I think this article is making mountains out of mole hills in that the answer is really quite simple: such social interaction based games are simply not palatable to Western audiences and Western publishers. And really, for good reason--all you have to do is look at Japanese dating sims to find a plethora (indeed, a whole genre) of such games. Heck, that's *all* you do in dating sims. (And yes, these *are* games, and yes, some of them are quite complex and well-developed)

Western gamers simply don't identify with mundane because it feels trite and artificial. Even the Sims is really about social climbing and wealth amassing, not simulating real life and all its daily chores. The daily chores in the Sims are simply ludic means towards an achievement end, the ludic challenges you need to meet to reach a goal (if you don't wash the dishes, your environment decays, causing your Sims to under-perform, making reaching that next Career tier or obtaining that new piece of furniture [which in the end itself is just to further the achievement goal] that much more difficult). In other words, working to become friends with that one girl purely for the sake of being friends with that one girl just isn't all that rewarding.

And this actually goes for dialogue in games as well; most dialogues in games aren't about the content of the dialogues so much as they are about obtaining ludic consequences. The very few examples in which the dialogue is there purely for the sake of its content (an easy example: certain joke dialogue options in Sam and Max) are used quite sparsely because their reward value is quickly exhausted and they don't serve a ludic purpose, which in the worst case can be confusing or even frustrating to players used to cause and effect. This is why the latest Sam and Max games only work episodically and why they don't have much replay value; you'll laugh the first few times you get Bosco to act stupidly by asking if he has a certain item for sale, but it loses its novelty rather fast.

So really, basically two things: not conducive to (at least Western) player identification, and not conducive to replay value (with extremely few exceptions like Façade, or Alter Ego even, which are not really practical for implementation on an 8 hour game scale). It's not about maturity of games; its about what works interactively, and interaction requires that the player is actually motivated and interested in interacting.

The narrative in video games is just laughable compared to all other mediums. Saying this on a gaming site might get me decaputated, but it's true.

In VGs, going from A to B killing everything in between is called "engaging story-line." In cinema that's called Rambo IV.

It has a very reasonable explanation though. Games can't be filled with 400 pages of letters like a book, because then it wouldn't be a game. In a game you are not an observer, you're an actor.

It's hopeless to even ask for story-telling games because they can only go as far as the actual playing allows. I for one can't forgive horrible gameplay over a good story. Shigeru Miyamoto has openly admitted that he cares little about story as long as the actual game is good. And he in considered the most influential game-maker ever by many.

Even if literal realism were technically and financial feasible, would it be really artistically desirable? If a game offered its player the level of freedom that should be allowed by a true real-world setting, it would become virtually impossible for the designer to control its pacing and balance. More to the point, such a game would be completely unable to explore its themes through allegorical 'unrealistic' gameplay mechanics, as titles such as Braid do.

The analogy to film or TV seems attractive, but the more I think about it, the less valid it seems, because in videogames authorial control is exerted so differently. It is very easy to film actors behaving in a highly directed manner in 'real' (read: highly safe and open) environments, but very difficult to enforce that behaviour on players. And even if this is achievable, and results in improved storytelling, it might be creatively counter-productive from a game design perspective.

Interesting article, though.

thnx http://www.sevdaruzgari.net

Acclaimed literature and movies are generally less about saving the world and more about the characters trying to save themselves. Any literature course worth its tuition fee will point that out.

Characters in games do not need to walk their dog to enter the social reality of the audience. They need to struggle with the same concepts and decisions as the audience. By doing that, series such as Galactica can have a deeper impact on the audience, while still blowing up spaceships in outer space.

But most games focus so much on how Cpt. Awesome saves the world that any meaningful identification with the hero gets buried under a debris field of BS heroism. VG writing is still too bad and far too obsessed with saving the world. A game of cheap moral high stakes so that the ends justify the means. The player is not contemplating anything, he is spoon-fed empty heroics. Games deviating from that, such as GTA, are generally in more trouble than game which don't; e.g. Halo. Sometimes, freak accidents happen, and games not about saving the world get made. A number of all time critically acclaimed classics follow that direction in writing. Leading them is Planescape Torment.

I think there are two separate issues still being slightly blurred: realistic social interaction, which could conceivably occur in any environment where the people and society feel real enough, and real-world social interaction which is based around themes and settings with which we are familiar.

As other comments have pointed out, gamers can easily become immersed in a well-crafted fantasy world provided it seems to operate upon coherent rules that do not break the suspension of disbelief. It has long been understood by game creators that real-world settings provide a much greater challenge in maintaining that suspension. Our own habits, routines and preferences mean that if we are familiar with the environment we expect to be able to interact with it in our usual way. For a traditional game setting that is easy for the developer anticipate because we effective have a shared past in earlier games. In the real world that is much more difficult.

The result is that walking down a street of shops in GTA feels unnatural because I can't enter the ones I would normally choose to. By contrast in a shooter, it rarely even crosses my mind that I would want to.

Don't get me wrong: I can't wait for games that deal with real-world human relationships, whether through a Fahrentheit-like approach or something even free-er. But there is a significant challenge beyond mere budget because of the freedom the audience will instinctively expect (not just in where they can go but also how they can interact). In the meantime I'll settle for realistic social interaction between my trainee psychonauts...

Once games are provided through streaming and the consoles aren't a development barrier, I think we'll start seeing a lot more variety in terms of narrative and adult storytelling. The audience is widening for these games but slowly, and they can't compete with market prices being 50-60$.

>>t’s common enough – game narratives are in their infancy

How are they in their infancy? I hear this often whenever somebody writes about game narrative, the future of gaming or the next generation of gaming experience. At what point did you start to think "hey, gaming's a baby! My industry's in diapers, It needs to be potty trained!" ?

>>a believable experience which they can identify with and relate to is a very core tenet of storytelling.

But games have been doing that for quite a while. We've been bopping turtles as plumbers in pipes for over two decades now. It is believable to the player in the mushroom kingdom that if this shell is red, when thrown it will move back and forth on a smooth surface. At no point did we slam the controller down, yell "this is absurd and unbelievable!" and then start watching the Real World MTV furiously.
Look at that blue hedgehog Sonic, he has some kind of messiac power to consume the lives of impressionable kids to teens. He relates to them, they identify with him. He's a blue hedgehog in red shoes.

I think it's entirely possible to relate to bionic assassins, telekinetic physicists, plumbers and hedgehogs in believable ways. Realistic not in 'Reality TV', but realistic as in engaging.

>>Ultimately, if identification with real scenarios is such an intrinsic element of so many essential narratives

What you're pursuing is interesting, but I don't think 'realism' is inherently superior to 'fantasy' which is the feeling I get from your article. If that wasn't your intention then I apologize. If it was, then I whole heartedly disagree with you.

How would Social Reality be the secret ingredient, when in your article say it's completely lacking? A secret ingredient that was never there in the first place, maybe it's just too high concept for me to get. Maybe the "Experimental untested ingredient" would be a better title, because isn't that what you're doing? Braving new frontiers, killin' savages to bring back cargo holds full of exotic spicy social realism to the bland old world of gaming narrative.

Fascinating article. I have often wondered myself how the virtually untapped mine of interactive possibilities that computers offer, can be used more effectively. I spend my 'screen time' flipping between xbox live, and Second Life. I can see each has strengths that the other lacks; Xbox Live has uniform standard graphics and fantastic worlds to explore, but is populated with such utter 2 dimensional morons as "Dom" I despair of wanting to keep them alive. Second Life has a person behind each avatar and the interactions and scope for soap opera are off the scale. How about a future where everyone in a game is a person, and if Dom decides to cap his wife for not talking to him in 20 seconds flat, we can role play the woman's father and go hunt him down..