The Top 10 Greatest Video Game Stories (Ever)

01. The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

My gut response to the first two hours of game play in Skyrim was Wow. And no, I was not thinking that it was like World of Warcraft, I mean the other Wow. As in Wow!

The underlying theme and story in Skyrim is not one of those game play and entertainment experiences in which you have to make an effort to invest yourself into it. Immersion just happens, and ultimately will happen, even if the game has to take you by the throat and drag you into it, kicking and screaming the whole way!

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As the story begins, most gamers cannot help but find a personal attachment to the protagonist largely due to the manner in which the protagonist ends up being created. As is often the case with the really good game stories, there is a process by which the player is slowly immersed into their role, one that starts with a paucity of resources and sees the player obtaining small victories as they work their way into the story.

This is actually a well-established theme for the Elder Scrolls series -- it is not like they invented it for Skyrim or anything. But it works, and it works well, and while you are still eventually going to find yourself in a sewer killing rats (that is an Elder Scrolls inside joke) you also eventually find yourself taking on the most dangerous beasty in the world: Dragons.

Now only that, but those Dragons are part-and-parcel a significant element of the story and one of the mysteries you are going to solve. And there are plenty of the latter in the former, believe me.

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Skyrim easily secured the Number One Slot. It did it by being deep, by having an expressive and very immersive but also truly great story, and it did it by avoiding pandering to our baser interests -- seriously, they managed to deliver one of the greatest stories ever, and they did it without nudity, drugs, or machine guns. How about that?

Conclusions

When you get a group of old school gamers together the talk often turns to the way that gaming has changed over the past 40 years. When you get a group of old school gamers who also happen to be actively a part of the games journo beat together, that happens in far more detail and depth than you are probably interested in reading about.

Still, it is a fitting focus for the conclusions here -- and specifically the telling of a conversation that took place in the media lounge at E3 2012 when a bunch of older games journos sort of gathered in a corner (probably out of self-defense since none of them know who Lady Gaga is or why she should be a subject of polite conversation or an ice breaker).

When the subject naturally turned to the games on display at that E3 an interesting thing happened: the conversation turned to feelings about games and gaming.

The underlying theme worked itself out like this: while we remember some of the core games of the past 30 or 40 years quite well and with great affection, all of us agreed that the world of the video game had now matured to a level that has surpassed TV and cinema.

The games we are seeing made today are genuine entertainment products -- and that deserves some explaining since clearly the games of the past were supposed to be that as well.

This new generation of games is very different than what came before. In simple terms, the old school games were entertaining, but were meant to be that in bite-sized chunks with very little depth and no lasting impression to be found other than, my that was fun!

The new generation of games has turned that coin on its side and packed in layers of entertainment all the way around. These games are meant to entertain over very long periods of time -- the typical game today has a minimal attachment expectation of something like 60 hours of game play! In the past -- if you were lucky -- you might have received 10 hours of entertainment from a typical game.

Now it has been pointed out that the advancements in technology -- specifically the size of data that can be included in the typical DVD or BluRay disc, had something to do with that. True that, but then a skilled carpenter with the right tools can make a simple bench or an ornate table -- which depends a lot on their imagination and desires.

Clearly the modern video game industry desires to be taken seriously and has attained a secure position as a major player in the entertainment industry.

Well done. Now keep those great stories coming.

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