My Battle Cry goes out to games that give the player the opportunity to “read between the lines”. This week you guys were discussing two games that use great works of literature as their source material, but what strikes me as the major difference between Bioshock 2 and Dante’s Inferno is that Bioshock actually tries to translate the incredible storytelling of Ayn Rand’s novels into the medium of gaming, while Dante’s Inferno simply exploits The Divine Comedy for grotesque imagery and name recognition.

My Battle Cry goes out to games like Bioshock, Half-Life 2, Ico, and Demon’s Souls. Instead of relying on cutscenes filled with exposition and generally poorly written dialogue that serve to beat the player over the head with cliche themes and oft-insulting plot twists, these games and (few) others like them use the advantages of their own medium to push the story along by integrating the narrative into the setting, gameplay, and the character’s actions, in turn allowing those gamers who are able to read between the lines to savor the experience of feeling truly involved in a story, rather than simply being told a story. For instance, I found that helping the character of Ostrava in Demon’s Souls to be one of the most rich and rewarding experiences I have had in a game in a long time. I won’t spoil his story for people who haven’t played the game, but the thing is that it’s entirely possible to completely miss out on this element of the game unless you are paying attention to Ostrava’s actions and the way your own decisions aid or hinder him, and it is done with hardly any hand-holding exposition from the developers. Likewise, the setting of Bioshock is in and of itself a narrative, with practically every room telling a story, often interweaved with the audio logs or ghostly images that accompany them. A careless player could go through the entire game and miss out on nearly all of it due to how seamlessly it is molded into the gameplay experience. And in a game like Ico, the relationship that is formed between the boy and the girl is as strong as I have ever felt in a game, and it is solely a product of the gameplay.

These are all experiences which offer a rich storytelling experience and an emotional attachment that are completely unique to gaming, yet still stand out as oddities due to the fact that so many games still choose to tell their stories through movie-like cutscenes or large chunks of text.

I know that there are people who enjoy the long, movie-like cutscenes in games like FFXIII and MGS4, and I know there is an audience for the dialogue-heavy stories of games like Mass Effect. But personally I don’t think that these games really take advantage of what the medium really has to offer in terms of rich storytelling. Games are unique in how they allow the player to experience a story visually and through their own actions that are completely dependent of simply choosing a branch of dialogue or deciding “yes” or “no” at the proper time or even worse, simply watching scene after scene of the same old song and dance we’ve experienced for years. Here’s to hoping that the future of storytelling in games lies in allowing the player to experience the story how they choose, and giving them the opportunity to read between the lines.  TadDicktardQuote