Gaming Narrative

Being a computer animation student and soon to be professional, I love story telling. It's part of what I do. But my medium isn't at all the same as the art medium of video games.
Now, I love video games. I've been playing video games since I could hold a controller and story always seemed second to gameplay. If it was fun, I'd play it (I'm looking at you Mario). That being said, I think story is very important to a gaming experience. Something to pull me into a world and keep me there. 
The Legend of Zelda series is one of, if not, my favorite video game franchises of all time. The gameplay is consistently fun and well designed, but the story holds a lot together. But here's the tricky part with story or narrative as it relates to video games. 

Mmm... Still gets me.

The Zelda series has claimed to become more and more story oriented, but really it's just gotten longer cutscenes and more dynamic animations. Even the first game for the Nintendo Entertainment system released in 1986. had narrative that was built into it's mechanics. The first thing that happens in the game as soon as you press start is you're thrown in a giant world with three directions to go and a cave. The narrative here is the exploration. You are just as lost and ready to discover new things as Link is.

This is something that AAA games seem to be doing less of and that's telling a narrative or giving an experience through play. Not that I'm against fancy cutscenes or extended dialogue, but I was kind of turned off by the beginning of Skyrim. No matter how friggen' excited all my friends were to play this game, this beginning is still boring.

The most exciting part is at the very tail end of this video. Really? This game includes basically everything plus killing dragons by yelling at them. Yet, the first 8 minutes has you strapped in a cart listening to Random Rob and Somebody Sam talk about... stuff and all you can do is turn your head. This shouldn't be how narrative is presented.

I recently found a youtube channel called Extra Credits. The writer has worked on everything from AAA video game titles to smaller titles like Farmville and even started his own MMO. These guys know what they're talking about and they describe game narrative too perfectly for me to word any different, so I'll just post they're video about it.

Long story short, even a simple game like Missile Command can have a strong narrative that can explore deep human emotion with out a single cutscene. It forces the player to feel and experience the narrative on his or her own. And again, I am definitely not against cutscenes. I know Megan Boyd touched on Luigi's Mansion, but I just recently beat the new 3DS sequel (I'm ahead) and I will say I got a lot of narrative from the little actions Luigi does. They add to his character and add to the experience the player is supposed to be having. Of course, the magical thing about Luigi's Mansion 2 is that these acting beats follow into the gameplay as well. 

I guess really my point is that game narrative is best told through gameplay.