Welcome to the world of the politically correct, a world which incidently people like Yahtzee for all of their caustic venom helped to create with all of their ranting about the choices of video game villains being bigoted and such. Things get increasingly generic because of a concern that they are going to offend anyone, and that even aliens and zombies will be taken as some kind of politically offensive metaphor. Things increasingly need to be kept bland and uninspired and that means tacking on what little exposition there is and hoping it gets lost behind the flash. To avoid complaints increasing numbers of game designers want to gloss over why the characters are fighting, especially in the context of real world or near-future settings.... there are still exceptions, but the trend has become kind of obvious.
Let me put it to you this way, just today I was reading an article about how a certain Muslim leader from a nation with nuclear ambitions was getting in trouble for his people because he dared to hug a grieving widow at a funeral. This was at Victor Chavez's funeral incidently, who was himself a crazy despot who liked to rant about things like American earthquake machines and managed to get himself on our "people we'd really like to see die" list for decades. The whole thing being kind of like Ras Al Ghul comforting Mercy Graves at a funeral for Lex Luthor when you get down to it.
The point being that we in the first world tend not to look at how messed up the rest of the world is. South of the US Border is full of tyrants, despots, death cults, and battles between third world gueriellas and warlords. There are some nations doing okay, but even some of the big ones like Mexico are barely holding on. Africa is full of warlords, drug kinpins, human traffickers, and constant revolutions with maniacs attempting to overthrow other maniacs, when even the "heroes" of the region like Nelson Mandela get in trouble for running death squads (well allegedly he claims they belong to his wife if I remember). In The Middle East, we not only have hardcore bans against showing affection or comfort to half of the population (women, and guess how much of a psychological benefit that has) but women being killed for not marrying their rapists, factional religious and political warfare with Muslims doing things like attacking embassies and burning down areas of cities where non-Muslims live, racism against westerners and Jews, and oh yes... increasing nuclear ambitions. In the far east we have Korea periodically threatening to attack the US and it's neighbors, while also threatening to nuke everyone, and slowly building up the technology to do so, and don't even get me started on China which is pretty much the "Evil Empire" for the new generation.
In a world like this wouldn't it be nice if there was hope, a culture that at least held ideas of peace, democracy, and co-existance, criticized what was going on through it's media to spread ideas, and occasionally stepped in to at least try and do the right thing and curtail some of this? Maybe more than one would be ideal something like oh... the US and UK, wait they exist.
The problem here is that for all of this ranting, you start doing video games either based directly on what's going on, or using analogies to them, and people freak out. Yahtzee for example loves to crack jokes about how we have some straight laced American or European fighting a bunch of people who represent a minority prescence IN the US or Europe (which is ironic given that globally whites are perhaps the smallest minority there is). While Yahtzee doesn't go off about indirect analogies, a lot of people DO and it gets attention. There are only so many times someone can do a game based around misguided liberal hang wringing, and trying to be inwardly focused rather that criticizing the crap a lot of these cultures do that generated the anger that lead to things like "The War On Terror". I mean it's nice to be critical of "Dubbya" but at the same time it's hard to really be sympathetic of a culture that freaks out over a hug
at a funeral, or stones women to death for refusing to marry those that rape them.
Now, a lot of people are going to freak out about my political statements, but understand that really understanding the motives of people involved in an acrobatic sword fight to care involves in either constructing a very detailed unreality, like we've seen with say "Final Fantasy XIII" or using a certain degree of grounding based on reality, which of course means being judgemental of someone, and really, it's kind of hard to cheer for some guy whose central motivations are based on a culture that wants to punish people for drawing pictures of their central religius icon, or say not being properly worshipful of Kim Jong Un and accepting North Korea's rightful place as global leader. It doesn't matter if you really agree with my analysis of the globe in general, actually part of the point is that so many people are going to disagree with me that it generates a lot of attention and havoc to even bring these things up, and businesses just don't have the guts to go there anymore.
I'll also say that one of the problems with building unrealities is that the modern "FPS" reared gamer doesn't have the patience for it. The casual market just isn't able to handle very complicated buildings of alternate realities which is why they tend to fail when they occur. A lot of the biggest examples of world building for computer games happend for the "real" gamers who were around decades ago, the gradual definition of the world of "Planescape" in the video game (which was done successfully even for those that didn't play the PnP version), the depth (especially for the time) of Lord British's "Ultima" series which was build gradually through books and dialogue with scores of NPCs, as well as sitting down and translating runes in certain places, etc...
The problem is that people used to complain about the MTV generation, and it's "buzz clips" and "factoids", today the mainstream, which is what the gaming industry caters to far more than it used to with the so called "core", "real", or genuine "hardcore" gamer being a minority "side audience" that is gradually turning away from gaming due to neglect (even companies seem to be noticing the falloff of core gamers), comes accross as a group of comparitive ADHD cases with no patience to read anything, and frustration in many cases over things as simple as NPC dialogue or exposition through expensive multi-million dollar cinematics. This is also a problem with storytelling. To be honest Yahtzee has been very intolerant of exposition and world building unless it happens gradually enough as part of gameplay to barely be noticed (or so it seems), having hated on things like say "The Witcher" pretty hardcore, but to be honest I think part of the problem was that for the modern audience he's actually become kind of "deep" and characters like Alcatraz didn't seem to go over well with the new mainstream. "Crysis 3" and other games of their ilk, setting out to cater to the mainstream, and that means things like "spoiling" their own plot twist early, in order to have it covered multiple times, so your typical mainstream gamer is likely to get it, since a lot of these guys are liable to space out during the actual plot events, abort the cinematcs, etc... and they sort of still want these guys to know what they are doing. Especially seeing as these plots are partially what justies video game shooters and their ilk to media critics.... the gamer himself just wants to shoot stuff and watch pretty enviromental destruction.
Apologies for length, unknown if anyone will read or appreciate this, but these are my thoughts.
