If there is a lesson to be learned from Star Wars: The Old Republic, it’s that the addition of straightforward story to a game has benefits above and beyond the quality of the story itself. Others use the medium of video games to tell stories in a way that non-interactive media cannot – say, Bastion, and its attachment of changing narration to different player actions. (If you’ve come across a dragon fighting a giant without you in Skyrim, that’s an emergent narrative system). Many games try to use “emergent narrative” where the game system creates personal stories for each player. So, then, why do games continue to make that attempt? Tradition, of course, plays its role. On the flip side, the idea that a Mario game tries to tell any story about evil turtles, heroic plumbers, and magic mushrooms is about as ridiculous as it gets, so it’s fortunate that those games barely bother beyond a cursory attempt. And have you tried sitting down and describing the storyline of a Metal Gear Solid or Final Fantasy? It’s embarrassingly cliché or convoluted.
Dragon Age: Origins has a good story for a game, sure, but when compared to books that inspired it, like A Song Of Ice And Fire, it’s pretty mediocre. We may all have our favorites – I’m partial to Suikoden II and Deus Ex, myself – but even the very best can rarely hope to compete with a great novel or film. Yet in the vast majority of cases, by the standards of those other narrative forms, games do it poorly. Most games tell some kind of story, usually aping the forms of films, comics or novels. This is one of the most important questions in gaming. Star Wars: The Old Republic isn’t just an MMO.
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