Problems with Modern Game Stories: Part I

Problems with Modern Game Stories is a three part series arguing that today’s video game narratives are ineffective. Note: Only single-player, AAA first/third person games apply to this argument. The article contains SPOILERS for Red Dead Redemption.  

Compared to a few decades ago, video games have become fairly easy. They don't really require precise timing or patience or even a significant amount of skill. The often brutal games of the 1980s have been largely replaced with forgiving, more user-friendly experiences. This decrease in difficulty, predominately in the $60 video game market is, unsurprisingly, to make games accessible to a broader range of people. This is not particularly new or controversial, but difficulty is often referred to as the biggest trade-off of accessibility, when there is another, perhaps equally significant casualty that no one is talking about.

Accessibility has ruined video game stories. Not only has it stunted its progression, but has regressed it to such a state that I fear it may never recover. Stories in today’s games, from their presentation to their plots, mirror traditional narrative-styles when it doesn’t make sense to do so. Three act structures, intricate plots, expansive dialogue, and linear cutscenes are used in games not because they complement the medium, but because they’re more in line with what audiences expect a story to be. Games are presented like movies because it is what audiences and developers alike are familiar with.

This decision, this quest to maximize accessibility, has made stories both emotionally ineffective and interactively constricting. Across this three-part series, I will attempt to argue this point. In this part, modern narrative design will be discussed, arguing that today’s plots are too ambitious to be properly understood or emotionally engaging.

Part I: Stories are too complicated

The word “cinematic” is a common buzzword used to describe many of today’s blockbuster video games. For those unaware, the term refers to elements that are inspired by motion pictures, cinema. These elements can range from plot presentation and structure, to interactively driven moments. Games that strive to be cinematic (which essentially includes all major releases) can provide visually intense set pieces or emotionally charged moments by referencing techniques used in film.

However, game stories have become overly cinematic. They’ve borrowed too much from cinema to the point where they’re very similar, almost identical to film. Take Red Dead Redemption for example. Like a movie, its plot is fairly complex, full of conflict, action, relationships, quirky personalities, betrayal, and character development. The entire story is even presented through film, just like countless of other games these days.

These stories require just as much concentration and attention as film, and it’s here where problems arise. Today’s cinematic video games demand too much from players. The cognitive effort expended when playing, in the form of AI/world interaction, environmental scanning, problem solving, and strategy formation is taxing enough, but games also require players to follow, remember, and be emotionally engaged in the plot. These demands are just not realistic.

This conclusion was also reached by game designers Tom Abernathy and Richard Rouse during a GDC talk titled “Death to the Three Act-Structure”. Their research found that players have difficulty remembering game narratives when plot and gameplay are not connected:

“[P]layers really hardly remember the plots of the games that they play…they can’t expend the mental bandwidth to follow complex plots and stories when they’re always having to do something else.”

In Psychology, this “mental bandwidth” is called Channel Capacity, and refers to the limited amount of information our brain can process at one time. If our brain attempts to process too much information, exceeding its Channel Capacity, it will not make sense of the data.

In other words, our brains have to process a lot more when playing games than film, making it harder to follow a cinematic story. A 2012 article in the journal of Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience seems to back up this theory. The study, titled “Neural contributions to flow experience during video game playing”, measured neural activity when playing a single-player First Person Shooter. It measured five factors found to promote immersion in video games: challenge, concentration, direct feedback, clear goals, and player agency.

Brain activity and challenge: Panels A and B indicate overcoming a task. C indicates failure.

Each of these factors was found to activate different areas of the brain in the cognitive, emotional, and sensorimotor networks. Interestingly, the study also found that players imagine and simulate their avatar’s virtual movements when they’re playing. These findings indicate that, in addition to the cognitive demands of experiencing a cinematic plot, games also require significant brain capacity to interact with the game’s mechanics.

BioShock Infinite’s ending is an extreme example of how a game can exceed players’ Channel Capacity. The game’s finale introduced multiple concepts and critical events, all in the span of about 15 minutes. The countless videos and forum threads explaining the game’s ending speaks to the confusion many players experienced.

In addition to plot comprehension though, cinematic games also demand emotional engagement, actually caring about what’s happening. This is another hurdle that most film-inspired games just don’t and cannot do. Consider this question: how many games have moved you emotionally? How many times has a video game story made you sad, laugh, depressed, or happy? Not many, I’d wager. I can only really count two emotions that stories achieve with any regularity: excitement and horror. Both of which will be discussed in Part II.

Recalling Red Dead Redemption, did you feel remorse when John Marston died? Did you tear-up, get a lump in your throat, or feel genuinely sad? I know I didn’t. Compare this to Boromir’s fate in The Lord of The Rings. Boromir’s death was far more effective, yet both characters are quite similar. Both sacrificed themselves to save others and both, in the end, redeemed themselves from past mistakes. Neither character was that likeable either. Marston murdered, pillaged, and plundered and Boromir tried to kill and take the ring from Frodo.

One difference is execution. Look at Boromir’s death. It’s visuals, the use of music, the slow motion; this scene is deliberately shot to make you feel something. Compare with Marston’s death. The camera angles are flat, there’s no music, and little pacing. Where movies are shot to evoke an emotional response, video games are shot in the most derivative way possible. Though games try to be cinematic, the result is often diluted cinema.

I agree, Michael

Emotional investment also goes back to the limitations of what our brains can process at any one time. Film is passive, it allows the brain to concentrate and digest what’s happening. In games like Red Dead Redemption and BioShock Infinite, where story strives to be cinematic, there are just too many things going on to be as invested in the narrative as film.

This is in contrast to games like Journey, Gone Home, and Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons. Their stories are incredibly simple: get to a mountain, investigate a house, and retrieve medicine for a sick father. Gameplay is also minimal. It’s no surprise, then, why these games are praised for their ability to emotionally engage their audiences. They understand the importance of Channel Capacity and that the player’s journey is more important than the actual plot.

Maximizing accessibility has ruined video game stories. It’s set a precedent, a false belief that games can achieve what films can. In actuality, their plots are overly cinematic to the point of incoherency and emotional indifference. If they continue down this path, these games will never progress beyond the forgettable summer blockbuster movies that they are.

Part II coming soon...