In one of my first computer games magazines I bought I found an article featuring different types of game deaths. The most interesting was that the writer had problems with finding an example of a beautiful death and managed only to mention about that he was really upset when he was playing Final Fantasy. Why is that? This is certainly not because games permanently try to accustom players with killing with cold blood or ignore death of others, there are people who would argue the point though. This phenomenon happens because of that the storylines of games very rarely are sophisticated enough for players to make them feel the bound with the characters, or even the playable avatar. The upper boundary of players’ feelings possibly is that they lost a useful tool or mere pity that an interesting character got killed. It almost never happens that players would mourn over characters death in the same way as for example reading a book, not mentioning real world.
"Aarseth describes this difference graphically in his account of playing Lara Croft: “When I play, I don’t even see her body, but see through it and past it” and adds, “the polygonal significance of Lara Croft’s physique goes beyond the gameplay. But that doesn’t mean it tells us much, if anything, about the gameplay, does it?” For game players, characters are vehicles onto which they project their own goals, skills, experiences and understanding of the game. Characters in games, one might say, are functional and not emotionally and psychologically characterized entities as their counterparts in narratives."
Markku Eskalinen on Gaming situation http://www.gamestudies.org/0101/eskelinen/
This is a good example showing how dramatic elements in games lack advancement and sophistication needed for the player to immerse not only within the game but also the storyline. Aarseth claims that this makes a difference between games and narratives, though in my opinion a it is possible to make a character that binds emotionally. In Baldurs Gate II it is quite often that players keep in the team certain characters only because they like them.
Aeris's death; one of the most upsetting moments of Final Fantasy VII. Also according to wikipedia had a huge emotional impact on the players.
One of the examples of a game with issue of disengaging storyline is the Borderlands. The game can be gone through without even a glimpse at storyline messages; the only thing that draws to the game is the challenge that characteristic to linear shooters in which player has very little possible space to manoeuvre and is dragged through another levels. The Borderlands is a game of immersion, specially balanced with thousands of guns, enemies to kill and a system of special challenges, which on its own almost excludes the storyline pushing it onto the further plan. However it is a good game on its own.
Another interesting think I found in the article I mentioned on the beginning was that the writer while listing games in which killing amuses players, such as Half Life or Sodier of Fortune 2. The author pointed out that players never think about characters they kill, and probably if they found, for example in a pocket of a dead guard, wallet with a photograph of visibly ill wife and a bunch of little children, and a mobile phone with a message “Dad, we miss You, come back soon.” In this case player would try to stun the guard, to pass them without killing. That would also be a good start to make storylines more complex. This also touches a significant point which is role of emotional attachment of player to games protagonist/s. This has been shown on example of chess. On their own the game is a simple simulation of a battle. Each side has a fair set of different pieces that have different abilities. The players command their pieces against each other until one of them loses the queen. Who would care about losing a pawn if on the board are still a few more? What would happen if all pieces had different names, own histories and personalities? Players would probably be more attached to some than to others. Now, why the just created characters fight? During the chess session the answer is easy to win, but what if they had a reason? What if they fought to defend their homeland or were just a mercenaries, all of these would change the situation on a real battlefield.
An example of a story almost completely rid of all of those elements is “gone with the blastwave” http://www.blastwave-comic.com/index.php?p=comic&nro=1
It is interesting because all the characters in this webcomic wear similar suits and differ only with colours that group them into three different teams, and it can be sensed that these soldiers as a reader are careless whether they die or not. Just like in strategy games like chess.
Concluding it is the back story or experiences of players avatars with npc’s that helps emotionally attach to them. Instead of using narrative and drama I used words back story and experiences not without a reason. Though games are considered to be sub-groups of the former, this still is being researched and the case probably will never be closed. On the other side I hesitate to use a word narrative while discussing some aspects of computer games.
“The problem is that this really is an a priori argument. Narratives may be fundamental to human thought, but this does not mean that everything should be described in narrative terms. And that something can be presented in narrative form does not mean that it is narrative.
(...)A more interesting argument centres on the fact that most games have a story written on the package, in the manual, or in intro-sequences, placing the player's playing in the context of a larger story (back-story), and/or creating an ideal story that the player has to realise:”
Jesper Juul “Games Telling Stories?”
In classic meaning of this word video games are not a narrative, but derive from games. According to Eskalinen, Narrative is
“the recounting…of one or more real or fictitious events communicated by one, two or several (more or less overt) narrators to one, two or several (more or less overt) narratees” (Prince, cited by Eskelinen, 2001).”
And widely games are being participant experience are being excluded from this group, because of the fact that player can put effort into changing the future events. This means that it is not recounting, in a way re-enacting of the events but creating them in the present time. Hence the Interaction is the main difference between games and any other narrative medium.
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