I was up at Game Republic last night, sitting on a panel unusually rich in Edge DNA, which was a very pleasant way to spend an evening. In amongst arguing about how many popes died having sex (Google it at your peril), we also hit on the eternal ‘games need better stories to attract girls’ proposition. My problem with this line of reasoning isn’t just the fact that female gaming hours are mostly put into non-narrative games, but that it tends to trap the games industry into a bafflingly self-defeating series of assumptions, which go like this:

Games need to be more emotionally engaging.

The way to emotionally engage players is with better stories.

Stories are about plot and character.

Plot and character are best explored through dialogue.

Dialogue is best expressed via high-fidelity character models and voice actors.

Every single point along that road is wrong. And every single point along that road takes games somewhere expensive and difficult.

Emotionally complex games are great, but so are emotionally crude - or indeed emotionally barren - games. If only emotionally sophisticated games are great, I wouldn’t have spent two hours yesterday playing Verbosity.

Games are perfectly capable of emotionally engaging their players without story. I have an incredibly rich emotional connection with Guitar Hero because of the hours I spent being rubbish at the violin, because of the years when bad 80s rock was an essential escape from a dorky childhood, because of the memories I have of playing live on stage with the lovely (and sickeningly good) Jonathan Smith, because of the pride I have in my eventual mastery of Expert. These are all complex emotions. They have nothing to do with narrative. They have everything to do with why Guitar Hero is a brilliant game.

Stories don’t need to be about plot or characters. Even leaving aside the emergent stories that players create for themselves through their interactions (whether it’s getting stuck up a pillar for 3 hours in Warcraft or pulling off some amazing victory in PES), there are games that tell stories implicitly through their character design, their architecture, their music, their mechanics. Don’t believe me? Go play Gravitation.

And even if you have characters you want to explore and narrative threads you want to unspool, dialogue isn’t the only, nor necessarily the best way to do it. Shadow Of The Colossus has a story that’s told almost entirely without dialogue, despite it having a formal narrative and strong characterisation. It tells its story through the landscape, through animation, through subtleties of the control scheme. I get more sense of the hero’s character, and of the background narrative of the game, through they way that he’s slightly too small for his horse, shown by the idle animation that has him twist in the saddle to relieve the pressure on his hips - through the way the control scheme requires him to put his trust in a horse that has more experience of being ridden than he has of riding - than I would get from an hour of torpid dialogue.

But even if you’re certain you want plot, characters and dialogue, cinematic cut-scenes - even interactive cinematic cut-scenes - are the single most expensive and failure-fraught way games can try to deliver them. Emily Short does a great job in her Gamasutra column of demonstrating that ’simple’ games like the time-management classic Miss Management have enormous potential for sophisticated, character driven narrative, at a fraction of the cost and the risk.

So please, someone do me a T-shirt I can wear to my next panel, so I don’t have to foam and rant at another roomful of perfectly nice papal sexologists.

Emotion =/= Story =/= Plot =/= Dialogue =/= Cut scene.

Final, hate-mail anticipation disclaimer: I’m not saying that any of these things are bad in themselves. There should be games with cinematic cut-scenes, should be games with gallons of dialogue, should be games with intricate plots, should be games which engage their players through rich stories. All I’m saying is that this is only one strategy, out of hundreds that games can employ, and that it’s an expensive strategy that’s difficult to pull off. There is no one right answer.