There is a player here: Storytelling in video games

My father and I used to play "Wolfenstein 3D" on our old 486. For the occasional hour or two, as rain drummed upon the roof and my mother hovered nervously in the hallway, I was a 5-year-old version of B.J. Blazcowicz, captured by bad zombie nazis and forced to fight for my life.

This is perhaps my earliest memory of a story in a video game. Fifteen years later, games have paraded bigger and better zombies, treacherous corporate maniacs, 'roided-up space marines and ninja vampire assassin girls before my watchful eyes in ever-higher definition. And 15 years later, I still get more chills recalling "Wolfenstein's" fuzzy, brutish Sound Blaster effects - "Haark! Buoaargh!" - than I do playing "Resident Evil 5."

So why haven't the new stories gripped me the same way? Why can't I immerse myself in the nightmare future of "Fallout 3"? Why don't I wake up with cold sweats and visions of Majini gnawing my larynx? Why didn't I cry when Aeris died?

Video games have an important advantage over other art forms: the player does half the work. The developer sets up the world, and then the player rushes off to cavort and gambol. In other words, game storytelling is a two-way street. In some ways, the more the developer tries to tell a story, the clunkier it gets, and the harder it is for the gamer to feel involved.

Square Enix's "Final Fantasy" titles, for all their epic pretensions, suffer terribly from this problem: they've got a story, and it's huge, and you're going to sit there and listen, and nothing you can do will change that.

Some developers, though, seem to have struck this gold mine of storytelling: let the gamer tell the story.

Roger Travis, associate professor of classics in UConn's Modern and Classical Languages program, commented on the importance of the player - or the "receiver" - in game storytelling. Indeed, says Travis, this importance can take on classically "epic" proportions.

"Even in the deepest work of art, the person who created [the art] doesn't have control over the reception of their work," Travis said. "The person who is receiving the work is always going to create the meaning. Games have the ability to put this front and center in a way that I think no medium has had since the bard of Homeric epic."

What games manage to pull this off? Travis cites "The Path," a horror game by small developer Tale of Tales, as a sterling example of dynamic storytelling.

"At the beginning of the game, you're given two instructions - go to Grandma's house, and stay on the path," said Travis. "If you stay on the path to Grandma's house, you find out that you failed. And the point of the game is to actually go off the path. It's a combination of creating your own story and discovering fragments of [the characters'] stories."

More mainstream developers are doing this too, albeit in different ways. Massive multiplayer online games allow players to perform for each other in a decidedly bardic way, argues Travis. The game world becomes a stage where the natural human need for play can be satisfied.

"The actual experience of playing the game is an experience of recreating it for itself and for the people you're playing it with," Travis said. "When you're in a group or on a raid, you're very aware of the fact that you're performing your own version of the story for the other people in the group."

So here's the problem with "Resident Evil 5," then, and the majority of mainstream game titles: the story is prescribed by the developers, meted out piecewise in cut scenes and stilted dialogue. Even "expansive" games like "Fallout 3" suffer a larger version of the same fate - they can give players more material to study, more exposition to read through, but it's still a one-way lecture as opposed to a collaborative experience.

And "Wolfenstein 3D"? No, it wasn't revolutionary, at least in a storytelling sense. But at my age, when I watched the sprites buzzing back and forth onscreen, I didn't really understand what was going on - I saw the sounds and the lights, and I put something together, some internal story, some complete (and terrifying) world that I had to escape from.

That world still sticks with me today. If other games can give me that same freedom to tell my own story - and it's harder now because I'm older and not so easy to confuse - I'll welcome them.