Plot is overrated? The real problem with stories in video games

Last week, Riot Games narrative lead Tom Abernathy and Microsoft Game Studios design lead Richard Rouse III gave a talk called “Death to the Three-Act Structure” at GDC that has caused quite a stir in the gaming community. Although their actual point is much more complex than the talking point it has been boiled down to—’plot is overrated’—some of the data they cite in service of it is quite interesting.

“Death to the Three-Act Structure”

First, let’s take a look at what Rouse and Abernathy actually said. At the core of their argument is a Microsoft user research study which had the following findings (I’m taking these directly from Rouse and Abernathy’s slides for the GDC talk):

• Players had difficulty tracing game plots from beginning to end (in contrast to other
  media), often forming only episodic memories for game narrative.
• Game characters were consistently remembered, though not necessarily for
  their role in the plot. Instead, characterization appeared memorable.
• Player recall for gameplay dominated narrative, even for players who self-reported
  playing games mostly for the story, but narrative provided context for gameplay, even
  for players who self-reported ignoring story.
• Participants were perfectly capable of rich thinking about narrative.

Abernathy and Rouse also cited some data, pulled from Steam and Bioware, on how many players actually completed story-focused single-player games like Mass Effect 2 (56%), Bioshock Infinite (53%), Batman Arkham City (47%), and Portal (47%). Yikes!

Their conclusions, to summarize greatly, were that the traditional three-act structure for film, television, and many novels isn’t particularly suitable for games, and that developers should focus more on characters. I think they’re half-right (I disagree with the character bit, but Gamasutra’s David Kuelz has already handled that pretty well).

But instead of focusing on their argument, I want to argue that those statistics they’ve cited point in a wholly different direction. The problem isn’t that plots in games are overrated. It’s that they’re crippled by a number of other industry failings.

You call this a story?

Microsoft’s research study found that gamers had an easier time retelling the plot of television and movies than they did the plots of games. There’s not much detail about the specific games or other media used in Rouse and Abernathy’s deck, but I suspect most gamers could confirm this personally. I’d certainly have an easier time trying to describe the story of Breaking Bad than I would the story of Call of Duty: Ghosts, even though I played that game more recently than I’ve watched the show.

The reason for this isn’t some inherent problem with plot in a video game, though. It’s that the stories most video games tell are—let’s face it—terrible. The writing is generally horrible, the characters are usually walking cliches, and the plotlines are either overly-simplistic snore-fests or so twisted and complicated that they’re impossible to follow. The reason gamers in Microsoft’s study were worse at recalling game plots might well be because overall, the game plots were simply less interesting.

This is, in part, a problem with the industry. Look at the credits the next time you finish a game. The team devoted to writing the story is generally small, if there even is one at all. There are gigantic departments for things like visual effects, but the story often falls into the hands of just a few people, often people who also have other design duties on the game as well.

And while I don’t want to name any names, if you look up these people on LinkedIn, you’ll find that some of them have no real background in writing or storytelling. Game developers hire the best coders to program their games, and the best artists to design them. But the story is often written wholly or in part by those same coders and artists, rather than people with extensive experience in writing and storytelling.

It’s also worth pointing out that in Hollywood and in television, one way things get made is that full-time screenwriters write stories as spec scripts, and then directors and producers choose and adapt the ones they like. In the games industry, there is no real equivalent, and virtually no outside input at all. If I were to write a fantastic game story and send it to Ubisoft, they would not make it into a game. There’s no mechanism for that sort of thing. Story is almost always generated and handled internally.