If you want a great example of why a good story isn’t necessary for a game to be fun, take a look at Tom Cross’ opinion piece on Dead Space. I haven’t gotten around to playing Dead Space, but according to Tom, just about everything non-game is “carefully and stylishly unoriginal”. The characters are flat and uninteresting, the plot is completely predictable, and overall the game fails at establishing a truly frightening experience. That being said, Tom loved playing the game.
I think Dead Space is a good argument against laissez-faire story design: the point of view that believes that games don’t need a story, just interesting game mechanics, and that the goal is to have the game act as a vehicle for players to put themselves into a world where they can make their own story. It seems that the designers of Dead Space attempted to create a blank slate protagonist that anyone could relate to, hopefully facilitating the player’s desire to insert themselves into a fantasy world where they can create their own story. The problem is that from a plot perspective, a flat protagonist is uninteresting.
Isaac never speaks, and you never get any indication of his mood, other than that he doesn’t like dying. He wears a mask throughout the game and reacts to little. Apparently, this makes him relatable, because so many of us are demure, voiceless, deep space mechanics who constantly wear masks.
And because the main character is flat, the story that revolves around him lacks any emotional attachment or depth. But the game is fun, it has a good set of core game mechanics. What get Cross worked up is that the gamer in him enjoys the pure game, but because Dead Space makes an attempt at telling a story, his basic human desire for interesting and compelling plot drives him to feel annoyed at the same time. A game doesn’t need story to be fun, but if a game does try to tell a story, the lack of a coherent and interesting plot generates the slightest bit of friction during gameplay. It rubs us the wrong way. A game doesn’t need story to be fun, but if you do want to have a game that tells a story, make sure you implement that story’s plot properly.
The problem with Dead Space, aside from the mediocre effort placed in crafting a story, is that there is no care to implement game mechanics that best tell this story. The story and game mechanics in Dead Space are for the most part completely unrelated. On top of that, the reason the game isn’t as frightening as it could be stems from the fact that the space of possibilities afforded by the game’s mechanics simply don’t have a scare factor to them; they don’t deliver.
I’m not suggesting that every flaw Cross points out is directly related to a flaw in game mechanics and nothing else. But I do want to emphasize that every flaw, in part, does relate to poorly executed game mechanics. I find this last statement odd when considering that those very same game mechanics provide Cross with an “amazingly fun” experience. However, it does makes sense when you consider that games and stories are two completely different things. What makes a game fun and what makes a game tell a good story aren’t necessarily the same. But imagine for a second what would happen if they were the same. This is what coherence is all about.
Overall, though, I think the most fascinating part of Cross’ article is the following chunk of text:
[...] most people are focusing on how the tempo of that movie [Aliens] is similar to Dead Space’s gameplay. They say that this game is like Aliens, with its frantic action and small scares, and less like Alien‘s slow creeping dread.
What “most people” are doing here, without even knowing that they’re doing it, is focusing on how the dynamic plot (telling) created by Dead Space‘s game mechanics (and experienced through gameplay) is much more like the plot (telling) of James Cameron’s Aliens than Ridley Scott’s Alien. Fantastic. It’s good to see people intuitively catching on to this concept.
Spake gian mancuso, tagged as: epideictic,opinion
