Deus Ex, and Why Game Narratives Fail

Taking a somewhat contrarian stance to the heaps of praise Deus Ex: Human Revolution’s story has garnered, IGN posted an editorial in which they argue that, while Deus Ex: Human Revolution certainly has a plot it lacks a proper story, even going so far as to liken it to the “plot-heavy, story-challenged franchise” that is, according to them, Halo. Here’s a sampling:

Despite the differences that divide us as individuals, all humans have one thing in common: we know a good story when we hear one. The craving for narrative is encoded in our DNA; stories are how we make sense of the universe, and as such, we have an innate sense of what makes a story truly click. When a child says “tell me a story,” he doesn’t mean “relate to me a sequence of events.” He wants something deeper than that not just to be drawn into a new world or to see exciting things happen (two things that games provide in spades), but to have a certain kind of narrative experience. Good stories give us characters who win our emotional investment, who develop over the course of the narrative, and who shed light on some aspect of ourselves. Good stories have a palpable dramatic arc that builds toward a climax. And by filling out these requirements, good stories also teach us something about the world.

The best storytelling games Portal, Uncharted 2, Red Dead Redemption, Enslaved, and Bioshock, to name a few fulfill these needs so slickly that they cast a spell over us, drawing us through the narrative with a tug far more powerful than the simple fun of their gameplay. The John Marston we see towards the end of Red Dead Redemption is a different man from the Marston we met at the beginning, and because of that development, we care deeply about his fate. The escalating tension we feel as we draw closer to the lair of GLaDOS (a fascinatingly evolving character in her own right) more or less provides a master class in dramatic arc, which is what made Portal so miraculously satisfying. Plenty of other games have Old West gun-play or spatial puzzles, but these titles are genre-transcending classics because they tell us engaging, fully-realized stories.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution does none of this. The game’s protagonist, a tech-augmented corporate security chief named Adam Jensen, not only remains personally unchanged through the course of the narrative; he even pronounces every one of his lines with the same breathy intensity, no matter if he’s speaking with a friend or confronting a super-villain. Leaving aside the stiltedness of Deus Ex’s sections of dialogue jam-packed as they are with bizarre emotional left turns, crazy gesticulating, and wooden voice acting the overcomplicated narrative line also lacks a sense of propulsion. Human Revolution’s “story” is, at heart, a linear and impersonal series of events that fails to build. In other words, it has plenty of plot, meaning that a lot of different things happen over the course of the game, but these assorted incidents just don’t add up to much of a story. If anything, Deus Ex’s overstuffed plot suffocates its story, smothering all character development and dramatic arc under the giant, overstuffed pillow of its conspiracy-laden narrative agenda.