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dirtylemons said: All I'm refusing to acknowledge is that YOUR standard is THE standard we all must follow. Because you are talking about something that is totally subjective. Tell me exactly where 'Beyond: Two Souls' objectively fails. Now, I'm not about to say that it's perfect, and I enjoy lots of imperfect stories, but you're discarding an entire medium of storytelling. That is just ridiculous. I don't see as how you've made your case that interactivity and a story conflict with each other, you've merely stated that it is so. |
No, what you are refusing to acknowledge is that there is a standard for good story telling. It's not my standard, it is the universal standard. Of course, story telling is not mathematics and leaves room for a range of creative implementation, but that doesn't mean that there are not standards for what makes something a good story.
Again, that you enjoy the story in Beyond: Two Souls is great. I am happy for you. I am not discarding the format at all. As long as people still create games that I want to play I don't care if David Cage and 100 000 other developers make millions of interactive stories.
As for why interactivity is inherently in conflict with story telling it's pretty self evident. There are many conflicts, but let me just outline one:
A great story is coherent, meaning the different parts of the story fit together. One essential tool to do this is foreshadowing. That means that when the story is getting established, items, events, characters are already set up and pointing towards the conclussion of the story. That is why great stories are often written 'backwards' where the ending is clearly defined before the begining is crafted to fit it. When you introduce interactivity this link becomes very difficult to maintain. You could of course create two seperate endings and link those to a specific choice made in the initial setup of the story (i.e. did the character steal the bread or not? This should in a good story lead to two distinclty different yet coherent story arches. If the stealing of the bread is inconsequantial, in a good story it is not included). Of course, interactivity could be used to control a number of sub plots and how they play out, but again, a subplot needs to tie into the whole story arch for it to have much value. A story that springs of into a myriad of small side stories that don't really effect the overall story arch is not a good story.
So, the choice is to either build a myriad of tightly connected storylines that introduces true interactivity and still stays coherent (this would be awesome, but the complexity is too much for my mind to comprehend, it would be down right impossible the way I see it and it most certainly has never been done in any interactive story that's ever been created) or to craft a story where the interactive choices don't really change the course of the main story. Perhaps you end up with a different reward if you do this or that, but the main plot elements have to stay the same so you can arrive at the story conclussion somehow reasonably. This is the approach used by all interactive stories I've seen and it's a compromise that breaks down the quality of the story by introducing a bunch of fluff that should ideally either be cut or present a much more solid link to the story conclusion, and it also breaks the game aspect as the choices you make are basically immaterial.
