Over the past few nights I’ve been playing Dead Space, the new sci-fi horror shooter from EA. It’s an extremely well-made and entertaining game, and I’m enjoying it a lot. I want to make that clear up front, because I spend the rest of this post complaining about it. And I’m even going to go so far as to unfairly single it out as an example of everything that’s wrong with the current state of storytelling in games.

At least from what I’ve seen so far — I’ve finished three of twelve levels — Dead Space is the perfect title for this game, because it’s the only combination of words that could possibly be more generic than SciFi Horror Videogame. It says nothing about the game and leaves no lasting impression, and it has the added benefit of being indistinguishable from a billion other videogame and movie titles, from Freespace to Dead Rising.

In Dead Space, you play as an engineer for some futuristic mega-corporation, separated from your group and making your way through a derelict sci-fi shooter haunted by the memory of past videogames, as you’re attacked by wave after wave of cliches. Bodies of victims are littered about the ship, their last warnings scrawled on the walls in blood, right next to alien, demonic-looking runes. You walk from one darkened room to the next, surrounded by flickering lights, audio and video logs, locked doors that need to be unlocked, health and ammo pick-ups, bodies hanging from hooks, lockers to search, ironically cheerful corporate advertisements, glass-walled rooms that show a survivor being attacked in a gruesome fashion, medical centers containing the zombified remains of the sinister scientists who knowingly took advantage of the situation, and monsters leaping out of air ducts at ostensibly unpredictable moments.

The cliches pile up so high so quickly that I was surprised just how entrenched and downright complex sci-fi horror cliches have gotten. I don’t play that many shooters (mostly because I’m terrible at them) or see that many horror movies, and yet everything I’ve seen in this game is recognizable several times over. At its core, it’s like an attempt to cross System Shock 2 with DOOM 3 (which was itself an attempt to cross System Shock 2 with DOOM). Toss in some Resident Evil and Half-Life 2, along with some smaller elements of Deus Ex, Halo, and Gears of War, and put your main character in a big suit vaguely reminiscent of the Big Daddies in BioShock. Now, Dead Space has been in production for at least two years, probably much longer, so I’m not suggesting at all that they “ripped off” those recent games. That’d be like complaining that the Sci Fi Channel Original Movie Tsetse Fly Rampage rips off the movies Mantis Attack, Night of the Snails, and Koalapocalypse*; it’s not necessarily that they’re stealing from each other, but that they’re all coming from the same source.

The game has outstanding production values: fantastic visuals, perfect sound design, extremely clear and well-thought-out level design, good controls, great balance, and terrific effects work (riding a tram through a cavernous engine compartment surrounded in fog as you hear howls and moans echoing all around you is a particularly cool moment). But it’s all in the service of a setting and story so distractingly uninspired and unoriginal, I have to wonder if the lack of innovation was intentional. I’m reminded of a quote from the EverQuest guys at a CGDC, explaining that the reason they chose such obvious fantasy cliches for that game was because they didn’t want to “confuse” or “overwhelm” players. But even in the rare cases where the game shows true originality and not just polish or attention to detail, the way they’re used just pulls the game back into generic shooter territory.
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More proof that ignorance is bliss: I’d been happily reading the internet for at least a year before I knew what “tl;dr” meant. Apparently, it means “too long, didn’t read,” and now it’s got my vote for the absolute worst internet acronym. Ruder than STFU, more arrogant than RTFM, stupider than ROFL, more vapid than ^__^, all combined in five attention-deprived characters. Plus, that should be a comma, not a semicolon.

But still: I do tend to go on a bit, especially when I’m making things up as I go along. So here are my thoughts so far on storytelling in videogames, in convenient list form:

1. Videogames can and should tell stories. It’s ridiculous that this is even controversial.
2. Not every game needs to have a story. This should be obvious, but the moment you say “videogames should tell stories,” that’s immediately mis-interpreted as “all videogames should tell stories.”
3. Stop saying “videogames are young.” It’s a cop-out that comes across as defensive, defeatist and lazy. The medium won’t just automatically mature at a certain age, just like videogame players don’t automatically mature at a certain age.
4. Games already have their Citizen Kane. It’s called Super Mario 64. Not if you’re looking for validation from movie critics, but if you’re looking for a work that advances its medium as its own thing, just as Citizen Kane advanced cinema. Games already have their Godfather, Singin’ in the Rain, Pulp Fiction, Star Wars, and about a billion Aliens, as well.
5. Games can learn from movies. Games aren’t movies, but that doesn’t mean they’re completely mutually exclusive. Just because we don’t want super-long cutscenes doesn’t mean we can’t analyze how movies (and comics, and novels, and plays) work and apply that to interactive entertainment. (It also doesn’t mean that Hollywood types who try to get into games are automatically doomed to fail, just that the odds are not in their favor).
6. Games have an implicit narrative. Humans are natural storytellers, so for all but the most abstract of videogames, we impose our own story, with a beginning (“I skipped the opening cutscene”), middle (“I shot some guys”), and end (“I beat the game.”) Because of this, I claim:
7. If your game tells a story, then the story should be as important as the gameplay. Don’t treat it as an afterthought, or even “salt” to the real “meat” of the game. When you do, that creates a conflict between the designer’s story and the player’s story, but:
8. The player’s story is not more important than the designer’s story, and vice versa. As long as there’s a conflict, one of them is going to get diminished in importance. Which just perpetuates the cycle of “videogame stories aren’t important because videogame stories suck because nobody think videogame stories are important.”
9. Agency is the most important part of interactivity. What separates interactive entertainment from other media is simply that the player is the one who’s driving the experience forward. Contrast “agency” with two other aspects of interactivity:
10. “Immersion” is too shallow. Even if the player is completely surrounded by a story, it can feel passive and reactive if the story is happening to him, instead of being driven by him. On the other hand:
11. “Choice” isn’t everything, either. The intention is to give maximum control to the player, but the result means that the player sees a limited part of the available content. So he can choose from several shallow stories instead of experiencing one great story.
12. No seriously, choice isn’t everything. The above is usually described as a limit of current technology. “As games advance, then we’ll eventually be able to give the player complete control.” That is not the holy grail of videogame design. It’d likely be a cool experience and is definitely worth pursuing. But:
13. Entertainment is communication. Neither the developer nor the player wants to be left in a vacuum. And:
14. The communication goes both ways. If the player has complete control, then the developer is squeezed out of the communication, and the player ends up just talking to himself. Therefore:
15. The best videogame stories are a collaboration between the developer and the player. This is the only part of what I’ve been writing that’s at all novel. (And for all I know, it’s already been said lots o’ times elsewhere).

I think that sense of collaboration between the people who made the game and the people who played the game is the most important thing in videogame storytelling. I believe that’s the area where games are truly different from other media, and where games have the most potential to improve.

So far, I’ve only got a few sketchy ideas on how to foster that feeling of collaboration, all pretty specific to certain types of games:

1. Let the player predict what’s going to happen. Horror and suspense movies do this, sometimes without even realizing it. Turn the story over to the player occasionally, so they’re anticipating the story, instead of just reacting to it.
2. Let the player have multiple goals simultaneously. Or, “make the game less linear.” This isn’t branching, or artificial choice-for-the-sake-of-choice. It’s done in adventure games mostly to give the player something to do while he’s stuck. But in any game, it reinforces the player’s involvement, because it encourages him to think about the game on multiple layers (What am I doing right now? What will I need to do later?), instead of just making him wait for his next batch of instructions.
3. Make story events a direct result of the player’s actions. Simply put, the story shouldn’t be “I went to the enemy base and then the front door exploded, trapping me inside” but “In order to enter the enemy base, I had to hack into the front door controls, causing it to explode, trapping me inside.”
4. Overlap the cause and effect loops. This is also “make the game less linear,” more or less. It just means avoid the story “I did this then this then this,” in favor of the story “I did this, which caused that, which caused that, but then this other thing happened because of what I did at the beginning of the game.” This fosters the sense of collaboration, because I’m acting and reacting simultaneously, instead of just doing my thing and triggering a response from the game designer.
5. Give the player a chance to figure things out. Action games have different pacing requirements than adventure games. But the constant handholding in action games is getting ridiculous: “press this button” in the objectives window, with the button highlighted on the minimap, and a big arrow pointing to it in the game world. Tell the player explicitly what his overall goal is, but let him take some time to figure out exactly how to accomplish that goal. If players are getting stuck in playtests, then add some adaptive system to detect when they’ve taken too long, and be more explicit in pointing the player in the right direction.
6. Be concise. Learn from my mistakes.

Previously on Spectre Collie, I made the claim that action-oriented games like shooters and platformers and “action/adventures” haven’t yet lived up to their promise of rendering traditional adventure games obsolete. Conventional wisdom says that adventure games are great stories on top of lousy, illogical, frustrating, and boring gameplay, and therefore

Myth 8: If you could combine the stories and characters of the best adventure games with a style of gameplay that’s actually fun to play, you’d end up with better games.

But conventional wisdom is wrong and dumb. The problem, as usual, is that insistence on that division between “story” and “gameplay.” Whenever I’ve rambled about storytelling in games before, I’ve usually been talking about how purely cinematic storytelling techniques are clumsily grafted onto action games, the host game rejects the donor story, players get frustrated, and people come to the conclusion that storytelling has no place in videogames.

And it goes both ways: the results can be just as bad when a story-driven game is moving along with all the right character developments and plot twists, and then suddenly realizes oh crap we’ve had 15 minutes of solid cutscenes and we need to cram some interactivity in there. The message isn’t “story makes better games,” but “games with stories need to make the story and the game the same thing.” In theory, it should be impossible for an adventure game to have a great story but lousy, illogical gameplay, because a great story is inherently logical — there can be twists and surprises, but nothing that has you asking, “Where the hell did that come from?”

The appeal of adventure games isn’t that they can have complex stories, interesting characters, and detailed environments. For better or worse, those are standard issue in big-budget games these days; games as shallow, story-wise, as Quake and Unreal are now a rarity. The real appeal of adventure games isn’t in telling the player a cool story, it’s allowing the player to collaborate with the team to tell a cool story.

You’ll often hear fiction writers claim that at a certain point in the writing process, their original outline gets thrown out and “the characters decide where to go next.” You get a similar feeling in writing meetings that are going well. The story gains a momentum on its own, pieces fall into place, connections are formed, and new ideas are created. What if those numbers from the numbers station transmission turn out to be winning lottery numbers? What if the bad guy turns out to be the hero’s father?

Adventure games have a spotty record of capturing that feeling; some of my favorites have only one or two instances of its really coming together, and some don’t have it at all. But I’ve never seen it in done in non-adventure games. Games like BioShock and Half-Life 2 can have you immersed in a world and engaged in a story in a way that non-interactive entertainment simply can’t, but still, you’re always reacting to the story, never creating it.

Since I’m usually long on theory but short on actual practical examples, here are some examples from my favorite games to explain what I’m talking about:
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