Storytelling in Games Can Be Better than in Movies

At the moment, one of the biggest debates in videogame development is this: “What's more important, the storytelling or the gameplay?” There's almost a universal agreement on the fact that the average quality of the stories told in videogames is not up to par with what movies and books offer to the average movie goer or reader. Yet, Square Enix believes that, very soon, the quality of storytelling in videogames will surpass that of the other mediums.

It makes sense for Square Enix, which with the Final Fantasy series can be seen as creating the epitome of Japanese Role Playing Game convoluted stories, to make such assumptions. But let's see what the arguments are. Yoshinori Yamagishi, who is the producer of Star Ocean: The Last Hope, declared for CVG that “As opposed to films, books and TV, as a medium it is more of a challenge to produce a game in order to tell a story. In case we always have to think about how players might react to each depiction of a character or storyline, and that's the part we can't predict. Nevertheless we have to make these predictions to a certain degree, and incorporate this into our work. So it's more of a challenge.”

But the problem that Yamagishi sees with storytelling in videogames is that of control over the reactions of players to certain characterizations, also present in books and in movies. We put down novels that we do not like and we turn off the TV or the DVD player when a movie is not worth our time.

The issue with videogames is that the story needs to be created in complete harmony with the gameplay, which is rarely the case. When we read or watch a movie, we only focus on reading or seeing the progression of the story. When we play a videogame, we also need to focus on the shooting or on the building or on whatever else the game is making us do. If the story gets in the way of that, then we are likely to ignore it. That's the issue which game creators like Square Enix need to tackle.