Today I got to play the game Dead Space. I wasn’t sure if I would like it or not since I’m not really into sci-fi games that much, but since it was recommended and since it was also really cheap (I should note, I rarely pay full price for a game), I decided to give it a shot. And I’m glad I did, because the game’s pretty good.
Pretty good? Okay, it’s awesome. Not perfect, but it’s got my attention at least. Many games these days just don’t have much “playability” to them. I think of the Halo franchise, for instance, where basically what you do is play the same thing every 30 seconds for six hours. It gets really old, really fast in other words. That the Xbox 360 gives you achievement points is really the only reason why you’d bother to play the solo game more than once. At least with multi-player, you have a human you’re responding to, so it’s not the same thing every 30 seconds then. But if you’re doing the campaign…boring is the only word to describe it.
Not so with Dead Space however. DS is one of those horror shooters, where instead of being Rambo and running toward enemies to blast them to little bits, like in games like the Call of Duty franchise (which, I should note, I do like), you’re freaked out by the enemies that aren’t there. So as you’re going down a hall, you hear the creaks and groans of the ship you’re on, and you can hear the aliens growling and grunting, and you know there somewhere nearby, but you can’t see them. Of course, they’ll jump out at you at some point (although that gets somewhat predictable after a time—but even with the predictability, there are some times that still get you).
In any case, I’ve completed 10 chapters of the game. There are 2 left, according to the achievements section (I could look it up online to make sure, but I figure why bother? I’ll finish it tomorrow either way). And the only complaint that I have about the game is the frustration factor that sets in. That’s when you’re told, “We need to get this goal accomplished” and you go forth and get the goal accomplished only to find out someone behind the scenes has sabotaged something else, so now you have to get ANOTHER goal accomplished. This is okay every once in a while, but when it happens at the end of 10 straight chapters, it gets annoying. Not enough to make me stop playing, but enough to make me note it. I think the game play would be better if they just gave you a list of objectives at the very beginning, and said, “Here’s the ten things you’re going to have to do.” Throw in just two or three sabotage events, and the game play is less frustrating because you feel like you’re actually getting somewhere.
And that brings me to the actual point of this post, which isn’t so much a review of Dead Space as it is using the video game to think about story. Many video games these days are getting story oriented. It happens a lot with RPGs, of course, but it’s becoming more obvious in other games that typically don’t have much story going for them. Now I’ve yet to find a video game story outside of RPGs (like, say Final Fantasy VII) that has any real depth to it, but games are getting better at it. It used to be that you could wow people with awesome graphics and they wouldn’t care about the story; now we’re finding that all the awesome graphics in 1990 are hideous today and, therefore, we need a story.
But the important part of the story isn’t the plot; it’s not the sequence of the events that occur. The important part of the story is the character development. And this you’ll find true of stories in general. Take, for instance, Robert Ludlum’s Bourne trilogy (I mean the books, not the movies). What made the first book so compelling is that you actually cared about Jason Bourne. You struggled with him as he sought to reconcile his good beliefs with all the evidence he was collecting that he was an assassin. How could he be a cold-blooded killer?
The movie, on the other hand, jettisoned the character of Bourne and instead focused on the actions. They weren’t even the actions of the book, but that’s another issue. Bourne became an action figure, and the result was that the first movie was lame. You didn’t care about what happened to Bourne. You had nothing invested in him. The only virtue he brought was that he could do cool moves that you couldn’t do, and even that is something that we subconsciously recognize as a cheat because of trick photography and wire work.
The net result: if you want something good, character always trumps action. If you care about the character in your story, absolutely nothing could happen and it’ll be a great story. If you don’t care about the character in your story, he can win the world and you won’t want to read the story ever again.
Dead Space doesn’t have much characterization in it, but it does have more than the average FPS. You’re given more than just a set of objectives to fulfill. Even so, the game would have been so much better had the gamers tried to invest a bit more in building empathy for the characters in the story and the people who play the game. So it’s a good first step, but an even better first step was F.E.A.R. which, incidentally, is of a similar horror game genre—in fact, the first time you play that game if you don’t know what’s happening, you’ll end up firing about 20 shots at nothing (the first level is a training level so there’s no real threat, but it’s set in the story so you think there’s a threat).
In any case, there is perhaps hope for the future. Game developers are reaching a state where they can no longer hide deficient story with the “coolness” factor of better graphics or sounds. We’re pretty much maxed out there (about the only thing that’ll be better is when they get a 3-D game). This means that story is becoming more important, and as a result I predict that in the next five years or so we’re going to finally get the types of good stories found in RPGs over in action games.
