The writing in video games leans towards the horrible. This is pretty much fact. While there are a few games that have passable plots and dialogue and even fewer with excellent stories, most are amateur garbage. We’re talking fan-fiction.net bad.

Yet this isn’t what I mean by a next-gen narrative. The games industry has been discussing good writing and story-telling at press conferences for years, and are on their way on improvement. However, they aren’t looking at it from the right perspective. Most of the games we look at today are either imitating the Hollywood style of story-telling, throwing in cut-scenes between levels, imitating the Half-Life model where you never leave the lead character’s body, or a combination of both. Even role-playing games are rather stale, following you from one set of events to the next with your actions having a limited effect on the world.

Some games get close to capturing just what games can do in story-telling. Mass Effect was the first title I played to introduce genuine morally ambiguous choices, where none of them could be called “good” or “bad”. The choices you had to make caused you to dig into yourself and find where your moral priorities truly lie. However, the end result of the game and its events aren’t much different from if you made separate choices. Replay the game making different choices, and you’ll still play the same maps and meet the same choices.

Interestingly enough, the kick to true next-gen story-telling began over a decade ago. Two games on the Super Nintendo impressed me greatly when I was younger, and ever since I had wanted to see a game that took it the next step.

Not many folks have heard of Inindo: Way of the Ninja, as it was long before Koei had become popular off of their Dynasty Warriors series. In fact, at the time they didn’t make many games aside from strategy titles, such as Nobunaga’s Ambition, Romance of the Three Kingdoms and P.T.O. However, Inindo was actually a pretty decent role-playing game with a lot of features still unique to it, including a method of finding and recruiting party members and fighting rivals.

What stuck with me was a very small detail from the start of the game. While few story elements were effected by the date and time, however long you took in the first dungeon had an effect on the cut-scene you witnessed leaving it. If you were in the dungeon for a short time, you saw Nobunaga and his troops marching to battle. However, if you took a long time you would witness him crawling out from a burning building, alive at the conclusion of the battle he would have been marching to earlier.

Fast forward a couple years to Chrono Trigger, a game many more are familiar with for its time travel and change of circumstances. There are various side quests and events where you can change the present and the future, and even choose to revive a very central character or get revenge on another instead of recruiting his assistance. However, while this game made a lot of headway in narrative for its time, the choices made were still very similar each time through, just as it has continued to be today.

It is ridiculous to expect too much from the narrative of every game. Most games are going to follow a simple formula, just as most films, novels and television shows do. However, it’s about time for a game that truly attempts to redefine what “next-gen” means in terms of a story.

The way I see it, take the elements of both Inindo and Chrono Trigger and combine them. Make time matter. If the player does not reach a certain location by a certain time, then events should change. Instead of being able to wander around leveling up for as long as they desire, if they take too long the evil Empire will have taken over half the continent. Now the heroes must infiltrate the occupied cities using stealth instead of coming with an army to reclaim it. Have each branch cause them to run into different characters, and in some branches they become villains that you will have to defeat.

It is not a simple task to create such a story, as several writers would have to work on the various branches. You would have to create a limit to how much one event will effect the others, but there should still be a ripple effect that will be visible. Perhaps make some key choices that seem small at first, but ultimately change the experience drastically. Maybe the very first choice in the game determines whether you will be fighting against the empire or for it, completely changing the entire game the second time you play it. Perhaps a choice halfway through the game will cause you to become a turncoat to the cause, or even reveal a completely different foe that wasn’t even there the first time you played the game.

When the Xbox 360, PS3 and Wii were all on the horizon, developers loved to use “next-gen” as a buzzword to describe “new experiences”. However, in the end it all ended up being technical. Graphics and physics were “next-gen”, or the large scale environments with large numbers of enemies on screen were “next-gen”. Or waggling a stick instead of mashing a button was, somehow, “next-gen”.

Yet one of the most important elements to any form of entertainment, the story, remains vastly unchanged. While the industry certainly needs to work on the writing, there needs to be even more. There needs to be real consequences that change the face of the game, truly making the experience different for each player. Not just a silly way to describe “well, you can either kiss babies or kick puppies. But we ensure that the experience will change the world and the experience!”

I’m looking at you, Fable. Peasants applauding from you is certainly different from them running away, but the experience is just the same: annoying.

Until a company has the nerves to try such an ambitious project, however, I’ll go back to choosing between selling candy to all the school children or giving them crack cocaine.

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