I’d never been “into” the series in general. The humor was just north of being functionally retarded, the “moral” choices in it seemed insignificant, and by Fable 2 the combat and RPG systems seemed almost non-existent. But that didn’t stop Fable 3 from coming out, and I’ll be honest, the draw for me was the latter half of the game. “Be a king!” the ads proclaimed. “I want to be a king,” I thought. “I want to make choices.” So I sought out the game… and didn’t play it for a while, because I thought I had made a huge mistake. Yes, like Gob.

Mostly, though, I had other games to play, and I was in the middle of a prolonged Halo: Reach binge that lasted way too long (and not long enough, if you ask one or two of my friends). Lionhead’s newest just wasn’t interesting enough to be worth my time.

That’s too bad, because I found some really cool stuff contained in Fable 3, once I got past the bad voice acting, even worse writing and piss-poor characterizations. (This is supposed to be British humor? Because I’ve watched BBC shows, and they’re funnier than this ever was. I mean, I’m supposed to laugh at a bird taking a shit right in the opening video. That’s not funny. That’s peddling to the lowest common denominator in gamers, and that’s the last thing this industry needs right now.) The problem with Fable 3, however, is the reason that it’ll never be a good game, or even a great game. It’s a simple problem, and one that plagues more games than I think most would care to realize: the problem with Fable 3 is that it’s half a game, and things end just when they’re starting to get interesting.

Let me explain.

The beginning of Fable 3 is fairly typical for a Fable game. It’s actually pretty typical for most Western RPGs. A standard setup, with this chick or whatever getting killed (or whatever) because you took a silent but moral “stand,” and suddenly you are outcast! wanderer! adventurer! self-proclaimed-and-silent-but-reluctant-savior! It all seems very cliche, right from the beginning, and that doesn’t help much when the game only runs about 12 hours total.

That feeling of the cliche – of been there, done that; a feeling that seems so well suited for the Fable series as a whole – changes about six to eight hours in, when the hero falls into a cave. It is in this place that an evil is brewing, something unnerving and foul. Something that vows to eat both the hero’s soul, and envelope the world. It is here that the real plot of the game begins to take shape.

Slowly, the relevance of your actions preceding this point begin to appear. This world – generic though it may be – is one that you are dedicated to saving. Your choices here lead up to the endgame, which at this point is approaching all too quickly, with little lead up, little preparation, only the promise of a battle that must be won.

Yet there is the problem with Fable 3.

Where most games might spend their narratives preparing the player for some world-devastating cataclysm, as was the case with Mass Effect 2 (and that game was content to spread things out, to make the experience last), Fable 3 condenses that story into a little less than half that time. It’s the length of a condensed action game, quick and brutal, with none of the focused trappings of similar titles.

Are the choices that you make worth making? Not when they’re presented in such a good-or-evil way, and the ramifications simply boil down to “can my coffers take this?” Are the characters ones that stay with you? Hardly, though that’s not surprising for any of Lionhead’s titles. Is the gameplay engrossing or captivating? Featuring a stripped-down combat system from even the woefully-inadequate system behind Fable 2… in a word, no. These vital questions aren’t even worth asking in light of a title that does far less than it could, than it should, because its creators were too busy playing with an as-yet-unreleased Kinect tech demo.

I wanted desperately to love the Fable series, from the first game to the newest. There’s something about it that appeals to me, even now. Yet Fable as a whole has been consistently disappointing. The series has never made good on its promise, instead presenting a multitude of systems and freedoms that somehow detract from the experience as a whole. For my money, Lionhead is the single most disappointing active British developer today, apart from Rare.

And none of that is to say that Fable 3 didn’t do a lot of things right. It did. There are consistently impressive and interesting things done in the gameworld, such as the bizarrely meta Dungeons and Dragons sendup, or a sequence where you entertain ghosts. These are the flashes of brilliance that Lionhead games consistently have, and yet the developer is never able to deliver on the promise that each of their games flirts with.

I suppose what I’m saying is this: inventiveness and creativity in games is all well and good, and should be encouraged, but when the underlying gameplay systems aren’t solid (and are persistently not solid three games on), there’s a problem with the series, and its goals may need to be reevaluated.

I’d sincerely hope that Lionhead holds off on creating another game in this flawed series until they can start resolving some of the issues that Fable has had since the first game, instead of adding to the problems. I hope that would be the case, but I doubt it will. We all love to see bad games fail, after all.

That isn’t going to be the case any longer.

I’m writing this post to say that I’m going to be back in full swing, intending to write (at least) one post a week, with a refocusing. As much as I love music and film, I want this blog to be about games, and how it intersects with other aspects of the culture. Games as a whole cannot be taken by themselves, and so here I am, and here we are.

Games are – by necessity – influenced by the environment in which they were created. No designer exists in a bubble outside of the culture, just as no musician does, and no writer does.

In the same way, we see representations of what interests and influences the artist in the art itself: Kojima was influenced by this, Miyamoto by that, et al. And so it goes.

I don’t mean to say that I’ll analyze things and put them where I believe they should go. That is far too lofty a goal for me to undertake. What I mean is that I’ll write about what interests me and place it here, because it’s the least I can do.

I’ve not been unsuccessful on the writing front since the last post here. I wrote a fairly lengthy piece over at Bombadillo, detailing my experiences playing with morality and choice in Fallout: New Vegas and a number of other titles. It gets a little long-winded by the end, and could probably have used the benefit of another editor, but that’s the way that goes.

I’m currently playing The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, reading George R. R. Martin’s A Feast for Crows and watching Mad Men, season 4. Nothing if not mainstream, right? But this comes after a three-month stint of reading exclusively Cormac McCarthy, of watching Korean cinema (I Saw the Devil will change your life; no Saw movie will ever be adequate, ever again), of working so much in my day job that I could hardly sleep at night from exhaustion. This is not an excuse, but a reason, a reason to begin again.

And so it goes, and on.

Hope you stay around for the ride.

-D

Red Dead Redemption, on the other hand, is an excellent but flawed game.  Its story winds and strays the focused journey that it should be.  Neither are its characters as engrossing or memorable as those found in Grand Theft Auto IV or any of its episodes.  Arguably, the world is more of a character here, but I find it an unfocused mess that’s a bore to travel through and tiresome to explore.  Still, the brutal violence, coupled with the classic imagery and excellent development of the main character place Redemption as a game firmly following GTA4’s lead.

Because it does follow in GTA4’s wake, the flaws of Redemption are put in sharp relief.  The grimy, claustrophobic canyons of steel and concrete that made up Liberty City have given way to a sprawling landscape, with barren deserts and snow-topped mountains.  And somehow, none of that manages to be quite so compelling as Rockstar’s previous outing, or even competing games in the open-world genre, such as Assassin’s Creed II and The Saboteur.  While neither of those games are necessarily as well put together as Red Dead Redemption ultimately is, they find themselves more compelling, more enjoyable and far more memorable than the vast majority of Redemption actually is.

Compare this to Alan Wake, the long-awaited game from Max Payne-developer Remedy.  Plot holes aside, Alan Wake is propulsive, a game that presses you forward from the strangeness of its plot and the tautness of its gunplay.  It’s stylish, a hard game to hate and easy to love.  It’s visceral and compelling, and like the best television has to offer, it keeps you with it through to the end.  This is despite the numerous plot holes, despite the game design quirks, and despite the fact that the game plays like a slightly updated version of the nearly decade-old Max Payne.

But Alan Wake is also a different genre than Remedy’s previous work, or the game that I’m most directly comparing it to, Red Dead Redemption.  It finds its influences in psychological horror, but relies on jump-scares to keep the player moving.  Yet the game is never truly scary.  Slightly unsettling?  Absolutely.  Hordes of enemies descending from the tree-covered hills is entirely unsettling, but in a game with the stated goals of Alan Wake, it seems that it would work more in the game’s favor if those jump scares were traded in for something more deeply disturbing.  And the end of the game does disturb, but it doesn’t linger, the thoughts of what just happened festering and making the reader feel alone and chilled.  Stephen King is Alan Wake’s greatest influence, yet the story has none of the effect that the most classic King novels do.  King examines the strangeness of a person through the lens of monster driven horror; he shows the way group-think works and he shows the way that we react in terrible situations.  Most of all, what he shows is understandable, if not necessarily believable.  We, as readers, are able to suspend our disbelief for Mr. King, until he gets too wacky, or begins to rely too much on his common element of deus ex machina.  King writes himself into corners that he can’t get out of; the author Alan Wake literally writes himself into a corner he can’t get out of, and then finds himself needing to write himself out of it.  The problem with this is that it feels like some of those interconnecting webs – the chapters that King would use even though they would feel slightly indulgent – are missing, and so Alan Wake’s story feels less than it should.  Those vital chapters – the ones that it seems Remedy has left on the cutting-room floor – are what give King’s novels their flair, and for a game that is so directly inspired by King-styled fiction and film, it seems strange that a game such as this would be missing something that seems so important.

Which is not to say that Alan Wake isn’t disturbing in parts, or that it doesn’t achieve its goal of developing character.  The game just focuses on a town like King’s Castle Rock or Lynch’s Twin Peaks – both towns with large casts of characters who recur throughout their respective fictions – and then more or less ignores the lesser characters.  Granted, the game is about Wake himself, not about the town.  Yet the town becomes so much of a character throughout the middle of the game, and then shows us the townsfolk towards the end, in a sort of melancholic “you did it” cinematic, that it seems out of place without knowing these people better, most of whom – barring the obvious main characters and the radio DJ – are barely present for the majority of the game.

Is it even fair to compare Red Dead Redemption to Alan Wake?  Probably not.  One appealed to my tastes far more than the other.  I barely want to think about Rockstar’s latest at this point; I found it phenomenally disappointing.  Most of that disappointment stems not from character, but from the way they handled the middle of the game.  Mexico is one of the most atrocious areas I’ve ever played through, simply because it feels like the developers lost focus.  I found myself pushing myself forward, because I wanted to get to the end.  I just spent a good deal of money on the game; I didn’t want that to go to waste.  And while the final act of Marston’s tale finally seemed to regain some focus, and recover some of that lost footing, the game never felt quite the same.  It had sagged.  Marston’s eventual fate, and the terribly annoying, half-hour long section that followed it, didn’t do much better, though I will say that the ending of Red Dead Redemption – not the one where the credits roll, but before that – was one of the most emotionally powerful things I have ever witnessed in a video game.  That the game that came before it wasn’t consistent is the tragedy, more than anything else.

And then I played Heavy Rain.  Developed by Quantic Dream – the guys who made one of my favorite games of the last generation, Indigo Prophecy (or Fahrenheit for the folks in Europe) – Heavy Rain is the story of the Origami Killer.  Or so Quantic Dream would have you believe.  To me, it’s really the story of Ethan – a father who has lost everything – and the lengths he will go to so he can reclaim it.  Sequences here are brutal and resonate deeply, yet the uneven voice work and – again – plot holes work against the story and against the brilliance of the game.

Heavy Rain does nothing new.  It does nothing we haven’t seen a thousand times before, albeit with graphics that impress far less.  It does nothing that Shenmue didn’t do, or a thousand adventure games before it.  And still, it’s a game that kept me playing, compulsively kept me playing, until the early hours of the morning.  I want to go through it again, but I know the experience will be different.  There won’t be that first shock, or the impressiveness of seeing the fight in the junkyard.  By playing Heavy Rain, I’ve effectively ruined it for myself.  A game like that isn’t going to be the same the second time around, or the third.  The most impact it will ever make is on that first playthrough.  After that, the wrinkles, the creases, the holes begin to show.  And as with anything, it becomes slowly less impressive.

The characters don’t find as much development as they need.  Some have commented on the sexualizing of the main female protagonist, Madison.  How in the first scene you see her in her underwear, and then in an optional shower sequence that focuses on her nude body, like the audience is a leering group of teenage boys.  The story focuses on Ethan; Madison is thrown to the wayside, as are the other two characters, until the final hours of the game.  And that’s really unfortunate, because those characters – the glimpses of their outlines that we see from the distance that we experience them – are really quite impressive.  Madison is smart and cunning.  Norman is an addict and a loser.  Shelby is broken and proud.  These are relatable characters because they’re archetypes, but they aren’t explored, and ultimately, Heavy Rain doesn’t reach the potential it should.

Still, it remains one of the five best games that I’ve played thus far in the year.  Like the other two that I spoke about above, it will stay with me in various ways for quite some time.

These are all flawed games.  They aren’t perfect.  But they represent different attempts at fusing narrative with gaming, and because of that, all of them are successes.  Not because they were all successful, but because they tried something different.

The industry needs more of that.  We, as gamers, should expect more of that.

I’ve got a couple of (sort of) reviews lined up, one for a game and one for an album.

Stay tuned.

The second announcement to emerge was to debut the newest Call of Duty, subtitled Black Ops.  Following Activision’s plans of  yearly Call of Duty franchise installments, developed by two developers, means that the problems that Activision is having with Infinity Ward are handily side-stepped by passing development duties on – as they did with Call of Duty 3 and Call of Duty: World at War – to Treyarch, an Activision-owned developer that I am not exactly fond of.  Why?  After seeing one shoddy port too many, I started completely ignoring the company, alongside Neversoft, Vicarious Visions, and a host of other Activision-owned developers.

Yes, that’s right, I’m no fan of Activision. (Nor am I much a fan of Call of Duty, but that’s another thing altogether.)

Yet with the announcement of Black Ops, I find something truly appealing coming out of Treyarch’s camp.  The concept of a game that goes through the earliest of covert ops, through Vietnam and into the present is something that could be quite powerful – profound even – if done correctly.

Time will tell.

Since then, my view has changed quite dramatically.  Before now, I cited examples such as Indigo Prophecy and Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time as being the closest that games had come to art in form, as the closest they had come to meaningful narrative and true artful focus.  They were games that attempted to break the status quo: games that did not cater to the masses but focused on instead delivering their respective visions without deviating for a second.  And while that’s not entirely true, in that the former unraveled by the end and the latter featured two sequels that deviated quite a bit from the fantastical nature of the original, it was my view, and I stood by it.

But I’m older now, and I’ve seen more and read more and have more perspective.  My journey from a wishful kid who saw something great in his beloved medium into an adult who verges ever closer to swearing off gaming for good in the name of writing and reading and actually being productive was a long one.  Part of it involved a slow maturing, and a good portion was about that boy learning about the world the hard way.  I won’t go into details there, because it’s mostly not important to the subject at hand.

In late 2006, I began to work at a local game store.  I liked it.  I liked my coworkers, I liked the product I was selling, and most importantly, I knew a lot about it.  I liked helping people find the best game for their needs, helping a parent find the perfect game for their child.  It wasn’t much deeper than that.  For a kid less than two years out of high school, it was a good job.  The pay was shit, and it stayed that way for the entire length of time I worked there, but I stayed because I devoted myself to the place.  The side effect of that was that I stopped gaming.

Why did I stop?  There were a lot of reasons.  Working there meant that I was constantly inundated with a veritable onslaught of noise and sound that began to represent a medium that I was starting to resent.  Yes, I loved my job, but I didn’t love what I sold.  It seemed slightly better than peddling pornography (which I have also done), but not much so.  Ultimately, however, I stopped gaming because I began to feel like I could spend my time doing a lot more, and thus become much more productive.  I began to reflect on mortality, in a very youthful way, and how I was spending ten and twenty and thirty hours a week playing this game –usually alone – when I could be doing something else.  I could write, I could read.  I could watch a movie.  I could fall in love.  These are things that are certainly not the domain of the young, but they expand a person in some significant way.  They contribute to the building of a person, a person who comes with an expiration date.  What was the point of wasting all of that time gaming when it contributed nothing to what was fundamentally me?

So I stopped.  I couldn’t rationalize it anymore.  I couldn’t justify it.  I was nineteen years old and I wasn’t living.  What followed was a spurt of growth for me, as well as a period of unbridled creativity.  I read.  I wrote.  I was consumed by emotion and my creativity.  Nothing else mattered, least of all gaming.  I would argue that, at this stage in my life, I became a better version of me, somehow more substantial and more alive.

When I finally picked up games again, I had changed as a person.  I had little time for them.  When I played them, I played in spurts: a week at a time, or less.  Months would pass before I touched a game, and I was happy with that.  Generally speaking, I still am.  It hasn’t changed much experientially for a couple of years, and that’s a pretty good thing from where I stand.

When I revisited the concept of games as art, I found that my view had changed.  No longer did I believe that art lay in wait with the medium.  I didn’t find that games were unable of art; I found that they were unwilling.  This is where I disagree with Mr. Ebert.  I arrive at the same conclusion – that games are not art – but it’s not because of a lack suitable material.  The elements are all there.  A game can say something meaningful, and it can even do it in an eloquent fashion.  But often, that eloquence is lost in a maze of bad translation, bad mechanics, over-the-top gore and a lack of a suspension of disbelief.

Mr. Ebert is wrong in saying that games do not have a single vision originating from one person, and I believe this comes from his lack of understanding of the industry.  Giants of design such as Hideo Kojima, Shigeru Miyamoto, Will Wright, Sid Meier, and others have absolutely emerged.  A team fulfills their visions, but they originate with one person.  What makes a game different from, to use an example from Ebert, a cathedral?  One might say that it’s because a game attempts to create an interactive experience, a narrative that the player works through in an attempt to elicit meaning from something that at first glance is inherently meaningless.

Does that make eliciting meaning from games a postmodern attempt at deconstructionism?  Certainly, we do not normally understand the original intent of the designer, so attempting to find meaning would either be an exercise in understanding the explicitly stated or deconstructing the various aspects of the work in question.  This would then place Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty (MGS2) in a strange place.  The game features a winding, philosophical narrative, punctuated by bouts of postmodernist ideas (no global truth, no objective truth) and rampant exposition.  And whereas some have said that MGS2 is one of the finer arguments for art in games, I find it one of the more damning.  Narratives need to unfold naturally.  We need to find some common ground with characters, some emotional connection.  With this game, what we get instead are caricatures.  What should be sad is instead close to laughable.  What is perplexing in nature is made more so by the emotionally void delivery of it.

At the same time, however, I look at the games that I’ve loved (and make no mistake, I did love MGS2) and I see much of the same thing.  The games that I’ve held are closest to art are the ones that I’m most critical of.  I love Grand Theft Auto IV, Bully and 2008’s Prince of Persia.  The latter is excellent in terms of how it delivers emotional connection to the player, should you so let it.  Yet it is also completely flawed; the characters seem initially stilted, the gameplay is nonexistent for portions of the game, and it is, essentially, linearity refined.  The former two I’ve discussed already in a previous blog, but what’s most important is that they create characters that are illusions.  Any emotional connection that exists for the player is destroyed should the player deviate from the nature of the character in the game, and that will absolutely happen in both games, simply because they are “open-world” in design.

Every game that I’ve played, from Super Mario World to Braid, from God of War to Persona 4, is not art.  I play games because stories fascinate me.  I’m discovering more and more that games are not the ideal medium for this, and that they ultimately detract from the things that I want to do.  But further, the more games attempt to be art, the more they lose their focus.  If game developers can first focus on delivering convincing, engrossing narratives, and second, further utilize the ingredients that they already have, gaming might one day becoming something quite special and quite worth the time.  As it stands, gaming lacks the significance of high art.  Because of that, an argument for the medium is difficult to make without compromise.

http://www.myspace.com/theantlers

And a video for the song “Sylvia,” which is probably one of the most haunting songs of 2009:

http://www.ifc.com/blogs/indie-ear/2010/04/exclusive-video-premiere-the-a.php

Enjoy.

That is to say that all of the things that I write about gaming come first from a writer and a reader of fiction, and second from a gamer and a person who enjoys those experiences: the fun, the visceral, the intellectual pursuits that I seem to aspire to in my continuing journey through interactive storytelling and in some effort to find it.

There are those that would say that gaming itself could function without story involved.  This is absolutely, unequivocally true.  I have no preconceived notions of that.  Yet I would argue that we would lose an exciting, powerful, stimulating medium through which to tell those selfsame stories.

I’m currently working through Cormac McCarthy’s 1979 opus Suttree.  Already, I find that McCarthy has fashioned a world that, while dilapidated and full of sleaze and scum (I’m not many pages in, and already have found several references to floating used condoms on the river, in addition to a startling scene of gore and realistic depictions of vagrancy), has fascinating characters, well imagined and well displayed.  People who are not vilified or repugnant, but who have their own stories to tell and their own characteristics and personalities.  These are not the types that would be so easily stereotyped, but are instead lively and funny.  They speak in a realistic fashion and respond and react, moving in accordance with their environment, like McCarthy the author is some sort of puppetmaster god, pulling the strings from above so his morality play will unfold exactly how he wants it to.

This is how good writing plays out.  Words paint pictures in both the writer’s head and the reader’s, and the people contained within the words come to life and mean something, anything, to the reader.  This is the way that it should be.  The author sets out to create a world that the reader is immersed in.  Day to day tasks are certainly not the way most would author a story, yet Joyce did it in his Ulysses, and in so doing, crafted one of the greatest novels of the 20^th century.  We find that the racial tension so endemic of the South and the rest of the nation in the last two centuries of its existence found a perfect reflection in Flannery O’Connor’s writings, just as they did in Faulkner’s, just as they have done in McCarthy’s.  The Southern Gothic is quickly becoming a haunting, elegiac reminder of a world that was; the place that A Rose for Emily lived in is no longer there, and not just because Faulkner’s fictional city Jefferson died with him.

Writing – novels and short stories and essays and poems – all exist to reflect the world that we live in, but also to reflect our daily lives more perfectly, and to capture a point in time.  Recently, I’ve gone over some fictional writings that I wrote some time back.  Am I that man now?  Certainly not, but I remember him quite well.  Bob Dylan has said that he no longer knows the man who wrote his early work.  The creative is in a constant state of flux, just as the normal man is, and this constant motion dictates that the subject of the work – the emphasis of the soul, if you will – changes from day to day and minute to minute.

By their very nature, books and short fiction are essentially static.  Interpretations of meaning and intent may change, but these are all on the reader’s end.  The word – what is put down and recorded – is changed only for editing, or for authorial whim.  Some will choose to expand novels eventually, and some novels, such as Kerouac’s On the Road, are added to because of censorship when originally published.  This is the exception to the rule, however.

When turning to a fluid medium, such as film or music or even video gaming, things begin to change.  Something such as Ingmar Bergman’s Trilogy of Faith is, essentially, a visual novel: we see the author’s intent and artistry through his work with the camera, and then through the words of the actors.  Intensely personal films are rare, however, and we find modern film to be more about telling a story or making a dollar, and less about the message behind the story itself.  Not everything, I have more than once said to a friend of mine, has to have a moral in it or a message to it.  This is certainly true of film, as cinema has become increasingly perverted with shallow, lifeless husks that we call “entertainment.”  (Certainly I enjoy mindless movies to some degree, yet these seem to be far more prevalent in theatres than the next Polanski or Scorsese work.)

Turning once again to gaming, we have a medium wherein story is often fashioned after the basic idea of what the gameplay should be is proposed.  Obviously, this has affected works such as Gears of War, where developer Epic Games has repeatedly said, “The theme is destroyed beauty,” or something virtually meaningless like that.  Is the theme “destroyed beauty” because here we have a decimated culture and civilization that is shattering under the weight of repeated attacks from a violent, ugly menace?  Or is it “destroyed beauty” because that’s what some marketing team decided that the vaguely Greco-Roman stylings of the environs remind them most of?  If this culture was truly beautiful, and a developer intends to tell me just that, then why not explore this within the game?  Show me visually.  Tell me a story without telling a story, because therein lies the strength of the visual medium.

This is, of course, not to attack Gears.  I loved both games, but not because of story.  The main problem was that neither went deeper than the skin.  I don’t expect Final Fantasy melodrama, but I do expect a bit of character exposition.  In fiction, it helps to be subtle, but not vague for the sake of being vague; it develops character and establishes the point of the plot.  And in at least the first Gears of War, much of the plot seemed shallow in the name of the gameplay.  Which is fine, but carry no illusions about the title.  It was story-based in name only.

I really started thinking about this topic while playing Final Fantasy XIII last night.  I have, overall, no real problem with the game.  First it was too easy, then it had this wall of difficulty that will probably be a problem for some of the players who have never before touched a game of that type before, but overall, there’s not been much to complain about.  The game’s failing is its story, which is shallow in the way that I could only ever describe an anime as being.  This is to say that the characters feel so, for lack of a better term, stock.  I know and recognize and appreciate that many anime films and works in manga explore deeper philosophical and moral problems, and often introduce questions of belief and faith and love into the mix.  This is a great thing.  It uses its medium to attempt to address some of the larger questions of life that we all have, and does so with a stylish visual flair that is absent (or was, for a long time) in much of Western culture.

And XIII does this, too, to a degree.  It presents and attempts to answer – through its characters moving to some great, mystifying epiphany that eventually proves to its characters to work together and overcome the odds, because that realization will most certainly help out in the end – seemingly important questions of life that seemingly everyone has.  The problem is that this is done with gusto tending towards the cliché of the genre.  Certain characters must appear, and these certain characters are archetypal.  And archetypes aren’t so much a problem as they are an easy way out.  To write to archetypal standards is to place your characters in the most predictable of predicaments.  Writing against the archetype, or writing variations on an existing archetype, work to break cliché, and work to surprise the reader (or in this case, player).

I had a much warmer reception to the characters in this year’s Mass Effect 2, most of whom I loved.  Yes, the occasional cliché broke through, but most of these were genuinely fascinating characters, and their stories were involving (for the most part).  The writing wasn’t great.  In fact, it was far from it, especially if I am to hold it up to the standards I set for fiction in the beginning of this piece.  But it felt far more real and more human than what I’ve been seeing from the newest installment of Square Enix’s long-running franchise.

Humanity does break through in some areas of Final Fantasy XIII.  Late game revelations regarding major characters are pretty impressive in their emotional depth and in their presentation.  But the ultimate problem with the storytelling that has been evolving in gaming as a whole (and I admit, I have not yet played Heavy Rain) is that the characters end up as archetypes or as cartoons, and neither is a substitute for human emotion.  It is my hope that eventually, gaming will move away from the idea of cinema as gaming, and will start to more fully embrace the heritage that it has, from a tradition that has Joyce and Faulkner and O’Connor and Dickens, as well as Citizen Kane and Goodfellas and The Godfather.  Collectively, this is the heritage that gaming has, because landmark films such as those were influenced by pieces of literature, and gaming has to do nothing but learn from both of these.  Literature  – books and novels and short stories – do a wonderful job of painting a picture in and of themselves, and until games start to see that the written word as well as the visual form can express and describe (and I’m not calling for games to have massive walls of text here), then and only then will we begin to see an evolution in the interactive medium.

The games that have influenced me the most are the ones that have resonated deep inside.  I have before called the ending of 2008’s Prince of Persia “Shakespearean,” and I mean every bit of that.  I believe games can do better because I’ve seen it done.  I know that developers can create something moving or shattering, because I’ve seen that done, and I’ll bet that you have as well.  It only takes a little more effort to create that emotional attachment to the character.

After all, I shed no tears for the Master Chief.  Did you?

The truth, however, is that the gaming industry as a whole – publishers, developers and consumers, as well as a host of other peripheral industries, such as gaming journalism and PR and marketing – relies on stability in games.  What is taken for innovation is actually an evolutionary iteration of established mechanics or tech, instead of something that is a full-blown innovation on established mechanics.

Did Resident Evil 4 innovate in its genre?  Absolutely.  Had we all seen essentially the same thing before in countless other titles?  Yes: the third-person shooter has been around for years.  A slight camera shift and paced aiming are not innovative, no matter how influential or impressive the game actually was.

This is seen across the board, and narrative is no different.

However – slowly – progress has been made.  No longer are we expected to rescue the princess from the castle with nary an explanation.  Now we are compelled to rescue the princess because and because and because.  Explanations abound.  But are they just the same explanations, repackaged and repurposed?

I’ve grown so weary of encountering the same characters in different games and scenarios.  Games are stuck and aren’t getting any better.  The Getaway was hailed for its story and how “Guy Ritchie it was,” but faltered on so many levels that it was rendered nearly unplayable.  Final Fantasy XIII, hardly exemplary of the series as a whole, was in fact a regression for character in the series.  It wasn’t “retro” in the sense that Final Fantasy IX was; it just felt like the developers had learned nothing from past mistakes and past successes. It’s almost insulting to see some of the character types present in the game, and how little they’ve grown almost twenty hours in.  And the secondary characters there?  Shouldn’t we as gamers expect just a little more from our games?

When a game deals with something meaningful is when I find the value in gaming, even if the game falters.  One of the reasons that I love God of War is exactly because of that.  Familicide and grappling with the immortal, as well as one’s own mortality, are all themes present in the game.  Yes, it is an unrepentantly bloody experience, and as one of my friends said, there is an hour of bloodshed for one minute of story exposition.  And that’s more or less just fine, because the game bears no illusions about itself.

But did God of War do anything new?  Not in the realm of cinema, that’s for sure.  And for games, it’s arguable.  Killing the vengeful god after the deity in question has raised your personal ire isn’t exactly an experience that many games have shown before, but the type of experience – throwing down an established authority figure in a generally iconoclastic fashion – is a road that many games have traveled down before, be it the angry king or the schoolyard bully, the mafia don or the backstabbing gangster.

And that’s exactly the point.  These games tell stories that aren’t new, and we don’t expect them to be that way.  But we do expect them to tell stories in new ways.  Half-Life 2 drove home the point of immersion in a game world and within a story by containing an essentially seamless experience from the moment protagonist Gordon Freeman steps off that train in City 17, to the final cliffhanger at the Citadel.

Games that have, historically, challenged convention – from Metal Gear Solid 2 to Killer7, from Earthbound to Contact – have not universally been successful.  Would MGS2 have been as big as it was had it not been connected to one of the biggest games on the Playstation?  Vagrant Story destroyed RPG convention and storytelling tropes, yet did remarkably well.  On the other hand, a game like Killer7 or Rule of Rose hardly sold at all; both dealt with hard subject matter and disturbing themes, including mental illness and pedophilia, and neither was exactly friendly to the player in terms of control or combat.

Would any of these games see the same success in this era of Call of Duty and Gears of War? Have our tastes been so diluted by this deluge of violence and gore? I’m not against any of that… but I find myself wishing tastes were refined and matured as opposed to constantly craving that adrenaline rush that certain games bring them. These are games that did something different and found varying success.  Somehow, that’s heartening for the evolution of the medium.

In Part 3, resolution is discussed, along with ideas and thoughts on how to reconcile some of the more interesting elements of fiction and film with gaming.

First-person shooters, in general terms, are the most underdeveloped of the lot, and many of them sell millions and millions of copies.  Certainly, Bioshock and its predecessors are exceptions, and worthy exceptions at that.  But these are not the rule.  Even these fine examples of design and narrative fell apart due to convention and cliché at the end of their respective journeys, something that proved disappointing to the players who found themselves caught up in 2K Boston’s cautionary tale.

How disappointing is it then, to those that value games as art and hold narrative progression in as high esteem as they do in film, that a game such as Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare was hailed as an innovator in storytelling?  How much of a letdown was it to find that the game offered nothing more than spectacular set-pieces and nothing that the hungry masses hadn’t seen before in countless action films?

Such an argument deserves justification on my part, and that justification comes from my background as a gamer and a person.

My parents – particularly my mother – always stressed the importance of story.  For one reason or another, fiction became an integral part of my being, and that inexorable sense of story came with it.  The games that I found too shallow or predictable may have been played, but fell to the wayside in the deluge of stories that I’ve found myself in, in books, film and gaming as a whole.

As a gamer, my growth began in the medium at an early age, as many do.  As a child, narrative didn’t mean much to me; I found it as uninteresting as I found hopping on Goomba’s heads exciting.  This was through early childhood, and things were bound to change.

In prepubescence, then later in the growth to my teenage years, I found myself captivated by genres that have since fallen to the wayside.  Adventure gaming, in particular, held my interest for long periods of time, and not for reasons of methodology or design but simply for the stories that they told.  So far ahead were they in the realm of character development and growth that many games are still playing catch up to this day simply based on the writing that they employ.

I remember quite clearly seeing a friend of mine work through Final Fantasy VII, and later Final Fantasy X, and not quite understanding the draw.  The games seemed vast experiences to me, a game that practiced exclusivity on those not versed in its ways.  Progression through games such as those on my own time – and more importantly, as I have grown older and matured in my tastes – has revealed my main issue with many JRPGs in general.  Mired as they may be in aging mechanics (which, depending on whom you ask, is either a very good or very bad thing), the main flaw with titles in the RPG genre is cliché.

Certainly, this isn’t just an issue with RPGs, but let’s focus there for a moment.  The vast majority of these games are literally tens of hours long, many exceeding one hundred hours in playtime.  While I’d be delusional to even suggest that all of this time is spent with story exposition (it’s not, and it’s not intended to be), much of the story exposition is formed by convention.

Anime and manga play a huge part in the style and progression of RPG plotlines, from the events portrayed to the archetypes represented in the characters of the game.  This is hardly a negative thing, but it hinders both the accessibility of the game as well as innovation in the storylines.  Games such as the Shin Megami Tensei series, as well as some of the less-popular, more bizarre fringe RPG titles have done much to attempt to undermine the status quo established by industry juggernauts such as Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest.

In some part, they’ve succeeded.  Battle systems have evolved slowly but surely, successive iterations refining and innovating stagnant mechanics and stale trends; games have grown and expanded in scope, while refining vision and narrowing focus.  Ambition has flared.

Still, it seems that much of this ambition has resulted in something of a deadlock for narrative progression in RPGs.  Even the most successful of games has a hard time breaking out of the cliché that its predecessors and influences have established, so expecting too much from one game or one genre could be considered too much.  A major problem for games in general is that they’re far too self-referential, and RPGs are no different.

What I mean by this is that game developers, for the most part, draw inspiration from other game developers.  Successful games in the modern era have been successful either because they’re part of an established franchise or because they attempt to draw inspiration from other sources.  A game like Uncharted 2, or, yes, even Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, draws its influences from both the world outside gaming as well as other games in their respective genres.

This is key, in my estimation, to narrative success for a video game.  Influence is necessary (T.S. Eliot famously said, “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal…”) but wholesale imitation is another thing altogether.  This concept goes further than narrative and into gameplay itself.  In the past ten years, we’ve seen light bloom and motion sensing and ragdoll physics and regenerative health all spread like a venereal disease, popping up in places that they shouldn’t be, sometimes to the detriment of the game in question.

There is a good argument for why this happens and why it will continue to happen: Familiar mechanics are easier to digest and acclimatize to than new mechanics, and audiences as whole tend to gravitate towards the easier, more familiar route.  Final Fantasy XII is an excellent example of this.  A critically lauded game, it was criticized by longtime fans of the series for abandoning too many of the long-standing pillars of the series itself, from combat to story design, from characters to art style.  There’s no denying that it was an inventive game and not everyone’s taste, but to shun something like that simply because it wasn’t familiar and wasn’t what fans were used to?  That’s something exclusive to two groups of people: gamers and music fans.  In both groups, it’s almost repulsive.

A large factor in the problem of narrative storytelling in games is the general lack of maturity found in the games in question.  The Grand Theft Auto series has, as a whole, done much to progress narrative beyond what it once was into something mature and relevant.  This is a contradiction with the core design of the GTA games, to go anywhere and do anything in a sandbox city.

The moral problems presented to the player in the narrative arc didn’t gel with the player’s actions, resulting in a massive disconnect that continues to this day.  Combine that with the series’ penchant for immature humor (which isn’t a problem) coupled with an attempt at mature examination of dark subject matter (this is, after all, what Rockstar tries to do in almost all of its games), and you have a game sending mixed messages all over the place.

I’ll be the first to say that I appreciate what Rockstar does and tries to do in its games, both in regards to how the game plays as well as how the story plays out.  Continually pushing the envelope of what’s considered acceptable is a very good thing, and the tales that they’ve brought the world have been nothing short of captivating (even Manhunt, in its depravity, had social commentary dripping from its ears).

That said, the very real disconnect between linear narrative and player action is something that is perhaps the biggest flaw that the company has running through the games it creates; both Jimmy Hopkins and Niko Bellic are morally sympathetic characters, but the things they do (with Hopkins, the bullying; with Bellic, the criminality) and the corresponding actions in the story proper don’t always line up, and this prevents the titles from achieving what is hinted at throughout the narrative.

In Part 2, analysis of the current state of narrative in games will continue, with a focus on the innovators.