An example of good narrative in a video game: Silent Hill 2.

I take another break from programming and my everyday activities to discuss a bit of narrative in video games. First of all, here we need a good definition to speak with clearity.

A good video game narrative would be that where the game mechanics are directly related to the story. It is illogical, for example, for the story to herald pacifism and the risks of amibition if game mechanics rewards killing enemies with great perks. It would be a contradiction, where, however, some reknown examples have fallen.

But it doesn't stop there: after all, what a game offers is a match whose ending can change. In literature, there are examples of non-linear reading that can contribute to every reader getting their own interpretation of the story. The video game has introduced various possibilities to offer non-linear stories, although limitations have been the norm:

-The different ending may depend on particular story events, leading to bifurcations. This is made to make data saving easy and to simplify the involved algorithms. Thus, this system makes people to save the game just before the bifurcation to obtain so the different endings from that point.

-In other occasions, those endings are activated by finding objects, so it rewards occasional curiosity reather than a constant tactic, for example not killing anyone.

-Regardless of the method of activation, this kind of divergent stories are usually rated as "good ending and bad ending", to say, some of them are considered better for whatever the reasons: because the damsel in distress isn't dead, because the true boss of the bad guys has been defeated or, less frequently, because the main character is considered to have commited a moral transgression during the adventure. The truth is that these kind of menas are seldom alone, being one the predominant. Anyway, the very ending hierarchy doesn't make the so called bad endings an attractive option, as the developers themselves call them, because they are failures.

One of the reasons this system came to be questioned was Silent Hill 2. Since it first appeared for PlayStation 2 in September 2001, it updated its predecessor in both mechanics and ending interpretation. For the first part, it made use of a system similar to that of certain RPG based on Dungeons & Dragons: saving various scores, according to how the player acts at numerous events, instead of saving the result of only one.

Now, Silent Hill 2 took a giant step forward, because these events were apparently random actions. As a general norm, RPG save scores according to thow the player acts at a mission. Here, however, the attention was in things such as spending a lot of time with a female character, observing a useless knife or even keeping the main character health in good or bad state. Here is the FULL LIST of these elements.

About the interpretation of these endings, it is interesting to say that it can't be said that the best ending is good (not related to the better is the enemy of the good), because it is fair to say it is pretty depressing (without spoiling the plot, it is). The ending that depends on finding hidden objects is very sinister, as it supposes a pact with Lovecraftian forces in the best scenario. The other endings are even sadder that the first, and that's saying a lot.

In the same webpage I have linked, you can read about other Silent Hill games that were pretty innovative, specially the third. Whaterver the case, Silent Hill 2 endings are one of the many reasons to propose the game as one of the best games ever (I had written the former sentencce in such a way it said the game "was" good, but I have corrected it).