Savagery vs Story in Games

My mother forwarded me a story earlier this week (you can find the link here: http://www.winnipegsun.com/news/world/2009/01/18/8062236-sun.html ) about a study that indicated that video gamers prefer plot, challenge, and character development to death and destruction in their games.

As a budding game writer and designer, I’m frankly surprised that this study was even deemed necessary.

Violent content in video games has long been a popular theme, largely because in any game it is necessary to have some form of conflict. Whether that’s against a time clock or a hostile enemy makes no real difference; for any gamer to be engaged, there MUST be something to provide a challenge. It’s part of the basic format of any game design, something taught to you in the very first classes at colleges like Champlain College, where I go to school. Violent places, or situations where you are required to use violence to resolve game objectives CAN provide interesting scenarios, but in and of themselves, with no context or story behind them, it’s just so much window dressing.

Let’s take a look at two popular games in different genres to illustrate the point. In 2005, there was a game released in January by LucasArts called Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction. Mercenaries was set in a slightly fictionalized North Korea, in the near future, and a great focus was set on a sandbox-style, fully destructible environment, where the player could destroy any buildig, vehicle, or person, much like in games such as Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto . As much as the destruction of, well, anything, was pleasing, however, it was the story that made the game fun. Without the background of North Korea’s strife-torn country and the fictionalized characters that advanced the storyline, Mercenaries would have remained exactly what it was: a sandbox. A very pretty sandbox, to be sure… but still, a sandbox. Instead, the game designers made sure the players’ attention was held by including an absorbing story about a North Korean coup, complete with a possible nuclear holocaust.

For a much different and more popular example, let’s consider StarCraft. StarCraft was a real-time strategy war game, one of the most popular ones ever invented and a major influence on today’s RTS scene, but one of the most interesting things about it was the story behind it. StarCraft had an engrossing, involved, and twisty story that always left the player wondering what was going to be next. Without that story, it would have just been a successful game; not nearly as influential as it turned out to be. Violence in it was necessary (what war game doesn’t have it?) and it was certainly a driving force behind the game, but it was all in context with a story, and made sense within the world it was in. In conclusion, it should have been obvious from what successful games manage to do with the violence they depict that gamers prefer stories to violence; the most successful games weave the violence in with the story so that it feels like a natural consequence of the situations you’re put in, with consequences for the player and for the story. This study merely confirms something that was obvious to many gamers long ago.