[lmkg]

What immediately comes to mind when I read this is the original Half-Life, and how it has a complete narrative, told mostly through the environment. There's no pre-mission briefing or cut-scenes, and very little dialogue. You simply experience the word, and that world makes sense. It barely even tells a story; it's more like you see the story that the world came from.

Portal, despite having more words and more dialogue, still comes from a very similar vein of narrative. The dialogue doesn't tell you the story, it gets you acquainted with the (complex) character of Glados. The story is still told by experiencing the environment, and realizing the world that environment is a part of. The bulk of the story is implied between the lines.

Yahtzee recently railed against the whole audio-log gimmick[1] you often see nowadays as ways of advancing the narrative. I think it overlaps a lot with this essay. I don't mind a story being told explicitly, but (some?) games don't need such explicit methods to tell their stories. As an aside, I feel that Bioshock, despite having audio logs, is a true successor to Half Life in using the environment to tell a story and set a scene, because its environment is so detailed and an integral part of the story its telling. 90% of the audio logs could be removed and the story would stand on its own. Nonetheless, the audio logs added to the game by providing characters that could not easily fit into the game environment during gameplay, and those characters helped characterize the world the game was set in.

I don't feel that words are inherently wrong in a video game. However, I do think that relying on overly verbose methods of storytelling isn't taking the fullest advantage of video games' unique qualities as a medium. It's like a design smell: it's not inherently wrong and there are good reasons for doing so on occassion, it just means you should step back and take a critical eye of whether you really need it or if you're better off not doing including that content, or doing it in another way.

[1] http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/columns/extra-...

[Groxx]

Half Life in particular strikes me as a surprising gap in the hall of fame list. And if you look carefully at what little is exposed, there's a lot of information that's implied, and a lot of mysteries that will (hopefully) be revealed in later games. You can practically play the game on instinct alone, and it's intriguing if you look at it carefully, it's brilliant. Heck, the whole series is like this, though HL2:E1 is a bit gimmicky gameplay-wise.

Portal oozes design-awesome, it probably belongs in the list too. The biggest detractors I can see is that the world is pretty small, and thus the story and characters are pretty narrow (though done very well), and the puzzles take away from that world somewhat (they're just sort of "there", they're only part of the story because you have to go through them).