Cliff Hicks is GameSpot's customer service liaison. He hasn't had to fight off a gang to save his brother from gambling debts...yet. Send tactical plans to [email protected].

　　One thing I know for sure is that games that find ways to reward you simply for playing and spending time with them are onto something important. While games should rightfully motivate you to master them and reach the finish line as effectively as possible, they should be providing you with a rewarding experience every step of the way, even if you lose. Don't take this to mean I think games should be dumbed down and should hold your hand all the way to the magical ending cutscene. On the contrary, playing Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance recently served as a great reminder that games that are punishing can be very rewarding in turn. But the point is, for me to want to feel compelled to belong as a unique individual in a persistent community of other game players, I need to really care about the games themselves first. It's a cart-before-the-horse thing.

　　Games aren't easy to care about these days. Sadly, most games are falling short in the storytelling aspect that's essential, and the new generation of gamers doesn't always seem aware of it. This makes me sound like an old man on his porch shaking his cane at youngsters, but I remember how games used to be. Yes, Timmy, back in the old days, before fire was invented.

　　This is Odysseus. He had a bad time getting home.

　　When graphics were a lot cruder, there was more of an emphasis on storytelling. Even your average side-scroller tried to steep itself in a story to pull you in. The characters had names, dialogue, and motivations. Granted, a lot of this came from players reading into the characters, but we had something to draw on. We had cutscenes with dialogue because they couldn't dazzle us with polygon counts. Minimalist storytelling relied on visual cues to inspire us. Take Samus from the Metroid series--we still know very little about the bounty hunter, but we read into her character, filling in the blanks where the story is vague. But with today's games, I've started to feel a bit like the Little Dutch Boy standing in front of the leaky dam...and I'm running out of fingers to plug the leaks.

　　Just look at lists of iconic video game characters and notice how many of them are new--it's pretty slim pickings. The real icons are relics of the older generation of games, and many of them are showing their age. How many times can they "reinvent" Lara Croft until she's fun again? Who's the Link of today? Do we even have one?

　　Blame part of this on Doom. Doom really caused the rift between gameplay and narrative to become wider. Part of the idea of Doom was that the first-person perspective would give players an immediacy they hadn't had before. You were right there! And because you were the character, all story-driven elements, such as character development and narrative, were cast aside. In later first-person shooters, this would make sense. Around the time that multiplayer and single-player started to diverge, the idea fit (even if we didn't want to admit it at the time). Really, when I'm shooting dozens of my friends, I don't care about my motivation. In fact, once you meet my friends, I'm sure you'll have all the motivation you need to shoot at them for hours; but that's beside the point. It's when we get to the single-player side of shooters that we as gamers are in trouble.

　　I haven't had a chance to play through F.E.A.R. yet, but most shooters have gotten extremely lackluster lately when it comes to single-player campaigns. In an effort to make your character...well, you, they've thrown out anything that might break that illusion. That means you have absolutely zero character. Look at the lifelessness of Doom III. I expect to see a plain white box in the near future with the word "SHOOTER" written on it in black letters on store shelves. Hero shoots aliens. Aliens send more aliens. Hero shoots them, too. Lather, wash, rinse, repeat.

　　Storytelling isn't impossible in gaming today; it just seems to be something most game studios don't want to do. Amid all of the "You're in the game! You are the game! The game is you!" propaganda, the way has been lost. It's good to be someone else. It's good to take on the role of a well-defined character with motivations. It's good to have a story of one character on a mission. Give us a story to get lost in.

　　That said, developers should kill some of their clichéd scenarios. They should just scratch them right out of their playbooks. No more princes pulling swords out of stones to save long-lost kingdoms in an epic battle to prevent the planet from erupting into utter chaos. Players' motivations don't always have to be epic. The motivations of most people are simple--survival, prosperity, comfort, happiness, love. Why give me a character fighting to save a planet when they could be fighting to save their family? Would it kill you to establish why this princess is so great that we're busting into endless castles to get her out? Can you give me five minutes of domestic bliss, just so I know the protagonists aren't wasting their time? I think Mario might thank you for it.

　　My hope is that the big-name movie directors who are starting to take an interest in video games as a medium will help even this out. Is it futile to hope, now that the likes of Steven Spielberg and John Woo are getting into games, that these acclaimed filmmakers will look at those cardboard-cutout characters and say, "Give these people some personality"? Heroes don't always have to be cut from the same cloth. Some of the most heroic actions in history and fiction have had interesting motivations, besides just saving the world.

　　You could make an entire game about a character's journey to try and get home. Or to hunt down an average guy who's destroying your life or your city. Or you could be breaking someone out of prison. A thief could find that a small job turns into big trouble. Your brother could be taken hostage because of a gambling debt, and it's your job to pull his butt out of the fire before it gets out that he's an undercover cop. Just from this handful of ideas, your mind is probably spinning with where these stories can go.

　　'Give me back my son!' Now that's motivation.

　　Some of the best concepts come from average people put into extraordinary situations. Who do you empathize with more, some insanely overpowered suit of armor, or a couple of average people in way over their heads? Maybe that's why the Silent Hill games resonate so well with me. I can (mostly) identify with how these people are acting. A lost daughter. A dead wife. I've never had either in my life, but I can imagine. I can understand that kind of loss, even without experiencing it. It's a little harder to imagine me taking on an entire invading alien army on my own than hunting down a handful of guys who beat up my little brother for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

　　Games are going to need more writers working on them going forward. I don't finish a lot of games these days because, sadly, I stop caring. I get part way in, and after a bit, The Adventures of Anonymous Andy just don't seem important anymore. Why am I going to get a fruit to give to a monkey who'll give me a key to open a door behind which is a book that I'll give to a wizard who'll give me a scroll that I take to the king who'll let me past another door? Is all this middling really necessary? A good writer would recognize a stall tactic in a heartbeat, and say, "Look, would you really do all this running around or would you lose your temper and try and find another solution? Let's work on something more realistic." Heroes are everyday people--they're just doing not-so-everyday things.

　　No matter how you spin it, the characters in games have to be at least recognizable as people. They should lose their tempers, they should cry, they should laugh, they should respond in the ways regular people do. When asked to do absurd things, they should act like it. Games can take on a smaller scale and still be just as effective. A little less "Well, time to save the world again," and a little more "You want me to do what?" please.

　　Next Up: Fan Friction by Brian Ekberg