I would like to preface this article by reminding everybody that we are in our immersion week and will be discussing aspects of narrative based games and how they relate to immersion. Each topic will be discussed in further detail later.
Story is possibly the most important aspect of immersion. I can see you going to click the back button now, but bear with me. Almost all other art mediums that are also entertainment revolve around story. Video games seem to be the only one that has no problem in throwing it to the wayside in favor of making a bigger dude with a bigger gun going to shoot a bigger alien. It’s because of this that video games seem to struggle in breaking through with providing games that consistently deliver on a fully immersive experience. Players choose not to become invested in the story or characters because a lot of times they are flat and generic. The main problem lies within the fact that most of the time you really don’t play the story, but rather you play to get to the story, taking away the uniqueness of games being an interactive medium.
One of the biggest barricades that stands in the way of a good story in games is the way a game is structured. So often developers just want to focus on the gameplay segments by themselves and then throw in story afterwards. What this does is set up a rhythm in games that goes something like cut scene, gameplay, cuts scene, gameplay, gameplay, gameplay, cuts scene, and so on. You can see a few problems here, one being the obvious separation of story and gameplay, which is counterproductive to games becoming a unique storytelling medium. Doing this can become tedious and really take a player out of the story and make them want to get back to killing stuff. An example of this is early on in Gears of War. Once you break out of the prison, you fly off to a base and jump into a cut scene. During this you are getting a rundown of what is going on while the characters on screen are shooting at aliens. I was immediately taken out of the game because instead of letting me take in the information while fending off the enemies at the same time, I was merely a passive observer. It is this type of separation that makes me want to just watch a movie instead.
The other flaw in this structure is that sometimes when you play a game too much time passes between story elements that you either forget what is going on or have really lost interest all together. I will admit that developers have gotten better at this to a degree, but it happens in games as great as God of War.
If you’re sitting there thinking that I’m just here complaining and not offering up solutions, here is where it gets good. Kane and Lynch: Dead Men is one of the most groundbreaking games in how it told a story. It had cut scenes, yes, but they tell such a small part of the story compared to how much you get while actually playing the game. For anyone out there that has not played it, hold off on your criticisms until you do, which you should go and do right now, because anyone who has played the game has experienced this almost immediately. Very early on in the game, you are riding in a van with a prisoner that just helped you break free and whom you know next to nothing about. While in this van, the two of you are shooting at pursuing police officers out of the back, you controlling it, not as a cut scene. But where this segment really shines is what is happening between the characters. While being hauled in this van and shooting at police, the two characters are talking to one another and giving the player insight into both the story and the characters. The entire scene plays out brilliantly, and this continues through the rest of the game. It’s such a change of pace from standard stop and go action and really shows how video games can actually tell a story effectively without ripping off movies and shoving information down our throats with cut scenes. It also helps in the building of empathy, actually feeling what the character feels, in a game. This seems to be something so hard for games to do but something that can make the player feel even more immersed in the story.
Empathy changes the context of the violence and makes it become something necessary for you as the character, rather than you as the player. In Kane and Lynch, because you are learning about your past and how you got where you are, you fight through the police as though it is second nature, a survival instinct of sorts. Aaron and I were actually talking about how strong that feeling is in this game instead of Grand Theft Auto for example, where players almost immediately go up to a cop and shoot them just to see what happens. These actions are from the mind of the player, not the mind of the character.
There is another approach that, if done well, can add to the immersion factor by letting the player fill in the blanks and use a bit of their own imagination, not unlike novels. This approach is more of a hands off approach in which the player is given a very small bit of story and then goes to complete the task the rest of the game. If you are having trouble imagining this, simply think of the game Shadow of the Colossus. At the beginning of the game you are given the simple premise of boy saving girl. Sure you see brief cut scenes after you defeat each colossus but nothing too important, it really just points you into the direction of where to go next. There are obviously other elements to this game that add to the immersion and its overall greatness, but in letting the player complete the entire while giving them minimal information along the way, it lets the player add to the story in their head without actually adding to the story. It’s actually quite an interesting technique that I would be interested in seeing more games implement.
Storytelling techniques in games and the types of stories told will hopefully catch up with the technology side. If the point is ever reached of seamlessly weaving gameplay with the story it will be a glorious moment, and to be honest it seems like the industry is on the cusp. But until then we can all only hope that developers continue to learn that the best way to tell a story in a game isn’t to tell it, it is to let the player experience it.