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Personal Tech

If you're going to use a story, exercise taste

By JOSH KORR
Published August 7, 2006

There's a discussion going on in the video game world these days about the importance of story. Should video games focus on interactivity, or should they focus on narrative? Can games compete with movies and books?

Prey offers one answer with its faux-soul-searching American Indian story line: It perfectly illustrates why narrative in video games is often superfluous or downright silly.

The game is a standard sci-fi first-person shooter. Aliens abduct a bunch of people and take them to a huge, half-alive ship. You blast your way through to find your girlfriend and destroy the place.

Some twists on the genre keep things interesting. At times you walk upside down or on walls as gravity shifts. This is cool but disorienting because the camera can go loopy trying to figure out which way is up. You can also turn into a spirit to help solve puzzles.

The spirit form is the most persistent example of the game's biggest, most ridiculous, genre twist: its Indian theme.

You play as Tommy, an Indian who wants to leave the reservation with his girlfriend. He feels stifled; his tribe and culture mean nothing to him. She wants him to stay - it's her home, she says - as does his sagely grandfather.

But reducing the problems of Indian life to a finding-oneself backstory is misguided and unnecessary.

Consider these facts about American Indians:

- From 1992 to 2001, the violent crime rate for Indians 101 violent crimes per 1,000 people was more than twice the country's rate (41 per 1,000), according to the Justice Department. 

- According to the federal Indian Health Service, American Indians and Alaska natives have the highest prevalence of type 2 diabetes in the world. 

- They have a life expectancy 2.4 years less than the U.S. population. 

- They die at higher rates than other Americans from tuberculosis (600 percent higher), alcoholism (510 percent), motor vehicle crashes (229 percent), diabetes (189 percent), unintentional injuries (152 percent), homicide (61 percent) and suicide (62 percent).

As a character, Tommy might not be able to recite these statistics any more than the average 20-something Indian can. A mindless shooting game has no obligation to be a public service announcement. But if the gamemakers are going to broach the subject, they shouldn't reduce it to cliches about having "dreams of bigger things."

Prey's ignorance of such complexities is the biggest example of how the game uses Indians as a mere device. The sole purpose of Tommy's spirit form is for solving puzzles: When a force field blocks the path, the spirit can walk through and flip a switch so Tommy can continue on. This is weak storytelling in the service of weaker game design. Toward the end of the game Tommy tells an enemy, "I am a warrior of the Cherokee nation." Apparently he has learned to embrace his heritage by ... blowing lots of stuff up.

I'm not suggesting Indians - or any group or idea - should be off-limits. But if games are going to aspire to greater stories, they need to do more than graft a new costume or theme onto 1980s-action-movie motivations.

Otherwise, just give me an anonymous guy, his anonymous girl and a War of the Worlds scenario - and let me go shoot some aliens.

Josh Korr can be reached at jkorr@sptimes.com Check out his video game blog at www.sptimes.com/blogs/videogames.

[Last modified August 7, 2006, 06:02:13]