Christina and I have been spending a lot of time (now that we have free time) with Mass Effect for the Xbox 360. I bought it a while ago and never really got into it, but since the sequel came out I decided to give it another shot, and I’m really glad I did. Not only am I greatly enjoying the game, it’s also actually got me thinking a lot about how video games can function as a medium for storytelling.

BioWare is famous for their branching dialogue system they’ve used in their games, beginning with Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic on the original Xbox and PC. Your character never spoke, but there were pauses in conversations when you’d choose what your character would say next. Several complete sentences were presented, you’d choose one, and the conversation would continue based on how you responded. I loved KotOR, and while I didn’t realize it at the time, I was experiencing the first step towards defining video games as a unique method of telling a story.

Now, it’s important to note that a video game does not require a story. Just look at Tetris, the most successful (and famous) video game of all time. No story there, just you, some blocks, and Russian music. The Super Mario series has about as paper-thin a story as you can get, instead relying on gameplay to define the experiences they provide players. This is how video games will differ from books or movies; for the former, a story is completely optional, depending on what kind of experience the developers are trying to create. For the latter, they are defined as a storytelling medium. A book without a story isn’t much more than a dictionary. A movie without a story is Napoleon Dynamite.

Video games have been telling stories for over 20 years, so it’s not like this is a new development, not by any means. Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy, the grandfathers of the role-playing genre, set the standard for how Japanese RPGs structure their stories. They’re really “role-playing” in name only; the story is told to you, and your interactivity with the story boils down to few (if any) dialog options, and selecting which characters will accompany you into dungeons.

I’m not claiming that JRPGs are bad at storytelling, or somehow inferior to Western RPGs. I’m a huge fan of JRPGs, and the Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest franchises in particular, so I’m not saying one is better than the other. They just take a more traditional approach to telling a story, an approach similar to books and movies where the story is told to you. As far as books and movies go, this is due to the limitations of the medium; there is no interactivity. You have no way of influencing the dialogue in a book or movie, or making the main character’s decisions. And before you say anything, no, “Choose Your Own Adventure” books don’t count. For JRPGs, though, it’s just the way they’ve always been.

That’s why I’m enjoying Mass Effect so much. It’s a completely new way to experience a story. In KotOR, when you made a dialogue choice, your character didn’t speak the line through voice acting, but the other characters would react as if you did. In Mass Effect, you choose from several options that give you the gist of what your response would be, rather than a full sentence (it’s also structured in a way that once you know how you typically respond to things, that type of response is always in the same spot so you don’t need to keep looking at the options), and Commander Shepard will speak the line. It’s very cinematic, and much more immersive than KotOR. Rather than making your protagonist silent in an effort to try to make them more relatable, BioWare instead chose to make Shepard an active participant in the conversations based on what you choose to have him (or her) say, which in my opinion makes Shepard much more relatable, and the connection between player and avatar is much stronger.

Rather than a piece of fiction where you’re told “Here is the story I am trying to tell,” BioWare has placed you in the setting and said “There’s a story here. Tell it however you want.” You can make Commander Shepard a ruthless badass with no regard for anything but himself. You can make Shepard the nicest person in the galaxy, going out of his way to help anyone who asks. Shepard can be male or female, and even romance different members of the SSV Normandy’s crew. There are places you must go to advance the story, but you can approach them in any order you wish, and the game will change accordingly. There are key decisions to make, decisions that will affect the galaxy as a whole, and the consequences are reflected in Mass Effect 2, and will be further in Mass Effect 3.

When you think about it, it’s an incredible way to tell a story; provide the framework and let the player decide the details based on their preferences. When you think about all the choices you make in the first game, which will change what you see in the second, which will again change when you play the third, there’s a staggeringly vast amount of ways for the story to play out. Penny Arcade’s Gabe posted a vague reference to ME2’s ending on his Twitter, and after receiving some angry posts in return, he told everyone to relax, because of the sheer amount of influence the player has on the story, there was almost no way anyone else would have the same ending as he did.

I’ve been hearing the same thing about Heavy Rain for the PlayStation 3 as well. A commenter on Kotaku mentioned that he and his friends were discussing the game, and none of them had experienced the same thing during their playthroughs. From what I’ve read, if your main character dies, the story will just shift to a different character’s perspective and keep on going.

This is where I think video games stand above any other medium when it comes to storytelling. Interactive fiction – truly interactive fiction – establishes a standard of immersion and personalization that a movie or a book simply cannot match due to the limitations of a printed word or a prerecorded video. The fact that we can have games where tiny decisions can change what happens hours down the line, and even in later installments of the series, really shows how far video games have come as a form of media. There will always be a place for Tetris and Mario, so don’t fool yourself into thinking they’ll ever be put away on the shelf. However, games like Mass Effect and Heavy Rain are taking large strides towards establishing video games as a form of entertainment as important to storytelling as literature and cinema.