1.
The Love Triangle is no Bermuda – Think if you will the greatest love stories
you’ve ever read, seen, or heard; now how many of them were love triangles?
Love triangles are the foundation of the old romance novels, the ‘bad boy’ and
the ‘good one’ fighting over the heart of the heroine. As romance novels
modernized the locales and stories might have changed but the Love Triangle
remains, Twilight anyone? It’s why Uncharted 2 touches upon it, by the device
of the ‘bad girl’ being the old girlfriend. If there’s one thing no story wants
to be, it is tired and cliché and quite frankly the love triangle does just that.
2.
Many characters make weak stories – If there is one thing you learn when you watch Gordon Ramsey’s Kitchen Nightmares, it’s that too many ingredients
muddy the taste of even the finest ingredients. It’s the same thing with
characters. When’s the last time you played a game with multiple heroes that
had a good storyline? If you answered Borderlands 2, let me remind you of
Borderlands 1. Great story begins with laying the foundation. It’s hard enough
to do when you only need to focus on a single character, but put three or four
in the mix and things get dicey. It’s not to say that it can’t be done, but the
challenge is an order or two of greater difficulty.
3.
Romance or Something A Lot Like Love – We sing about it, we read about it, we
talk about it; humans and love are inseparable. So too then are Story and Love.
A great story just isn’t the same without a great love. Chief and Cortana, Drake
and Elena, Shepherd and EDI, Joel and Ellie; love doesn’t have to be romantic
to boost the emotional level of the story. Kirk isn’t romantically involved
with Spock, Benson isn’t in love with Stabler, or Holmes with Watson; love in
any of its forms tends to transmute a story to be more than the sum of its
parts.
