Dialogue=/=Plot

One trend I've never been able to understand: treating the quantity of dialogue in a game as a major barometer for how much story a game is. A game with no dialogue will be referred to as having little or no story, while a game with dozens of hours of dialogue will be said to have a substantial story, regardless of whether the dialogue actually does anything to construct a story, and essentially ignoring non-verbal storytelling components.

This seems to be the default for people, and I just don't get it.

I've been bothered by this for years, but I was reminded of it in a particularly stark way by starting to watch a Let's Play of DOOM 2016, where the LPer explicitly stated early on that DOOM has less story than Doom 3, which was striking coming on the heels of DOOM's first sixty seconds having more and more interesting story than exists across the entirety of Doom 3. Doom 3 is not a game with a substantive or interesting story. It barely has more story than Classic Doom. It has more story devices than Classic Doom, such as having a specific villain to blame as the mastermind of events, but Betruger's presence in Doom 3 doesn't add story to the game, it just gives the game a way to Villainously Taunt the player. Doom 3 has some quite decent Villainous Taunting dialogue, make no mistake, but the actual narrative of Doom 3 still boils down to the classic Doom story, only made instantly less sensical through such bizarre choices as explicitly establishing that the player character is the newest soldier on the base and is a mere corporal, destroying any possibility of imagining that Doom3guy has some prior training or experience to justify him being able to cope with the invasion while so many other marines die unceremoniously.

Classic Doom's story goes pretty much like this:

1: Portal technology is experimented with on Mars.

2: It turns out the portal technology goes to/through Hell, and Hell invades through the portal technology.

3a: Doomguy survives the initial onslaught and goes on to kill a whole lot of demons, single-handedly stopping the invasion. Mostly because this is a video game, he's the protagonist, that's how these things work.

3b: Also the forces of Hell manage to get to Earth somewhere in here, but Doomguy follows them and kills them all so it's all good in the end.

Simple, right?

So let's look at Doom 3's totally more complicated and nuanced story:

1: Portal technology is experimented with on Mars.

2: It turns out the portal technology goes to/through Hell, Betruger is arbitrarily turned evil by passing through the first portal (But no one else who tested the portal is turned evil because Doom 3 doesn't actually care about having a coherent plot), and Hell invades after a while with a complete disregard for the portal technology. (But it's somehow a major plotpoint that Hell can't just do the same thing to reach Earth, and needs the incoming ship to get off of Mars, because seriously Doom 3 doesn't care about plot)

3a: Doom3guy survives the initial onslaught (For literally no reason, because people straight-up instantly die to arbitrary eldritch forces: Doomguy isn't really good at dodging or something, he just conveniently never has his head pop off on its own due to ambient Hellish energies or whatever is supposed to be going on there) and goes on to kill a whole lot of demons, pretty much single-handedly stopping the invasion. Mostly because this is a video game, he's the protagonist, that's how these things work.

3b: Somewhere in this mess Doom3guy is arbitrarily forced to get an ancient artifact which is even more arbitrarily the only way to hurt the game's final boss. That's... the only thing about this fantastical artifact from an ancient civilization that matters; its capacity as an arbitrary contrivance to take away an even more arbitrary contrivance's existence. That whole ancient Martian civilization that made it? Meh. Nobody cares.

You might notice this is Classic Doom's plot, but with snark about how the plot makes a lot less sense, and replacing 'Hell successfully invades Earth' with 'hot plot device on plot device action'. Betruger's existence doesn't really matter to the story: Doom 3 never suggests that Hell couldn't have invaded without his help, or that it wasn't inclined to do so before he came along and talked Hell into it, or anything else that would make him matter as a character. He's just a Villain doing Villainous Things like taunting the player, gloating, and just generally being a bit of a jerk. Cut him from the story, and you'd... slightly tweak the emotional impact of Resurrection of Evil? I guess?

Sergeant Kelly sort of looks like a new story beat if you squint, but his primary purpose is to feed the player their latest objective -where 'objective' doesn't really mean anything because you're just going to follow the linear corridors until the plot activates itself without your input anyway- and so when he gets turned into a demon to act as a boss fight, this doesn't really have any larger meaning. The story could have used the fact that he's head of the facility to signal when Doomguy is truly alone, no other human forces left to resist Hell on Mars, or something of the sort, but as-is it maybe has some mild emotional impact if you're a player who gets attached to characters on the basis of them telling you things you don't actually need to know and that don't really mean anything in practice anyway. More likely it's just another boss fight, whatever.

Councilor Swann and his bodyguard also look somewhat like a new story beat while not really being one, though I find this more forgivable or understandable than in Betruger or Kelly's cases. The game needs to get to the gameplay in a reasonable timeframe -in fact, it honestly takes too long to get to real gameplay as it is- and that gives it a very limited timeframe for Councilor Swann to do anything to the plot in the context of his actual job and all. Once the invasion starts, Swann is honestly less important and interesting than his bodyguard wielding a BFG, which is where a more significant misstep occurs: I honestly assumed, first time through, that the player would loot the BFG from the bodyguard, with the implication being that there was no other BFG on the planet to loot... and you do loot it from him (Well, from the boss who looted it from him), but this is only necessary because the first one you looted from an armory vanishes along with all your other stuff the first time you go into Hell. Which itself is this weird non-sequitur the plot doesn't do anything with and the gameplay doesn't do much with either.

Doom 3 has literally hours and hours of dialogue recorded, not to mention all the text to read, but the vast majority of this stuff is trying to build a creepy atmosphere, not lay out a storyline more complicated than Classic Doom's 'we played with portals and then Hell invaded and then Doomguy killed all the demons' story. I genuinely have no idea why anyone would suggest Doom 3 has more story than Classic Doom or DOOM 2016.

Yet this framework is typical. The game that has more dialogue gets labeled as having more story, regardless of how much actual content there is.

I wish I knew where this idea came from.