I find some points of your argument contradictory, but that’s because I think your definition of story changes throughout your comment. I’d reply here, but then who would really read it? Not very many people. Expect to be heavily quoted in a post early this week!

To quote from Gamasutra article – “Now, the notion that story doesn’t matter is worst with the industry old-timers. “Just repeat that 30 seconds of gameplay, and you’ve got it,” I’ve heard. Or worse: “We’ve never had to worry about of that story stuff before.”

“Maybe that’s okay for a small audience of addicted gamers, but the new charter for platforms like Xbox 360 is to appeal to a mass audience, not necessarily people who have even played games before. That means that if games are ever to rise to the level of universal cultural experiences, the way movies have, we have to figure out the same story problems movies did in the last century.”

Sorry, but this is the road to allowing this art form to transmogrify into the equivalent of the worst of what Hollywood stands for. Games are already a universal cultural experience, and will become even more “universal” as the older folks – who will never play games the way they watch TV – die off and are replaced with a population who has never known a day without videogames.

If the argument is to change the basic structure of games so that a “mass audience” can love them… well, what do we want here? To what extent are we going to slave the game experience to the story instead of the other way around – as it should be? For what? To attract these people who don’t already want to play videogames? How much more money does the industry need to make? Do you want a major component of the design process of the next ‘God of War’ to be “How do we get 40 something soccer moms to want to play this game?”

Is it time to inject into Madden 2008 mandatory reversals, where your star quarterback is taken from you near the end of the season and given to a rival team because it fits the needs of the STORY? (read: the needs of the author to tell HIS story rather than for you to tell YOURS.)

Yes, story matters in (some but not all) videogames, but it’s not the story THEY want to tell, rather it’s the story you create as you play.

I hate to beat up on any product in particular (but this example is so successful it doesn’t matter) – the perfect example of “going Hollywood” is the comparison between Halo and Halo 2.

Halo 1 was a radiant piece of art, it put you into the experience and let you do what you’d always wanted to do. It wasn’t the story that made the game special, the story was well done and served to enhance the experience almost perfectly – but it was “Robocop and the Space Marines from Aliens vs. Predators and Zombies on Larry Niven’s Ringworld”.

What made Halo 1 great was that the game placed you into an internally consistent world where you are given the freedom to solve the game’s problems, within the construct of the game, in your own way and only according to your abilities. The game world would respond as you might expect it to were you actually in that situation. When you faced the end of a level – there was no Boss character, rather you had a slew of enemies in fortified positions with tank and air cover. When you faced a ‘race’ situation – saving Marines in level 2 or the race against time before the reactor of your ship exploded – you had a real race, you could lose, it mattered.

In Halo 2, what do we have? Well, aside from its saving grace of being the current best online multiplayer shooter from a technical standpoint, you had a game that went Hollywood. It slaved the game to the story.

Halo 2 gives us Bosses a’la Wolfenstein3D’s Mecha Hitler. Characters that should, were the world consistent, been weaklings and yet they are tougher than the toughest Elite or Hunter – or GROUPS of Elites. When you chase after the Prophet, you can’t lose him. You can wander around lost for 15 minutes and then suddenly – bam – you are right on his tail again. You can’t lose that race. Why? Heck, you’ve even got doors that won’t open until all the enemies in the room are dead. Do you remember that in the original title? Me neither. The first game give us mysterious aliens that serve as the perfect backdrop for our experience. The second destroys the mystery and tells us ( we don’t discover – we are told) all about these now english-fluent creatures.

Why were all of these things done that were not done in the first game? These design issues were perpetrated in service to the story. With Halo 1 the designers felt if they created a kickass videogame that players would love it. For Halo 2 they felt they needed to continue the story, protect the story. Their story – not yours.

And I think gamers intuitively understand this, I think that when it comes time for Halo 3′s release, unless it’s more Halo 1 than Halo 2 is, that Microsoft is going to find the title much less of a weapon against PS3 than they expected.

If this is where we are headed, I’ll put my faith in the hands of those old-timers whose games are still fun 20 years later, let alone 2 weeks later. Authors don’t often think about getting out of the way of the fun of the experience. The “Old Timers” and those inspired by them are not concerned with directing the evolution of something millions of people love in service of the goal of making millions of other people who don’t love that thing more likely to buy it.

But hey, that’s just me.

Story is very important (but not primary) for many videogames but I don’t want any story in some games. For the most part, I don’t want story in a racing game, or a snowboarding game, or a sports game. It gets in the way. Let me bring my story, all you “authors” keep out of my championship season.

Try Sid Meier’s “Pirates!”

You may find it less appealing than you think. Then again, you may not.

Think of how much of the RPG experience is obsessive-compulsive. The “treadmill” isn’t just something we see in online RPGs like EverQuest, it’s an _essential element_ of every RPG I’ve ever played. You start with a longsword. Then you find a longsword +1. Later, a Murasama blade.

The funny thing, of course, is that this is the polar opposite of how combat and conflict works in real life, where generally you get the nice weaponry BEFORE you engage in combat, if you want to survive.

What I am trying to get at in my notes is that the “spreadsheet model” of RPGs works BECAUSE it provides a framework on which to hang the plot. The player is content to some extent because as long as the numbers in the spreadsheet keep getting bigger, he thinks he’s making progress.

The larger point I’m trying to make is that this is a “worse is better” style solution: it’s an 80% solution. It kinda works, but it also forecloses an entire class of narrative possibility that might — just might — make for more interesting role playing. I don’t know about you guys, but I’m halfway through my life and I don’t notice myself getting stronger or more dextrous or any better at, say, tennis. Yet somehow things are still interesting.

On another note, I agree 100% with Chris’s observation about where the Western RPG falls on its face, which is in giving the player so much rope they just get bored and aimlessly wander away. I didn’t really discuss that in my article directly, but I should have.

-peterb

What can you do?

Not to harp on this one again, but I think Half-Life 2 illustrates a great crisis of story-telling. How do you allow the player to feel immersive by presenting the main character as tabula rasa while at the same time trying make the character a vital portion of an epic story?

I still feel that, well Valve didn’t. That they simply cobbled some backstory and some very loose plot elements and then let the player wander in between. Comparatively, you have San Andreas … where you were allowed a decent reign over what your character was like and some control over the story being told, even if it had cutscenes to solve the problem in my first paragraph.

But I’m still waiting for the game which gives you the city and the characters and just lets you figure out how it ends.

Still, I’ve added a little something to help the flow a little.

I can’t believe you don’t think trying to feed an insatiable hunger isn’t conflict. *nirg*