I'm a big fan of Cracked and especially David Wong, but let's face it, the guy's shtick is to be extremely negative about absolutely everything, and he's more than willing to twist or overlook a few facts to make his point. He's been preaching doomsday for the video game industry for a good solid half a decade now, and while it may not be in the best shape creatively at the moment, it's nowhere near as bad as he makes it sound. This year's E3 saw the announcement of new projects from Eric Chahi and Tetsuya Mizuguchi, two of the most revered figures of the art-game crowd and, by extent, the creative fringes of video gaming; I would've thought that would be enough to please most naysayers, but somehow these seem to be overlooked entirely. I'm not going to make any excuses for the bulk of mainstream titles, though; I liked the JPG in Wong's second article so much I saved it to my computer.
My basic philosophy on story in games (simplified considerably) is that it should either be REALLY GOOD, or virtually nonexistent. There's nothing I love more than a good interactive narrative, but if storytelling isn't going to be one of your top priorities, then just give me a fun game and don't bog it down with a story no one cares about. Or, put another way: the higher the story-to-gameplay ratio is in a game, the greater obligation said story is under to be good. When you reach the point of, say, having nine-and-a-half hours of cutscenes in your game (hello, Metal Gear Solid 4) your story sure as hell better trump most A-list Hollywood productions (MGS4 didn't). Actually, no game should have nine-and-a-half hours of cutscenes, period. Segregation of cutscenes and gameplay is the way of the past; cutscenes in this day and age should only be used as a last resort to communicate information that absolutely cannot be conveyed in-game, and if they are still going to take up such a massive bulk of the experience you're creating then you need to consider working in a different medium. Today we have games that tell surprisingly powerful stories with a bare minimum of actual narrative (c.f. Shadow of the Colossus, Portal) and games with veritable brick-tons of narrative and cinematic ambitions that still only manage the storytelling and directorial nuance of a student film project on a multimillion-dollar (MGS4, Heavy Rain). Game designers who overestimate their abilities as storytellers try to make movies. The best video game storytellers, on the other hand, recognize the universal truth of the medium, and the one that fundamentally separates it from film: the star of a video game is never, ever the supposed main character: it is ALWAYS, and by the very nature of the medium always will be, the player. The best storytellers in video games recognize the crucial importance of player experience, and use it to create narratives of power and personal involvement that could not be approximated in any other medium.
