Now, find yourself a favorite five-year- old RPG. Heck, go mad, go back eight years and play Baldur's Gate. You'll wander around Candlekeep for a bit, frustrated by the 640x480 resolution and your inability to zoom in and out. But you'll chat with everyone, you'll complete those first few tasks and then it will be time to be off with Gorion. But oh no! He's been killed by those bastards! What's this? Imoen wants to join you. It's just the two of you, now, and the world to explore, villages to visit, people to talk to, quests to complete... And you stopped noticing the graphics somewhere back in Candlekeep.
Oh, come on, eight years is nothing. Go for 13! Install Sam & Max, Day of the Tentacle, 15 to boot up Monkey Island. Wait, I'll raise you: Eighteen years! Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders. Sixteen colors and one of them's magenta. Start a timer to see how long you care - it won't do any good, because you'll forget to look at it as much as you'll forget you're not dressed from head to foot in a virtual reality outfit, walking among the space aliens.
And now, do the same with an 18-year-old, story-less first-person shooter.
There's a mistake above, and I'll recognize it. This is an argument riddled with holes, and I'm happy with that - I believe there's a core truth that needs to be heard. I rather pathetically put in "single player shooter." Multiplayer defeats me. If you want a five-plus-year-old game entirely free from narrative, you've got Quake III: Arena and others beside. They are every bit as joyful to play today. Curse them, because my point remains important - despite these exceptions, the key aspect is still missing from the majority of our games.
Perhaps it is all our fault. Perhaps we, en masse, really are so addled, our attention spans are genuinely transitory, only interested in that adrenal high for so long as it lasts, then ready to chase the next fix. Perhaps the three hours of interest FarCry offers is all we desire and all we deserve.
But this cannot be true. Look at the MMOG, a peculiar pile-up of meta- and micro-narrative, sewn together by no narrative at all. You have to spend hundreds of hours to get anywhere, and millions of people are doing so worldwide. There's a hunger out there for more than graphics - people are looking for that narrative, looking for a shared, cooperative vocabulary.
A game that understands powerful action requires powerful motivation and powerful storytelling. Yes, Need for Speed may tirelessly dominate the charts, but look what knocked it from the top spot last month in the U.K.: Shadow of the Colossus.
Story has always focused on the Hero, from Beowulf onward. Gaming taps into this understanding, and lets us be that Hero. But, once you remove the Story, the Hero withers and fades. Booker's weighty work concludes in a similar mind.
"The hero or heroine is he or she who is born to inherit; who is worthy to succeed; who must grow up as fit to take on the torch of life from those who went before. Such is the essence of the task laid on each of us as we come into this world. That is what stories are trying to tell us."
We're willing to code images of the furthest reaches of the galaxy, or delve into the most delicate mysteries of the atom (thank goodness for Will Wright, allowing this bit to work with Spore), but I fear the greatest and most important mystery, the power of the narrative, is being grossly ignored.
John Walker is a games journalist who stalks through the night, telling stories to the innocent and unsuspecting. He also draws a cartoon rabbit here.
