games. His works are sold in compilations, and in the time it takes you to finish one of these games for the story, you could have read five entire noir novels. Why do I single out poor David? Because his work was considered disposable reading material, and it’s still better written than any game story. The plots are better, the characters are more complete and fleshed out, their motivations are more complex, there’s better use of imagery and language, scenes have a purpose and there’s symbolism and themes for you to chew on. All in old stories from the 1940s that were thought of as junk. Of course you people praise games with bland stories as amazing, you people don’t even read.
I’m not being a fussy schoolteacher, saying that you’re wasting your time playing with your Nintendo instead of doing something constructive like reading Shakespeare. You could be reading anything. Want something light? Read a manga. 30 hours is what it would take for you to catch up with One Piece if you started reading it now from the beginning. Read through all of Jujutsu Kaisen. You zoomers love that stuff, don’t you?
What if you don’t want to read? Watch a movie or a TV show. In the time it takes to beat a 40 hour game, you could watch Quentin Tarantino’s entire filmography three times. You could watch every single Marvel movie. You could watch the entirety of Better Call Saul in that same time frame.
Anything else would give you a better, more complete and concentrated story than playing a game.
Story-driven games I like
La Mulana is a metroidvania where you play as an explorer going through ancient ruins. I’ve referenced this game a lot for various reasons. It’s a fantastic game, it’s incredibly difficult and really long. It’s also a great example of merging gameplay and story. I like how this game combines both aspects, because it feels natural. Whenever anyone thinks of “story-driven”, all they mean is you’ll be interrupted constantly with exposition dumps, cutscenes and other nonsene. Here, it means that the story is what moves the gameplay forward, and knowing the story means you know what to do in the game.
The game is primarily a puzzle game. You solve riddles to progress. Throughout the game, you’ll see stone tablets that have hints on them. These hints are story pieces. To understand each puzzle, you have to know the area’s story. It’s like being an archaeologist solving the past. You read stone tablets and get environmental clues as to what happened in each area, and that serves as the hints for where to go next. If you have to bring an item to the statue of the Conqueror, you read the lore and figure out who the Conqueror is, and go and put the thing on the statue as stated in the lore. The way the game’s world works is also an eureka moment that comes when you know the story and how everything fits, and the implications of it on gameplay. It’s not ultra-deep, as the story just serves to give hints on what to do, but it works. It makes you pay attention, and since it’s told through environmental interactions (like Dark Souls), you have to come to your own conclusions and think like an explorer. Then you get to a completely nonsensical puzzle and go read a guide.
The Talos Principle is another one I love. It’s another puzzle game, but this time you’re a little robot and you’re trying to find the meaning of life. The story is told through journal entries and audio logs, which isn’t my favorite, but they’re quick reads and get to the point. The story isn’t completely integrated into the game, since you can complete it without knowing it, but if you pay attention to it, you’ll see hints on how to get to the true ending.
The story is all about robots, what separates humans from robots and what it means to be conscious. If it sounds like the story of Nier: Automata, is because they’re very similar. These big, philosophical questions are part of the game’s background, but there are sections where you talk to a computer program that interrogates you directly. Are you conscious? Do you have free will? You can ignore these and answer whatever, but that’s missing the point. The computer responds depending on what you say, and you can even make it go into logic loops if you know how. This little bit of interactivity in the story makes you actively think about what’s being proposed throughout the game. The fact that you’re alone solving quiet puzzles also helps you think about these things.
Then at the end, if you’ve been following the story, you can go for full completion and get the true ending, which puts a nice bow on everything in terms of story and gameplay. You get a satisfying payoff to everything that had been set up all through the game, you get concrete answers to some vague things, you keep a few questions for the sequel and you get to do one big puzzle that feels like a final boss.
Combining gameplay and story doesn’t have to be a monumental task. It can be something as simple as hinting how to get to the next part of the story, or giving you the tools to want to engage with it. A little interactivity goes a long way, too. I’m not 100% against stories in games, it’s just that I dislike most of them, and think my time with a game is better spent pressing buttons and solving problems. So I’m more like 95% against story.
I might be wrong
People enjoy these kinds of games, and they genuinely like these stories. I might see them as a slow way to get both a mid gaming experience and an unsatisfying narrative, but others don’t. They enjoy the gameplay and have fun with it. They like having that 50/50 mix of gameplay then cutscene. They get the satisfaction of overcoming a challenge along with a cool story. I get that. I have enjoyed some story focused JRPGs. If people didn’t like them, Sony wouldn’t have multiple billion-dollar franchises. It’s just not for me, and if you enjoy these games, more power to you. You have more sources of potential joy and fun than I do, but if you do play them solely for the story, I think you should check the alternatives.
Conclusion
I don’t recommend stories in games. At least not for me. They introduce a whole host of problems including the dreaded ludo-narrative dissonance, they dilute the gameplay and, most of the time, they aren’t even good. I wish developers would put in the extra effort to write stories purposefully made to take advantage of the interactivity of the medium, instead of trying to write around it. Not every story has to be a maze of branching paths and alternate endings, but acknowledging the player’s efforts here and there, or keeping the story consistent with the mechanics goes a long way to blending the two seamlessly.
I think each medium should play to its strengths. I don’t read books for their incredible special effects. I wouldn’t want to read a novel that spends its time describing every single detail of every room, trying to get you to imagine it like it’s a movie. At that point just film it instead of writing a book. I also don’t like movies that don’t make use of the visuals. If I can close my eyes and listen to a movie, and get the same experience I would watching it, it means it doesn’t do a great job at being a movie, which are primarily visual. Games are interactive, and if I have a controller in hand, I want to press buttons, not watch a movie or read a book.
I have tried to read a book while playing a game. It doesn’t work. My teammates didn’t like it. They yelled slurs at me and I re-read the same paragraph twenty times. I failed the exam, too. I really don’t recommend doing that.