Why video games often suck at storytelling

Warning: Contains mild spoilers for Modern Warfare 2.

When a video game attempts to tell a story that's worth to be called that, you will usually lighten up in joy. When it does tell its story in a coherent, capturing way, you are just opened a clam and found a pearl inside, or in other words, witnessed an event that's not bloody likely. Most video games tell sketchy and clicheed stories at best. They don't even try to do something else. Picture, for example, the "Modern Warfare" franchise. The games do a great job at providing great scenes that feel like a Hollywood Blockbuster happening with you in the middle, but if you waste even one thought about the story holding these scenes together, you will go in cathartic shock due to sheer dumbness.

I mean, seriously, look at the storyline of "Modern Warfare 2", where a terrorist attack on an Russian airport where the body of an American was conventiently found prompts not only the Russian government to invade the US in what is basically the better version of the "Red Dawn" remake we will soon suffer through. No, the American allies don't help them because it's basically their own fault. This story is so dumb that I currently hold the screenwriters of said "Red Dawn" remake in high regard for letting freaking North Korea invade the US by use of a EMP superweapon (or something along the line).



America has Thor, though, so fat chance, North Korea!



Even games that at their core tell a really good story, like the "Assassin's Creed" franchise, tend to divide their games into the gameplay part and the story part and let both pieces interfer with each other only on need-to-know-basis. For example, our favorite Assasssin doesn't kill innocents, which is cool, and the game punishes you for killing "civilians". When you get at your target, you politely listen to their last words and close their eyes. In between these high-profile-targets and the amorphe mass of civilians lay, however, the guards, your main enemies. These poor, hapless guys walk around in patrols or stand on rooftops, wating to be killed by a serious of really cool moves, which is nice, of course.

But it really doesn't make any fucking sense. The tenderness of the contract kill stands in stark contrast to the routinely performed kills on guards, which don't fit the "innocent" pattern just because they are wearing uniforms. You might now tell me that without that, the games wouldn't be fun to play, of course, and I couldn't but agree with you. And that is exactly the problem of video game storytelling. Contrary to movies, for example, video games require you to actually do stuff. Since much of the things movie characters do cannot be transported to the medium - like talking, looking around and performing any non-combat-related action -, only the action secenes remain to be played out. Think of an action-flick like "Transformers", for example. There are perhaps three real action scenes in the mindnumbing two-and-a-half-hours of running time.



The only parts worth it, but certainly not the only parts of the movie.

Having that many action scenes, however, presents you with another problem besides the boredom it might ensue. The latter you can avoid by simply making them different and engaging, but another remains unsolvable. It is best visualized by the first and most famous scene of "Saving Private Ryan", with the allied soldiers storming the beach of Normandy against German gunfire and bleeding heavily for it. In the movie, this scene is very intense. People fall down with their entrails hanging out, panic and fear can be seen on the soldier's faces, and you could be killed any minute. The problem is not to technically transport these feelings, make no mistake. That they perhaps could do in the near future.

The problem is the question if we really want to have this. Do you want to storm the beaches of Normandy while shitting in your pants? Do you want to see these kinds of things, things that led to trauma in reality? In the safety of a cinema seat, you have a certain distance, no matter how gross it is envisioned. When you play it, however, most of the distance is gone. You really don't want to reach that kind of immersity, or else be sued for mental torture by your players.

Just not the same without a weapon looming into the screen.

So, what video game designers basically do is to stretch the action scenes over the complete game, perhaps letting cutscenes interrupt the action to tell "the story". But cutscenes and other effects like this disrupt the flow of playing more often than not. Only very few games so far have managed to really use gameplay to tell stories. It is understandable, because it's hard work, and the target audience wouldn't really appreciate it anyway. But this is the one important reason why video games constantly lag behind in artistic appeal. It's the same with TV series - when all they could do was "Dawson's Creek" or "Al Bundy" as not to challenge the vierwes too much, it was just something to get off from work in the evening. Only when the work used the chances of the format to actually tell a story, the format took off. TV was never the same after the Sopranos, but somehow, we still wait for the video game to do the same.