Saturday Soapbox: Gaming's Greatest Story
What's the best tale that video games have ever told?
PES6 was a fantastic stage for the increasingly elaborate theatre laid on by my friends and I, and there was a sparseness to the game that made it all possible. In the gaps between the minimal in-game commentary and equally threadbare presentation there was space begging to be filled by our hungry imaginations as we threaded a grand narrative in-between the on-pitch action.
It's a story that's unique to PES6 in many ways, and attempts to recreate it in more recent games, such as the increasingly excellent FIFA series, have fallen flat, the slick presentation, pervasive commentary and insistence on licences obscuring the tale in its telling.
It's those spaces in-between that often enable the best video game stories, whether that's the void that hosts a score attack in Geometry Wars or in the blank canvas presented by Minecraft.
It's a point that can be illuminated by comparing two very similar games, one that happily lets the player indulge and create their own fantasy while the other imposes its own narrative on them.
Realtime World's Crackdown was strikingly skinny in many regards, throwing the player into its own toybox with little context or backstory. All it did was provide the player with an exquisite set of tools and the gentlest of shoves in the right direction, and the adventures that followed were often deeply personal, crafted as they were from your decisions.
Grand Theft Auto IV, on the other hand, had an equally exquisite sandbox, but it was tempered by the spectre of Niko Bellic's tale, a story that often overshadowed the player's own. It's been well-documented how there's a disparity between the Niko that's coming to terms with his violent past, struggling to find peace, and the player who's striving to cause as much destruction as possible. GTA IV's a brilliant game nonetheless, but this central friction works against it.
It's a problem that's arisen again in Eidos Montreal's exquisite Deus Ex: Human Revolution, and its promise of untold player choice rubs up against its desire to tell its own story. Those much-maligned boss fights are one source of conflict, but the problem's pervasive throughout Deus Ex's world.
I admit I enjoy being spun around on Deus Ex's grand conspiracy waltzer, but when the cut-scenes kick in they star a character that's drifted in from another game entirely. In my hands, Jensen's an idiot voyeur, a man who likes nothing more then to break into people's flats, rearrange their furniture and then rifle through their personal belongings.
When caught, he stroppily kills his way out of trouble until there's no one left alive who'll dare question him, and then it's back to the important business of reading through a stranger's email account. It's a world away from the gruff, suave cyborg that shows up every time the control is wrestled away from my hands.
Telling a great story, then, demands a compromise that very few games have been able to make. Leave some space for the player, a little stage for them to act out their own fantasies rather than imposing your own on them, and the results can be magical - because often the best stories are the ones that we tell ourselves.