Reality Killed the Videogame Star

Reality and storylines are two things that most game makers think that a game needs, for some reason or another.

Does Chess have a storyline? Does it simulator reality? Both are answered "no"! Yet Chess is one of the all time great games.

What about Tetris? Its definitely a classic. Reality and storyline be damned.

The same goes for: The Sims, Pacman, Asteroids, Quake (1) Multiplayer, Super Mario Kart, Breakout, Bomberman, and many many more. My point is that there is no set formula for making games, yet you will see many developers talk about "the basics" of a game such as the physics engine and scripting for the storyline.

Finally, one example of a series of games that ceased to be games... and became cheasy movies that require a button to be pressed, in order to advance the movies: the Final Fantasy series. Anyone who started out on the original Final Fantasy 1 for the NES knows that it was a great game. You had a lot of decisions to make (remember this is back in the 80s) that effected your party. The Final Fantasy series improved through each iteration, when it peaked with Final Fantasy 6 (FF3 in the USA). Starting with Final Fantasy 7, everything was downhill. The storyline for each game became totally linear. Interactivity became lame and dull, if it even existed at all. Really, I wonder why they don't just cut out the crap and make the thing a movie that uses the Playstation's rendering capabilities. Oh wait, the majority of the games are prerendered. Forgot about that... so why don't they just release a frickin DVD movies?

Sorry if I sound pissed, but Square killed one of my favorite video game series by putting too much storyline into it. "Lines" are linear and not interactive. You have only one choice with "lines", and that is to keep going in the same direction.

Now, a game can have an "emergent story", but not a storyline, like say with The Sims. There is no story LINE, but the gamer creates their own story. Some developers try to approach "emergent stories" in their games by cramming multiple story LINES into it. One example is Deus Ex. A great game, but still flawed. If you are too creative, the storylines break down, and you realize that there is no "emergent story", just a bunch of scripts that break when you do something the developer didn't consider.

Lines and Realism can be useful in some games, but definitely NOT all games. Most of the best games have a dash of storyline and a dash of realism... and the rest emerges from the actual gameplay (Counter-Strike is a good example).