Are video games better without stories? (Gaming)

by cheapLEY , Thursday, April 27, 2017, 13:33 (2768 days ago) @ General Battuta

Spec Ops: The Line (the player's 'coerced complicity' requires them to be a player, not a reader: the game forces them to make a terrible choice because they are present in a terrible situation, and the situation overrides personal agency: the only Right act is to never enter the situation)

Both this game and Bioshock (the first) never worked for me the way it did for others. I can appreciate what the game is doing, but I just don't like it. The game forces you do terrible things and then goes "Look how awful you were for doing those things" at the end. The white phosphorous scene looses all impact and credibility when the game literally gives you no other alternative. Spec Ops is an example of bad video game story telling in my opinion--it removes players agency to the point that you might as well just be watching a movie of the same story.

Bioshock works better, in that it at least doesn't paint you as the "bad guy" in the end, necessarily, and it does at least make the player question why they did the things they did, just because some guy on the radio told them to.

Fary Cry 4 pulls it off better, I think, then both of them. By actually waiting for Pagan Min to return at the beginning of the game, you get to go spread your mother's ashes and the game ends, avoiding all the heinous shit you would do otherwise. Even that feels a bit . . . I don't know what word to put there, actually. Pretentious? That doesn't quite fit, but I guess it works. Like, I didn't buy Far Cry 4 to spread some ashes--I bought it to rampage through the country-side, shoot things, take over bases, and just cause chaos. The developer trying to insert some message about that being bad comes off as weird, as they're the ones that make the games that allow me to do that.

In any case, I hate Spec Ops. I guess I can respect the fact that they probably realized they were making a mediocre shooter and decided to do something interesting with it, but I don't think it worked very well, and I think it's a terrible example of a story that can only be told as a video game.