The Power Of Emotional Storytelling

I will never ever forget going to see "ET" at the cinema many years ago. Even though I was still a teenager, when the end of the film arrived and Elliot said goodbye to ET, I was completely in tears. Using an 8 year old actor and a well-made piece of plastic, Stephen Spielberg had found a way deep inside of me : I started to think of a good friend I had lost the year before in a car accident, of my old school friends who were all heading off in different directions in life and who I would never see again. I just felt this overwhelming feeling of loss : a realisation that childhood was finally over , that real life was not so sweet and innocent after all, that dreams don't really come true and that we all get older. All because of a particular scene acted out on film.

Steven Spielberg may be a successful film director but, for me, he is essentially a storyteller, telling his story visually using his camera and actors. And this is exactly what game producers / directors also do too … they just use different tools and a different medium to do it in…

I hope its agreed that storytelling in the film medium is different from storytelling in games : GTA4 may have a great story but its also kind of hard to appreciate it to any degree as its so disconnected because of its sandbox genre and game length. In addition, just as everyone going to see Indiana Jones at the movies this month will expect a rollercoaster ride of adventure and excitement and nothing else, it would be also be wrong to expect an amazing story when we get to play Gears Of War 2 this November!

But where are those games that move us emotionally and make us cry? I have to think really hard to come up with great examples of game storytelling … Hideo Kojima seems to be the nearest equivalent to Spielberg in terms of storytelling but his stories are so interwoven with such complex plots twists that I just cant keep up : Bioshock was a great story but too far fetched for me personally : there was little I could relate to in its underwater world setting. Even the long running and popular Zelda series story failed to produce a single tear over its lifetime. There have ,of course, been special moments like Aeris dying in Final Fantasy 7, the clever and unexpected plot twist of Jade Empire, Tidus realising he is not “living” and therefore must say goodbye to his girlfriend in FFX etc but nothing on the same scale as "ET", "Saving Private Ryan", "Ghost" etc

So,despite enhanced graphic capabilities and bigger storage capacities, the story tellers of today, (Lost Oddysey, Blue Dragon, Mass Effect, Too Human, Fable and many others that spring to mind ), all seem to opt for the action and fictional kind of story… where "x" and "y" discover they have special powers etc etc and fight the evil boss who is destroying the universe and they finally kill him and the earth is ok again etc etc …let's try going straight for the tears by using more real human characters armed with nothing but their frailty. Let's affect the player emotionally more often : it won't suit all the games out there but for those that it does , you can rest assured that you'll never again need to worry about the cost next time you need to "phone home"...