Quote: When he looks at video games from a critical distance, Bissell is concerned mainly with their lack of narrative meaning. Games ask us to save the princess, save the country, save the world, save ourselves—but no one plays games to achieve those ends. We play for the puzzle, for the physics, for the sense of being embedded in a fully realized world. Indeed, for me, the "story" usually seems like filler, even in games like Grand Theft Auto and RDR [Red Dead Redemption], whose stories are smarter than the rest of the video-game pack. RDR begins and ends every mission with cleverly scripted movielike "cut scenes" that provide some explanation for why your character is doing what he's doing—but the game also lets you skip the scenes, which I usually elect to do. Thus I can't really explain why my character is doing what he's doing. The real answer is he's doing it because I am making him do it, and I am making him do it only because I am having fun.
"This is one of the most suspect things about the game form," Bissell writes. "A game with an involving story and poor gameplay cannot be considered a successful game, whereas a game with superb gameplay and a laughable story can see its spine bend from the weight of many accolades—and those who praise the latter game will not be wrong." What's the solution to this quandary? Should games invest more in story, in an attempt to bring us narratives that are on the level of those of the other popular arts? Or should games abandon story—is the video game, as a form, simply incompatible with traditional concepts of narrative, and must game designers instead find other ways to invest their creations with lasting meaning?
I happen to feel that narrative is typically awkwardly shoehorned into games, with elaborate backstories provided for the character you're supposed to be playing and an on-going plot for the conflict you're embroiled in, but none of which is necessarily vital to play (in most games) or viscerally experienced in and of itself. In fact I've argued that games should have little more than bare premises, leaving the players to create their own emergent narratives - and there's evidence to suggest that this is precisely how tons of people play sandbox games like the aforementioned Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption.
Ultimately, though, I must admit: the (already little) time I spend sitting in front of a computer or television playing video games (or watching TV in my case, although not movies) does feel wasted. Not so much because I think the activity is inherently wasteful as because it's ridiculously inefficient: apart from the fact that I could be "getting things done" (including socializing), there's the fact that your classic video game is structured around repeated failure before advancement to the next level, although titles like Joe Danger (PSN, Hello Games), among others, allow you to advance in any order and to retry areas/levels at your whim. My PS3 sees way more use as a DVD/Blu-Ray player and Netflix client than as a game console.
Your thoughts?
