Posted by Rampant Coyote on July 21, 2016

I have often posited that you can have a great game, or a great story, but not both.

Having spent some time improving (well, reducing the suck level of) my fiction-writing chops, I think I’m ready to offer a more informed opinion:

You can have a great game, or a great story, but not both.

Right, no change. Actually, it’s been reinforced. Now, I feel you can have a great game with an acceptable story, and vice versa. And you can have a great game with a story that stands out among other game stories. I’ve played several of those, and I love them.

By way of further explanation: A game can have a great story if the player has little or no control over the story. But in my opinion, that detracts from the interactivity, and the point of games is interaction, so it in turn detracts from the quality of the game-playing experience.

It’s the difference between active participation and being a spectator. If you are an athlete, you are going to perform your absolute best in a serious competition. You are going to do your best to run up the score, to break personal records, and defeat the competition by a wide margin of safety. As a spectator, however, the sport is most exciting when it is a close game all the way at the end. The winning three-point shot right at the buzzer marks the end of a spectacular game for you, not the running-out-of-the-clock in the last two minutes for the team that has a commanding lead.

This is exactly the problem of story vs. gameplay. In a good story, the princess isn’t just in another castle. No, going into the final act, not only is the princess in another castle, but by raiding the castle looking for the decoy princess, you just unsealed a demonic army that is now ready to attack your kingdom. The main bad guy took you awesome sword and armor for himself, and in your absence your scumbag cousin Clayton got engaged to the real princess. You haven’t become more powerful with an awesome BFG or hitting level 70. No, you are in worse shape than when you started, bruised, bleeding, naked, humiliated, and everything else except broken.

This is story. And if I was playing an RPG where that crap happened to me in spite of my best efforts, I’d probably quit playing. Although “playing” might be the wrong term for that kind of railroading. I absolutely hate it when I’m playing a game and very carefully avoiding / preventing a potential ambush, only to have a cut-scene happen where I suddenly become STUPID and walk right into it, with bad guys materializing from nowhere.

A good story is about failure. Lots of failures, and successes that came at such a dear cost they might as well be failures, all the way to the end where the hero snatches victory from the jaws of defeat. But playing a game is about minimizing those failures.

So… yeah. As a game developer, you have to compromise one or both. Now, this isn’t a message of doom-and-gloom, and I’m right there with you if you want to throw around some favorite game stories as counter-examples. I love RPGs partly because they are so story-heavy. I’ve got a bag of tricks of my own I’m trying to use to get around this fundamental limitation. But the important part is recognizing that it’s a fundamental limitation.