Emotional Investment of the Virtual

Having just seen the new, 7 minute, Japanese trailer for Final Fantasy XIII (http://www.gametrailers.com/video/tgs-09-final-fantasy/56840) I find myself wondering how important a story is to a video game. In this trailer alone I find myself sucked in by the drama of the events, the way the characters speak and interact with each other with complex body language and facial expressions. Various emotions are carried in their voices and it is all very clear that the world in which this takes place is breathtaking and awe inspiring place to be. Most of the trailer seems geared towards pulling someone into the story rather than the game play, but how important is a story to a video game?
Over the years, the Final Fantasy series has been a treasure trove of imaginative story lines, sub plots, archetypes, and characters that captivate the imagination. I first fell in love with the series, with Final Fantasy VII, and to this day I consider it to be one of the best video games I have ever played, if not 'the' best in fact. I didn't play it when it first came out, in fact I already owned an N64 when I finally got my hands on a PSone and a copy of the game, a good 3 years after it was released, so standards of video games had gone up. The character models were blocky, the animations had a low frame rate, most of the game took place in 2D pre-rendered backgrounds, some of game mechanics were fiddly, there was no voice acting, and some of the menus were confusing... but none of that mattered, simply because the game oozed character, imagination and charisma. The story was one of the most fantastic epic tales of good and evil (and the shades of grey in between) that I consider to be more imaginative and awe inspiring than anything modern cinema has thrown at us. The characters within the story were all so well written that even by reading their dialogue on screen you could almost hear their individual voices and personalities in your head, and you quickly grew to love all of them in their own way, causing explosive excitement whenever a piece of back story for any of them was revealed. As the story progressed and the lines of friendship, love, and heroism became blurred, you become so involved in the story and the fate of the characters, that anyone who claims not to have shed a silent tear for the pure and innocent Aries (Arith to Americans) when she met her untimely end, half way through the game at the hands of the game's misguided and disillusioned antagonist, can be nothing short of liar.
Obviously all final Fantasy games are story centric, which is no surprise as series creator Hironobu Sakaguchi is famous for saying "I don't have what it takes to make an action game. I think I'm better at telling a story" at the time of the first Final Fantasy game in 1987, however none of the others that I have played have ever been as engrossing as FFVII, despite most of them being technically more proficient. after VII I played VIII, which, despite two separate attempts, I never finished. this had nothing to do with difficulty, I just didn't care enough about the plot or the characters, not totally surprising for a follow up game to one of the most successful RPGs of all time, although there is debate among fans as many believe it to be superior to VII. Personally, I consider VIII to be more generic, less mature, and akin to a Hollywood plot. A better game that I played following VIII was IV, and despite going back to the 16 bit graphics of the SNES, this for me was a very good game, as complex, if not more so than VII, and I did see it through to the end despite a crippling level of difficulty, but ultimately I didn't care as much about the story or characters, the whole thing just seemed a little fragmented. XI is a game I finished, but again, didn't find it as engrossing and it almost seemed sparse in places. X was very different take on things and heralded the evolution to the next gen of consoles for the series, and while the characters felt more real and caused the player to become more emotionally involved in them and their relationships, the main story arch wasn't as dramatic as the almost opera like VII.
If we were to take a look another long running story driven franchise, you don't have to look very far to find the Metal Gear series. The metal gear games have always been based on stealth action in a world the resembles our own much more closely than the worlds presented in Final Fantasy. I came into this series at Metal Gear Solid, which was the third installment in the story, but that didn't leave me at a loss. The 4 'Metal Gear Solid' games happily stand on their own as a story and fill int he blanks for anyone that missed the earlier 'Metal Gear' games. the Metal Gear Solid games play much like an interactive action movie, and draw many elements from Hollywood action films. I only actually played Metal Gear Solid and Metal Gear Solid 2, but the story line is so enthralling and exciting that I have watched the cut scenes of Metal Gear solid 3 and 4 without bothering to play the games! doing this was actually a pleasure, they are well constructed cinematic sequences and the voice acting is totally top notch. And while it is a shame that I missed some of the finer details that would have cropped up during actual play sequences, there was still enough rich story and action content in the cut scenes to keep me on the edge of my seat throughout... and that actually says a lot when you consider that there was over 5 hours of cut scenes in Metal Gear Solid 3, and 10 hours in Metal Gear Solid 4! (which to be honest is something I didn't know when I sat down to watch it one Sunday morning). for this series in particular, the story was actually more important to me than the game itself, but had it been presented in any format other than a game, I believe many elements would have been dropped to fit the medium, and as such it would have lost some of it's charm and suspense, and had these elements not have been dropped, the production costs would have been either too high or corners would have been cut, causing it lose it's edge.
It's fairly obvious from my review of the new Halo game that I am a fan of the series, and the story there of, but it isn't as necessary to the the game as Final Fantasy or Metal Gear, but it is a sci-fi epic in it's own right. What I find interesting about it is the different way in which the story is presented, in the Halo trilogy the player takes the role of the Master Chief from a first person view to run a bloody assault against an alien army (or two), and for the most part this is the perspective that you assimilate the story from as well. The Chief doesn't have a lot to say, so it is very easy for the player top layer the Chief with their own personality and play through your mission almost as yourself, or how you would be if you were an armoured and fearless cyborg tasked with saving humanity. where the emotion comes in is through the characters you meet and fight along side, how they all depend on you to save the world and the sacrifices they make in order to help you accomplish your mission. The other very clever element is the character of Cortana, a female computer AI who spends most of the series plugged into the chiefs computer components, meaning she almost lives inside you and talks directly into your head. But she is also written with a very human, caring personality, and while her main purpose is the survival of earth, you get the feeling that she actually cares about the various characters and their well being, including you, the Chief, which makes her presence sorely missed throughout most of Halo 3 while her whereabouts and and condition are unknown, a time during which the Chief displays his most determined and human side throughout the entire series. Without all of these components, Halo would really have been the stereotyped mindless and violent video game so many non-gamers seem unable to release their mental grasp on, albeit a very playable one.
Some games only really have a story out of necessity, or even in some cases, habit. the legend of Zelda series has been using almost the same formula for all of it's games, where by a Hero dressed in green (often called Link but this is left up to the player) has to set about saving the world of Hyrule (occasionally another place) by adventuring around the world and into various dungeons or temples to vanquish evil, find magical items and tools to help him proceed with his quest, and sometimes save a princess (almost always named Zelda). Most of the series seemingly is unconnected despite these similarities, and while the story has become more developed in later installments, it never really ventures too far from this formula. Because of a few small elements that do seem to connect the stories of the various games, there are a number of fan theories connecting them, which include ideas of alternate time lines, parallel universes, and reincarnation, which if nothing else goes to show how video games can actually encourage the imagination.
Similar to the Zelda series are the, one time rival, Mario series and the Sonic series. these were both simple platform games, but given basic story lines to give some small element of sense and purpose to the player, but over time with more installments and associated fiction, the story arches and lore evolved until both series' had their own rich worlds for players to become engrossed in, so much so that books, comics, and in Mario's case a poor Hollywood blockbuster, all spawned from them. Would either of these series's survived if the fantasy world in which these loveable little characters existed had not been solidified around them and left to be utterly unexplained?
Coming back to more modern times, one in-development game that has recently caught my attention is Heavy Rain, a game set in a real world setting with a gritty tale of murder and various other adult themes. From what I can tell, the story has been written for this game with the actual game play being more of an after thought, the catch is that depending on how the player influences events, the story will unfold very differently. the game appears to have many possible paths for the story to flow down, with each 'scene' having multiple ways of playing out, all of which will alter the events to follow.
what about games that do not have a story, well these days they usually only come in the form of sports simulations, even other types of simulators have a story that develops, but they just happen to be stories built by the player. The Sims series is a rather obvious example, where by the player is given a canvas world to fill with what they choose, then place in the characters of their choice, just to watch the story unfold in it's own way, which must be very much like the way soap opera writers imagine their worlds, and that comparison alone explains why so many girls enjoy the Sims series (risky comment!). going back to sports games, even these have an element of story in the modern world in the form of a career mode, where the player writes their own story from the stand point of an athlete, or even a team of athletes, and is a simple easy to identify with, story of challenge and glory.
Before I wrap up, I want to quickly suggest the notion that a bad story can ruin a game, the same way a bad story or poor acting can ruin a high budget Hollywood movie. If a game is perfect to play, in that it is utterly, sublimely enjoyable to perform what ever tasks or challenges have been set, but the story makes no sense, or the acting, certainly with today's increasing standards, was so bad that cerebrally I couldn't stand it, I would have no choice but to turn it off. The same however would also be true if the story was superb and well acted, but the game itself was diabolically crafted with bad controls, terrible visuals, and frustrating level design.
I believe that video games are like any work of fiction; books, films, cartoons, comics, etc, they are worlds and characters created in someone else's imagination and presented in a form that allows others to experience to a level that is not possible with other mediums. and this is why I love video games, because you actually get to enter and explore someone else's world, to live there for a short time, and the more fantastic the world and events, the more interesting and believable the characters that exist there, the richer the whole experience becomes.