Video Games Are Better Without Stories

For the most part, early games dumped you directly from the title screen into the gameplay. They had a few paragraphs in the manual explaining that some bad guy's kidnapped the princess, and it's time for the chosen hero to beat up the bad guy's army, rescue the princess and save the world. Most of the people didn't read it.

This made the games that attempted to tell a more detailed story stand out from the crowd and develop as a distinctive genre.

Nowadays games feel as if they have to give you ten minutes of cutscenes for every twenty minutes of gameplay. Games are a great artistic medium for telling stories. The problem is that games that aren't in story-heavy genres feel a need to pretend that they are. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is a great example of a modern game with a minimalist approach to its use of tutorial and cutscene elements.

So today, games that take a minimalist approach to storytelling are the ones that stand out from the crowd.

It's hard to build a game that's fun but focuses solely on narrative. Heavy Rain did a great job at this, but a lot of games fail.

JRPG's are the genre that gets as far as possible toward a storytelling focus without totally sacrificing gameplay. For a recent example, Persona 5 is a flawlessly executed example of a game that tightly integrates story and gameplay (although a full appreciation of the game's literary depth is impossible without some knowledge of Japanese culture and tropes).

I don't think the title "Video Games Are Better Without Stories" is true.

The premise of the article seems to be slightly different than the title: that traditional mediums can tell stories better than video games. Which seems true, or at least.. has been true so far.

Personally I think video games can tell stories differently (not better or worse) than movies/books. They can do a much better job of putting you in the story and actually feeling something. The author uses the example of Bioshock, but really that's a poor choice for his thesis. Bioshock wasn't using the gaming medium to tell a story, they were using a story to add to a video game. Which was great, it worked very well to add to the action and became critically acclaimed (which seems to me to prove the title of the article wrong). But the story was just tacked on to the game, the game wasn't there to tell that story.

There are a few good "games" that are really just a story in a game setting. Here's a couple that I've seen:

Firewatch - http://store.steampowered.com/app/383870/ - Uses a mystery setting to tell a story. It seems like video games (at least first person ones) are constrained in a lot of ways to use mystery settings to tell stories. I've played this one and can attest it is pretty good and you actually feel involved.

Emily is Away - http://steamcommunity.com/app/417860 - This one is an interactive instant messaging story, so very nostalgic for our crowd. However, it's not as interactive as it necessarily seems. Which is why I consider it a story in a game setting. I haven't actually played this one yet, but I've had it in my "wish list" on steam for a while until I'm in the right mood for it. However, it's free to play so you can try this one yourself without anything but a time committment.

Video games are interactive stories where the editor is you: so there is some potential for a great story, it won't be something film-like, more like a animated life diary of virtual character. People usually don't play games "for the story", they see it as atmospheric bonus for the game mechanics: something like background music they wouldn't want to focus their time on, or be forced to run down the storyline the 124th time just to get the gameplay rewards. The problem is inherent in video games being a competitive, goal-oriented environment where repetitive, constructed stories and art are just immersion decorations for the gameworlds. Obtrusive stories forcing the player to "rewatch the film again" detract from the flow of gameplay and actually make the players treat the story as sort of wasted effort(interruption in gameplay, e.g. cutscenes, dialogues, infodumps) that makes the game less fun/cohesive/natural.

Being a huge fan of the genre of "interactive narratives", I have to disagree. Games like Gone Home, Life is Strange, Mass Effect, Skyrim, Fallout, Deus Ex, and others have had a profound impact on me. The author doesn't seem to make a compelling point why they would be better as books or movies. I haven't really been able to derive a more coherent argument from the article than "they're worse because they're worse, so they should not be games". I think that is a bit harsh on the incredible achievements of the games that painstakingly build an interactive narrative on a medium that is both technically and artistically extremely challenging. Take Mass Effect for example, to me the whole franchise has been one of the most successful science-fiction stories ever. It rivals Star Trek, Star War, and The Expanse. Especially since Mass Effect came out during a period where Hollywood had pretty much given up on the genre as a whole. Mass Effect constructs this beautifully detailed and coherent universe set in a future where mankind discovers advanced technology from an ancient race. This propels mankind into a new era of exploration, conflict and intrigue. Te reason why Mass Effect "works for me", besides the "world building", is that you have the ability to construct a secondary narrative on top of the one presented by the game itself. You are allowed, and encouraged, to make decisions and reflect upon them. While it's all arguably superficial and closed-world, the moment you immerse yourself /in the character/ it offers something very few books and movies can: the ability to guide the story, and become a "person" in a complex world. Then again, I'm biased…but so is that author it seems.

I feel like the author had a point they were trying to make in this article, but it ended up being a complete mess that just comes across as stupid.

This idea that games are just cheaply emulating hollywood is just wrong. Games can and do tell stories that just don't work in film or books, and those stories are valuable. Games can use interactivity to make a story more personal and give the player investment and ownership.

The article essentially ends by saying that games should focus on mechanics over story. The same argument has been made before and is just a bad argument. Subtle uses of interactivity can be effective just as subtle uses of the visuals in a film can be effective.

I think that's often true of more traditional attempts at storytelling in games. I would say that the emergent stories in games like Civilization or Dwarf Fortress are more compelling that the written stories in most games. However, there are some games that really do a great job of leveraging the interactive medium for telling a story. Undertale is one that comes to mind. Of course, actually making a game like that is far more difficult and time consuming, since you're essentially writing a huge branching story where each path the player can take is still cohesive and makes sense.

I'd love to know what games the author has played in the last decade.

Gone Home was nearly universally hated outside of media outlets, and is hardly a game in the first place; so it's interesting he brings it up as a shining example.

Procedurally generated stories. This is where video games can have an upper hand over other media. Dwarf Fortress is doing it right.