I was originally going to title this column:‘To tell better stories,games need better characters.’It’s true,but it implies that games don’t tell compelling stories right now, and that’s unfair. There’s a wide array of games that have weaved wonderfully entertaining tales, from the BioShock and Portal games, to BioWare’s unique and brilliant Mass Effect trilogy.
More recently, Telltale’s adventure games have added to the pile of fantastic story-driven experiences, and there are innumerable indie titles, such as To the Moon and Kentucky Route Zero, which are majestically written and plotted. Even the story of this year’s Wolfenstein, a game about shooting Nazi robot dogs with laser guns, punched above its weight.
All these games share the same reason behind their storytelling success – characters, which are crucial to any story. Thankfully,…