Telling Tales

Journalists love trying to find "common themes" at industry events. Being able to talk about "emerging trends" in the wake of a conference or trade show makes us look like clever pundits, sifting carefully through the noise to uncover the clear signal about the direction of the industry and expose it to the world. Sometimes, when a writer has enough context and background information to the topics at hand, they can even be on the money; more often, common themes are little more than common sense or the results of a highly unscientific vox pop among industry pals.

As such, I feel rather sheepish for kicking off an article with a comment about the common theme which I think I've uncovered at this week's Games Convention Developer Conference. However, I do honestly feel that in the sessions this week which I took most to heart (with the exception of the MMOG panel, where the audience were heartwarmingly kind enough, or at least sufficiently pitying, to laugh at my rubbish puns), there was one key message worth pondering.

Here it is, in a nutshell; the videogames industry is telling crap stories, and it's telling them badly.

That proposition was made most blatantly by Eidos' creative boss Patrick O'Lunaigh in a talk on Monday about the nature of storytelling in games, and how it must evolve - but in a slightly indirect manner, it was supported heavily by the keynote speeches made by both Lionhead's Peter Molyneux and Flagship's Bill Roper.

O'Lunaigh was very direct in his message on the topic; he believes that despite the growth in complexity, production values and indeed budgets in modern video game titles, our ability to tell even simple, linear stories is incredibly weak by comparison with films and literature - while our exploration of dynamic, branching or interactive storytelling forms is very much in its infancy.

Much of his criticism focused on the industry's failure to engage the services of writers and authors to develop plotlines and characters. We've all seen the final results in games we've played, but it's still somehow slightly shocking to hear a development insider talk about games with budgets of well over five million pounds where the storyline and dialogue were left in the hands of a game designer or artist.

This fundamental lack of respect for, or focus on, storytelling means that when it comes to the end of a project and corners are being cut, there's a good chance that chunks of storyline will end up on the cutting room floor - leaving players with a disjointed, amputated mess of a story staggering ungracefully through the game.

Molyneux' talk, on the other hand, was ostensibly about combat, which is often considered to be the other side of the equation entirely from storytelling. Even so, it reflected in many respects a desire to make combat into a more intrinsic part of the storytelling process. Molyneux laid into the traditional button-bashing approach to videogame combat (and to his credit, he reserved his harshest criticism for Lionhead's own Fable), proposing instead a more context sensitive system, more interaction with the environment and a more genuine sense that the weapons being used are dangerous.

That might not sound like storytelling, per se, but the focus of such a system is on the emotions of the player - making them feel heroic, or exhilarated, or frightened - and in a sense, that's a core part of the story. Right now, games mostly drop players abruptly out of the storyline when they engage in combat; you could be playing the world's greatest martial arts master and still end up hammering the X button to execute a repetitive sequence of dull kicks as soon as an enemy appears. Making the combat system relevant to the character is a key thing that needs to be done to make game storytelling work.

Bill Roper, too, had words of wisdom to dispense on the subject of storytelling - although again, he didn't really come to it from that angle specifically. That said, any man whose CV includes work on the Warcraft, Starcraft and Diablo franchises probably can't go ten minutes without accidentally dispensing a pearl of wisdom on the topic of videogame storytelling - so it came as little surprise that Roper's talk on the importance of intellectual property rapidly turned into a sermon on the art of building universes.

This is a key concept, not only for videogames but for any kind of storytelling, and it's one which most game developers overlook - presumably, going back to O'Lunaigh's comments, because they've let a designer work on the plot during his lunch hour rather than employing someone actually dedicated to the craft of telling stories. Building game universes the Blizzard way (and indeed, the Flagship way, that being Roper's new company) involves creating a massive "bible" about the world in which your game is set, teeming with information about the world and its key players, and gradually accumulating histories and side-stories until it feels like a consistent, solidly-founded world. Players really do appreciate this; it's the principle which underpins not only some of the greatest games out there (the Warcraft franchise is arguably the best example of all), but also the most popular literature in the world, such as Lord of the Rings.

Of course, it's not easy to build a whole world, consistent and fully formed, and then tell great stories in that world. That's bloody difficult, in fact - which is exactly why the industry needs writers to do it. The advantages, as Roper pointed out, are not simply that you'll create a much better game with an engaging storyline and characters; there is also a clear business case for spending more money and time on our medium's storytelling prowess. It's all about building franchises; creating characters and worlds which can be turned into books, TV series, films, T-shirts, action figures, merchandise, and of course, a further series of great games. Even fan-based activity around your game, while not directly creating a profit for you, will enhance the success of your franchise - and that kind of fan activity generally comes from having characters and scenarios which people identify with, are enthralled by, or quite frankly, fall in love with.

At this point, of course, the traditional defensive argument of many game designers is that videogames are meant to be about gameplay, rather than storytelling - but this, to my mind, completely misses the point. Fiction - the art of telling stories - is the most basic and fundamental expression of the human desire for entertainment. Great storytellers have been revered in our society ever since we developed language complex enough to express fiction concepts, and no form of popular human entertainment exists without a strong element of storytelling. Even sport, ostensibly another kind of entertainment which is all about gameplay, is held up by a core of storytelling - what else would you call the pages and pages of sport reporting in newspapers, the endless discussion of the lives of athletes in the tabloids and the countless hours of pub discussion about the history of teams and players? Sports fans are interested not solely in the athletic prowess of their chosen teams, but in the story that they tell - just as games fans are enthralled by the stories told alongside, and indeed throughout, the gameplay they enjoy.

As such, there's no question but that weak storytelling is holding back our medium. There are games which break out of this mould and tell wonderful, subtle, emotive stories - the work of people like Fumito Ueda (ICO, Shadow of the Colossus) and Valve (Half-Life 2) is of particular note - or huge, dramatic, sweeping epics - Blizzard (World of Warcraft) and Square Enix (Final Fantasy), for example. However, the baseline of storytelling in the games industry is below even the realms of B-movies and Mills and Boon romantic fiction pulp, and far too many of our industry's high budget products subsist on this baseline rather than aiming to create anything genuinely compelling or involving.

So yes; for the most part, games are telling crap stories, and they're definitely telling them badly. However, as GCDC proved, the solutions don't have to be complex, or obscure. The first step, as with any problem, is to admit that videogames have a problem and that a solution is needed, and to understand the importance of characters and narrative to any form of entertainment. That in itself is the next chapter in the story of videogames.