People Who Don't Care About The Story

Videogames are still a young medium, we are yet to actually be able to decide on what's important to a game in order to judge it. Story for me is a very important element in how i view a game, no it's not as important as gameplay but if you have a shit story then it can really hold you back. But at the same time we have a generation of people who grew up on videogames that didn't care about story so they don't care about story, for them it's all about the gameplay, nothing else, if a game has a good story, that's just a bonus. This is simply an outdated point of view, story matters, themes matter, writing matters. I talked about this a while back where videogames have been accused of just stealing cinema techniques, but i argued that taking those techniques and adapting them to the medium of videogames can allow for a much better experience. Now this isn't something that applies to all videogames, i'm never going to critisize a Mario game for a simplistic story, i mean i would love it if they tried, but it's not a necessity. However, when you have something like The Last of Us or Bioshock or Mass Effect or Spec Ops: The Line or Shadow of the Colossus or Uncharted or any of the dozens and dozens of games that put effort into the story, just for players to completely ignore the story, character development and themes that people have put a lot of effort into, it's not right. Story is important, and if a videogame isn't going to try or is just going to half-arse it then i'm going to critisize it for it and so should you. Yes every story type is going to be different, you can't critisize something like GTA V for not being deep or complex, it's a satire, you can't critisize Mario for not having a thought provoking story, it's a kids game, and again, it's not even trying to have a story or characters. But fact is, when a videogame goes the extra mile, of if they could go the extra mile and they fail then they need to be called out for it, it's how they develop as a medium, by knowing they can do better and then strive to be like that, and if you're just going to shrug that off then you're holding back the evolution of what is in my opinion, the strongest medium there is, it just needs more products willing to take it to the next step.

-Danny