"In the year 1997 a scientist by the name of Daniel Kruger developed what he thought was a cure for cancer and began testing it in secrecy. It didn't work. But it did do something, and he wouldn't live to see it, as he himself died of cancer. In 2017 it finally happened. It started with intense pain and weakness and pretty soon the children of those who had subjected themselves to the test so many years ago began to drop dead with sudden cancer throughout their bodies. But that wasn't the worst part. They also were spreading cancer--through the air! All options were being exhausted by the US Government and with the new "disease" starting to hit the rest of America seemingly overnight and posing a huge threat to Europe, the government decided on an audacious plan: to change the past, to stop this "cure" from ever being made. They selected you, Kyle Ward, CIA agent, to execute this mission alone. You thought it was would be easy. You thought you could just walk back through time, try to stop this from happening, and if necessary, kill Dr. Kruger. But your talk with him didn't end well, and convinced that he was on the verge of a cure, Dr. Kruger told people about his work. Word got out, he was idolized, and you couldn't just kill him anymore. Worse yet, in all your efforts to convince people otherwise, you have landed yourself in a 1997 funny farm. The world is about to kill itself outside your walls . . . unless you stop it first."
Now that is just the game story that sickens me! Larger-than-life characters, extremely extraordinary events, and extremely extraordinary actions seem to be the essentials upon which so many games are built. I can't imagine how many times people have saved the world in front on their Xboxes.
I understand the counter-argument, I understand that the shorter word for "ordinary" is "life" and we all know how boring that is. I understand that we play games to do things we'll never do in real-life, I understand that we want to escape the ordinary and retreat to a world of fantasy, but seriously, saving the world isn't the only exciting thing out there! I find it discouraging when I walk into a game store and most of the games I see feature dudes on steroids, wearing giant suites of armor, and toting huge guns. This is all great and fun (and I love Gears of War just as much as anyone else), but it's really not cool to see every other new game using this same formula. One thing the movie industry has taught is that most anything can be dramatized, and you don't have to save the world to make a great film . . . so you shouldn't have to do it to make a great game either.
Let's get real people. And remember, the games must be fun!
