Erik Marshall

From NYTimes,  Charles Herold writes about the game Lost Planet: Extreme Condition:

While the battles are epic, the story is less so. The animated cinematic sequences that separate missions are slickly produced and well acted but not remotely engaging. The story is generic, and perhaps is present not because the developers had a story they wanted to tell but just because they thought one was obligatory; you tolerate rather than enjoy it.

I don’t really care about this game, but I find the quote interesting. To what extent to gamers care about narrative? I think it depends on the genre of game. I’ve been playing Battlefield 2142 lately, which is set in the future, after global climate change has reduced the world’s livable land mass.  Each map has a story about the battle, but I don’t care. I just want to go kill bad guys. Some games rely more heavily on narrative than others. Warcraft III has a fairly extensive narrative, full of lush cinematic sequences that furthered the narrative.

The trend toward releasing games based on movies is a way to borrow the narrative of the film for the game. In doing this, game designers do not have to come up with new storylines, although, sometimes they do, but instead rely on the player’s prior experience with the film. The Godfather game is a good example of this. Some of The Matrix games  actually do tell a story concurrent to that of of the movies, from the point of view of minor characters, expanding that universe.

Maybe that’s one reason why Machinima like Red vs Blue is so enjoyable. It takes a relatively narrativeless video game like Halo, where the main objective is to kill players in other colored uniforms and take their flag, and gives it a backstory, albeit a ridiculous one. It posits a world where the characters are conscious, asking, basically: “Why do we want their flag?”