As a big-book-reading, literature-major, Coen-brothers-film loving English teacher, I'm often horribly disappointed by the poor quality of story and plot in the video games I love so much. I've been thinking a lot lately about why this is, and what game designers could do to develop better stories.

Let me say at the start that storytelling is just one part of a game, and often it's the least important element. As one of the Couch Mercenaries once said, if I want to watch an engrossing movie, I'll put a DVD in. I play games to have fun, and I'm irritated when a developer tries to pretend that tedious cutscenes are all they need for a good story. (Many JRPGs fall into this trap.) Let me also say that story itself has several different components, and it's important to distinguish between them.

Most of the time story is obviously nothing more than a means to an end — Borderlands and Left 4 Dead come immediately to mind. Some game developers work hard to tell a worthwhile story, and many people like them; but I'm usually unimpressed by the results. COD4 and BioShock fit this slot for me.

Elements #1 and #2: Mood and Characters

So what is needed for a good story, and how can I claim that COD4 and BioShock don't qualify? Let's start with two major elements, effective mood and engrossing characters. BioShock does a great job with these. I'd go so far as to say that BioShock does the best job of establishing mood of any game on the XBox360. It's creepy and unsettling, but most of all it brings us into a barely-breathing world of disappointment. Mood is nearly inseparable from setting, and we can all agree that the setting of BioShock is superbly rendered.

COD4 has decent characters, I suppose, but we never really get to know them. We're jerked around the globe from one situation to another, and (for me at least) it's hard to keep track of them, much less care about what happens to them. The mood of COD4 is fine, but it rarely deviates from tense action. (Which is fine; we can't really ask for much more from a military FPS.)

Element #3: Character development

Another element of good storytelling is character development. Not just who these people are, but how they change over the course of the story. What are their motivations, and what decisions do they make as a result? Here is where BioShock falls down. For all the recordings we collect and glimpses we see of Ryan and Atlas along the way, we don't really get to know them on any meaningful level. I loved the conversation with Ryan as we play golf in his office, but it was short and didn't shed nearly as much light on the situation as I would have liked.

My biggest problem with character development in BioShock is that it's too episodic. One minute we're trying to figure out why Ryan and Fontaine were trying to kill each other, and the next minute we have some psychotic composer ordering us to kill random people for no obvious reason. This makes the gameplay more varied, but from a story perspective it's a nightmare.

COD4 has almost no character development. These are soldiers whose personal histories are totally unknown to us, and they really don't change or evolve over the course of the game. Unfortunately, storytellers usually don't make soldiers into actual people. The most we can hope for is a tiny bit of moral ambiguity when they actually have to kill an enemy soldier.

Element #4: Method of Delivery

Another important element of the storytelling puzzle is the method of delivery. Will we watch cutscenes? Listen to recordings? Read journal entries? Or get story elements while actually doing things? (GTA4 has some good examples of this last one; the character you're trying to shoot may yell things or take you somewhere that reveals a story point.) Most games use a combination of tactics, with varying results.

Having the player collect recordings is really overdone these days. BioShock does it well, I guess, but we're usually doing other things while we listen (opening doors, replenishing health). This makes it hard to follow the story closely; we almost never give it our full attention. We collect recordings also in Dead Space and Borderlands, with less success. I'd say the best use of recordings (even though it's really dialogue from a character) is in Portal. They're crisp and informative, but they evolve into intriguing insights that make us smile as we play.

Cutscenes are tricky, because we don't want to watch, we want to play! The best cutscenes provide a well-deserved break after a tiring bit of action; I think COD4 really shines in this area. Let us battle vicious bad guys for fifteen minutes, and then give us two minutes of explosive cutscenes as a reward.

Journal entries are difficult for the same reason. As Butt-head so aptly put it: "If I want to read, I'll go to school. Huh huh." Lost Odyssey takes a big risk by throwing entire text-based short stories into the mix, and despite my yearning for good tales, I skipped most of them. MYST does a great job with printed material, but that's partly because the technology didn't exist to offer alternatives. (The game is also a big love letter to books, so that's part of it too.)

Element #5: Ending

The final element we need to discuss is the climax and/or ending. Every great story has a moment or scene that really knocks the audience back. The Usual Suspects is my favorite example from the world of film. Romeo and Juliet has a powerful ending, as does Kafka's The Trial. In the world of comics, Watchmen is a great example. The climax doesn't have to be the very last scene, but at some point the audience needs to see everything put together, and get some resolution to the conflict(s). If we can get some kind of "oh wow" moment, that's great, but even if it's just an intriguing combination of what we've already seen, that's okay too.

BioShock, obviously, has a magnificent "oh wow" moment; I would compare it with The Usual Suspects for its impact on me. I will probably play the game again just to see everything I didn't know about the first time through. But the ending of the game is so weak that it really left a nasty taste in my mouth. I liked the final cutscene, but it wasn't enough to reward me for everything I had to do to get there.

COD4 has a decent "oh wow" moment of its own, even one that does something risky by killing off a main player character. But the bad guy is not nearly developed enough for us to feel urgently that he needs to die. The slow-motion tries to force this feeling on us, but in the end it's contrived and unsuccessful.

For all its great story elements, the ending of MYST is perhaps the worst in the history of video games. There is a short cutscene (during which a major character goes away for a full minute), and absolutely no resolution. We're left watching a looped video clip of a man writing. Woo-hoo! I bet you feel rewarded now, huh?

Borderlands comes in a close second for Worst Ending Ever.

Doing It Right

So, I hear people asking me impatiently, which games do a good job of telling the story? You may be expecting Ico, since it's a game I rarely criticize. And while that game does a superb job with mood, story delivery, and (especially) ending, it doesn't really have much character development. The two main characters don't even speak the same language, and their interactions are only related to solving the puzzles of the castle they're trying to escape. It's a glorious game in nearly every sense, but if I'm being honest, it leaves something to be desired in the area of character development.

I'm giving my Top Story Prize to Mass Effect. BioWare is known for good storytelling, and even though I'm only halfway through, I'd say Mass Effect takes the cake (assuming the ending isn't mediocre). The characters are interesting and multifaceted. We get to know about their pasts, and we're interested to see how they react to varying situations. One of my favorite lines comes when Shepard tells Wrex "Let's not start a fight here." The big fella answers calmly: "Why not?"

The mood in Mass Effect is well-presented, from the barren wasteland icy planets to the imposing officialdom of the Citadel. The characters develop well; we see them think and change. We even have to choose between two characters' lives. (I'll discuss the unique possibilities and problems associated with moral choices in part two.) Even Shepard, the player character, has a backstory which is woven (however simply) into the game.

As for story delivery, Mass Effect does a tremendous job of keeping the cutscenes interesting without being too long or contrived. Characters speak with purpose, and conversations are presented cinematically. At the same time, the producers aren't full of their own graphical ego; they let the story do the work and they keep fancy effects out of the frame. (Until it's time to watch a huge space station explode; then we get the full fireworks display.)

Conclusions

There are lots of other games worth discussing, but this thing is already way too long as it is. GTA4 (and, in my opinion, San Andreas even more so) has some interesting approaches to the above elements, and Oblivion does a good job with smaller stories along the way. My goal here, however, is to provide a framework we can use for further discussions.

Too often we discuss video games based solely on the things we love or hate about them; and if someone else disagrees on one element, we respond based on another. I think the best conversations and reviews should be able to honestly and specifically analyze the many different components, without resorting to Haterade or Fanboy-ism.

I hope this is useful for other video game addicts. We all want games that give us what we want, and most of us want the same thing. For every fun game that barely has any story at all (Borderlands), I want at least one game like Mass Effect that tells a good story, and tells it well.

In part two I'll take a look at some of the unique challenges posed by storytelling in the video game format, and examine some of the common mistakes game developers make in these areas.