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There have been times during my career that I've found myself at a press event, listening to the creative director of a role-playing game, talking about their forthcoming release. Very, very often they will say something like, "there is such a rich story behind our game, there is a lot of lore for players to discover if they want to go deep". And, I have to admit, I inwardly groan. Partially this is because I'm a terrible person. But also it's because video game lore can be... well, just awful.
The problem is, video game creators are prone to making two erroneous assumptions about what constitutes a deep narrative. The first is that volume equals depth. In the classic tradition of epic science fiction and fantasy literature, studios will craft thousands of pages of backstory, often involving many hundreds of characters and vast intergalactic wars. Sometimes it seems as though, early in a narrative meeting, one writer will say to another, "okay, let's set this in the middle of a war that has been running for a 100 years"; then their colleague replies, "No wait, how about... a thousand years?" And then everyone agrees this is exponentially deeper. It isn't, it's just an extra nought on the end of a conflict that, without context, pathos or human tragedy, is ultimately meaningless.
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