Game Motive vs. Story Motive

A bit of a followup to my last post, which was a little schizophrenic in hindsight but I think I got the point across in some way. The plot of Mario games are usually pretty simple, you want to go save someone from Bowser so you jump across a lot of things to do that. The thing is, I don’t really care about Mario’s problems because Mario is a fictional character who lives in a fantasy land filled with nonsensical bullshit. How exactly does a game reconcile the differences between what I care about and what Mario cares about?

I use Mario because the story there is easy to understand, but really you can apply this to just about any videogame protagonist ever. The thing you need to understand is that typically within any game that has a story there is always a mismatch between you and the protagonist in terms of motivation, even in cases where the protagonist is literally supposed to be an avatar of you. This is a big problem because you decide what the protagonist does and if you, the player, are not given motivation then there is no reason to continue playing the game.

This is the core reason why I stressed games were supposed to be fun in a prior post, because fun is a motivation for the player to play the game, and if the game is not fun or enjoyable then the player will not play. It’s as simple as. You can either reject the reality of this and try to huff your own farts around bad games that try to be ‘story first gameplay never’ or accept it and try and work the player’s enjoyment into your narrative.

Let’s start by explaining how I’m going to define these two terms: “game motive” is the motive I have as a player to continue playing the game. It’s the basic fun or enjoyment I’m looking for as a player, and even removed of whatever parts of the narrative are unnecessary I would still be enjoying this element. “Story motive” is the motive the protagonist has within the story, a person who isn’t necessarily enjoying whatever he has to go through and is going to have different thoughts about events and characters than I will.

Here’s a basic example, a cutscene happens with a character talking to the protagonist. The character and protagonist know a lot about eachother, so they’re very invested in the conversation, however I’m not. I know little about this character and frankly he’s done fuck all for me. I am just sitting there admiring two other people’s conversation, even if what they’re saying is interesting I am separate from it and not immersed in the world.

There’s a simple change you can make to make me care: give this character some sort of relevance to me, as the player. Perhaps at the tail end of this conversation he unlocks a new gameplay mechanic for us, or joins our party and adds to our strength, or opens up the way forward, or imparts wisdom that can be applied to the gameplay. With this, I’m given a reason to give a shit about the character beyond the fact that the protagonist gives a shit about the character. He’s relevant to me.

This may seem silly, but often its this gameplay relevance that’ll make characters stand out even if they have little relevance to the narrative itself. Difficulty spikes are a notable one, a boss or even regular enemy that turns up the difficulty can easily be burnt into people’s heads as a result of how intimidating their presence is.

Inversely building up a foe in the narrative only for them to job fairly easily to the player makes the foe very forgettable. If you’re making a scary threat narratively, you should also make that threat a real problem to me or else the idea is going to fall flat.

Even putting aside the idea of unique enemies and such, having gameplay relevance for narrative concepts solidifies those concepts as important to the player because you are now actively made part of what would otherwise have simply been an idea. For example, if a disease gets introduced and the protagonist catches it then it may be important to add mechanics relevant to that disease and have the player tackle with them…

Then again you could just ignore this if it doesn’t seem that fun or important. Resident Evil 4 sure didn’t when Leon got infected with whatever that one zombie parasite was called. On the other hand, Resident Evil 4 did have a lot of mechanics revolving around Leon’s objective, Ashley. Through many sections of the game you’re tasked with escorting her, and as a result Leon’s goal becomes much more relevant and important to the player where having her simply exist in cutscenes at best would’ve nullified people’s interest in her.

Ashley’s vulnerability is made obvious through how she acts within the game. You can kill her in a single shot anywhere on her body, she gets overpowered and kidnapped often if you lose track of her. If she dies, it’s the same as if you died. The player cares about Ashley because the player is given their very own motivation to do so, even if Leon would think the idea of getting a ‘game over’ from Ashley dying is a sick joke at best.

On top of that, we care about Leon’s mission for long enough to experience the Ashley segments because Leon’s mission is fun to experience for us. The tight mechanics from RE4 and the intuitively designed movement reduce the friction between the player and the game, and the basic shooter gameplay is tense and engaging. If it wasn’t for the large number of QTEs then RE4 would have been perfect in this aspect.

Gameplay inspires emotions greater than any written narrative hook ever could, simply because gameplay is something viscerally real if you let it be.

This is why I mock moviegames and fail to understand the so-called legendary storytelling behind TLoU 1 and 2. I know the answer is because games journalists got paid to call it a good game and it has high production values but bear with me.

In TLoU, story is considered cutscenes and walking segments. Story is areas where nothing else happens other than talking and getting the narrative moved along. Ellie is given all the motivation ever to do whatever childish shit she does, but because of this treatment of the gameplay, I as the player am never given a reason to care.

Many people mock the ending of the story where Ellie learns to regret seeking revenge, and the reason they do this is because the player never had a chance to pick a different option or take a different route. We didn’t even get to have a word in edge wise when Joel got beaten to death by Ms. Steroids.

Why the fuck should I care about Ellie’s story then? I am here for the interactivity, and to the extent that I am not interactively involved then I do not care. TLoU is not the Citizen Kane of games, unless Citizen Kane were a completely flat shot of some guy telling you fart jokes.

Citizen Kane was considered so great because its editing and use of special effects told a story and evolved a medium. TLoU is considered a Citizen Kane because games journalists are desperate to be taken seriously and regularly recieve paychecks from publishers. TLoU has done nothing to evolve the medium of gaming, in fact it has infantalized it harder than any other game has previously because it has done nothing other than tread the path already beaten for it. Even what little gameplay there is is ripped off from the most mediocre Metal Gear Solid games.

I digress. This is why I see it as so important for gameplay, not script, to drive a game’s narrative. Interactivity is shunned when it should be celebrated, simply because the post-modern artists of today who were given far too much leeway hate to be people pleasers, and creating a truly great interactive experience requires a fair level of people pleasing.

Great games don’t need to justify themselves with gratuitous amounts of narrative. A great game can simply be, and people will see how great it is upon engaging with it. Terrible games aren’t like this and need to carry everything else with dull forgettable narrative.