Industry Pushes For Story As Next Key Item...

If you have been following the game news lately since oh lets say GDC of this year there has been a lot of fuss put in the media, and even GDC 05 for that matter, on how storytelling is going reinvent the games market and make everything better once again as if it were some magic formula that will make everyone great once again. I'm sorry to say but I have a bad feeling that this is going to amount to nothing more than a load of crap.

Now don't get me wrong I am not saying that a story or storytelling isn't necessary for a game, but for the most part its not necessary for most of the games that are on the market. Why is that? Well it's simple, look back at some of the older games that have come out oh about eight or more years ago, you know classics like Doom, Mortal Combat, Ultima 4, Final Fantasy 3, Xwing and others like that, the ones that you get all nostoligic for when people say "gee, why don't they make games like they used to?". These were all great games in their time but for the most part none of them really had deep stories and certainly not something along the lines of modern cinema or the monomyth such as Joseph Campbell writes about. So what made these games so great that they are remembered and constantly compared to today's stuff?

If you ask me, what makes these games so great was their lack of story and storytelling devices, because of this, the user went and made up their own stories in the back of thier minds for what was going on to fill in the large gaps between what little story and storytelling that we were given. We created our own emotional responses to these games, we shared our stories, thoughts and ideas with one another and in turn made these products memorable.

IMHO this is what is lacking in games and its also the reason why we as game developers can no longer capture that magic that was one had on the market. We don't craft games where the user creates their own little stories about how they experianced the game and in turn put a little bit of themselves into the product what they talk about it to others. Instead we are spoon fed some sugar frosted regurgitated crap, told that its the best thing to come along since the flavour we were fed last week and smile and nod all the way while wondering, if this stuff is supposed to be so great, why isn't it anything like we had eight or more years ago. There is nothing left to the imagination anymore with our push for realism and hyper realism and our herding of the player through a roller coaster ride of stimuli. Woooo how exciting, for about five minutes.

Creativity is dead in the games industry, its time we realized that, took the time to understand exactly what we are doing, why it works or doesn't work and figure out what the market really wants (as opposed to telling us what they think they want through conditioned respones controlled by the very marketing and accounting gurus who are screwing this industry up). Throw all the story you want at us if you want to think that the idea of the monomyth is what you think will sell more units, you might see some short term gain until people get bored with watching a story unfold in front of them like some dime store novel.

To me I feel that the key is in ensuring that the end user can create their own story in their mind about their experiances in my game. Why? Well to be honest I think its always going to be 1000x better than anything anyone on the market could do even if you gave them unlimited funds and a thousand monkeys at a thousand keyboards to achieve working in a vain attempt to produce something better.

Those are my thoughts on this whole subject of how necessary it is to have story and storytelling in your latest greatest game that you will purchase, so tell me what you think.