Games don't need stories.

[dharh]

richardhutnik said:

To confirm the subject of this thread, I did a quick check over on Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game

Yes, I know Wikipedia isn't a perfect source, but it is generally in the ballpark. 

In that entry, you see ONE place where stories are brought up, and that is "role-playing games".  Beyond that, not a single mention of story is involved.  One can throw in "adventure games" as another possible genre that stories are part of, and considering how adventure games have been assimilated by action games, one sees what appears to be more and more importance of story to the action game title.

Several things come out of games not needing stories:

* You can have a really good videogame that doesn't necessarily have a great story.

* You can have great games that actually have NO story involved with them.  Players can come up with their own war stories from games they played, but these are created experiences players have, rather than something written by someone else.

* There is potential folly when the videogame industry puts more and more focus on elements that go into movie-making, in hopes they will produce hits.  I would say it is close to being on par with an excessive focus on improving raw horsepower to put out better graphics, and not focusing on art direction and coming up with a good looking style.  You get diminishing returns in what you are doing by doing this, until you reach a place where you will never recover your costs.  In short, how does hiring a great cast, having great writers, and high production value make up for bad controls, stupid enemy AI, and stupid level design that is beyond frustrating to defeat?

* Stories are a narrative told by someone that holds the interest of the person listening or viewing the story.  When people play, they have a degree of freedom over their action, and are rewarded for performing proper actions.  Both tend to work against one another, but can come together also.  They can come together and be great, but isn't there an increasing chance that one element or the other will end up overriding the other?  I see in Borderlands, for example, you have Skag creatures dropping ammo for your weapons.  In what universe of logical and believable storytelling do unintelligent creatures drop ammo for weapons?  If you saw that in a movie, would you claim that the movie is great, or it is beyond stupid?  In Borderlands, as a game, it works, and is a useful addition to the game, that gives you compelling reason to keep playing.

* Exactly what is the story in Chess, Checkers, Poker, Spades, Monopoly or Scrabble?  Are these games?  I find them in the games section of stores.  Any idea how exactly they could benefit from adding a story that was written by an award-winning writer?  How about Tetris or Pac Man, on the videogame front?

* Is it entirely possible that the reason why we have failed to get any decent movies from games, is that games don't lend well to the creation of movies based on them?  We are now possibly seeing that we may end up getting some good movies based on games, because videogames have been embedding more and more narrative into them?  I am thinking Prince of Persia here as a possibility.  One aspect of this I see is that a good movie based on a game may end up being hardly like the game it is based on.

Anyhow, just my two cents here.  I am curious to see if anyone else has any other opinion on this.

Of course you can have a game without a story. There are tons of games that focus solely on gameplay. However, I applaud the trend of adding both RPG and story elements to the other genres. Especially adventure games. Heck if they aren't going to have at least a minor story in an FPS they might as well cut the solo mode out altogether.