We explore the increasing importance of story in videogames

EXTENDING THE UNIVERSE
Games aren’t there to be watched; they exist to be played. That’s perhaps why publishers and developers look to other methods of expanding their stories, without impinging on the flow of the game. Titles like the Metal Gear Solid series have been roundly criticised by some for allowing their cut-scenes to run on for far too long, without any input from the player. Yet the series has also been widely praised for its cinematics, proving that the lines between gaming and the apocryphal ‘interactive movie’ are blurring. Games like Sony’s forthcoming Heavy Rain take that a step further – offering multiple narrative paths, some even culminating in the death of an avatar, yet allowing play to continue. It seems games are set to explore ever more elaborate narrative structures as the technology grows to better accommodate the visions of their creators – yet there are still ways of exploring these ideas in a more traditional videogame setup.

A common storytelling technique more prevalent in games over the past few years – utilised in past titles like Doom 3 and Half-Life, but arguably popularised by BioShock – is to have a simple, linear plot that the player can follow as part of his/her path through to the end of the game, backed up by optional background information, filling in the gaps or simply providing additional narrative nourishment. In BioShock’s case, it was provided by the audio logs that players could pick up and listen to whenever they wanted, or, alternatively, completely ignore if they so wished. Fleshing out the back stories of some of Rapture’s inhabitants was just one of many widely praised elements of the game, and it’s rare to see background narrative given the same attention to detail as that which is directly presented to the player. Activision’s forthcoming Singularity uses a similar idea, but integrates it more thoroughly into the gameplay, asking players to use their powers to rewind time to make destroyed tape players listenable again. Again, it’s a way of providing further information about the game world or its characters, which players have the option to look into should they prefer additional detail to the basic story, while also making sure that it doesn’t interrupt the flow of the game for those who are more concerned with actions rather than words.

Another approach, and one that is fast becoming a popular structure for modern videogames, is for a more disjointed, even fractured, narrative – one that has the player collecting elements of the story and piecing them together. Radical Entertainment’s Prototype explored this in its Web of Intrigue, as players picked up ‘nodes’ and attempted to join these disparate story strands to find out the whole truth behind Alex Mercer’s mysterious superpowers. Again, it’s not the first time this method has been used. The first two Siren games adopted a noteworthy and unusual structure where players guided multiple characters at several different times, with a metagame setup that forced gamers to try to form their own take on the narrative via an almost spreadsheet-like screen displaying the various characters and the timing of the game’s key events, and also by picking up important items relating to the plot.

Yet if it’s becoming the domain of the player to expand his or her knowledge of the gaming universe simply by playing, many other publishers have adopted more traditional methods of exploring additional facets of the worlds they’ve created.

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