Helios said:
Exactly. Another example of a solution can be found in Nintendo's Majora's Mask. Though the issue has not been mentioned in this thread, player death and continues are a large part of the problem in designing game narratives. Even Bioware's games suffer from this - the choices are great fun, but how does the emotional impact suffer when the player knows he can simply reload the game and correct his 'mistake'? Majora's Mask elegantly solves this issue by making failure - and the correction of that failure - part of the plot itself. The world is already doomed from the onset. Ad to that one of the most intricate and involving game worlds ever created, and a story that, though simple at first glance, is ripe with symbolism and surprising depth... Well, it's one of gaming's great, as far as I'm concerned. I can only hope that director Eiji Aonuma manages to strike gold again - Phantom Hourglass certainly gives me hope in that regard. At any rate, as a student of game design, I can certainly see this article's point. Games should take advantage of the unique possibilities of the medium - only in that way can a truly great video game narrative be forged. I do not agree with his examples however. It is not, in my opinion, wrong for a game to use the story to provide a context - some of the early Final Fantasies did this to great effect, for instance in FF VI's Opera Scene, where the player is involved in many different ways in this one plot-event. It is a great example of the merging of gameplay and narrative (note: Majora's Mask and it's transformation masks also did this to great effect – Twilight Princess and it’s wolf, not so much). The silent protagonist is not the only solution to the problem - in fact, this archetype (like any other) only works if the plot is structured in such a way that the player can relate to what is happening in the game. Nintendo games are particularly good at this, perhaps because their stories are often quite simple. Still, it can be done, and if it is, it is an effective way to tell a story. As an example of a game that failed at this, I can point to the (much acclaimed) Deus Ex. The game, in my opinion, was interesting and ambitious for its time, but crude and unfulfilling by today's standards. The plot itself is good, if nothing more, but the problem stems from the players dubious relation to the main character, JC Denton. JC is supposed to be "you" - you are given "choices" of what to do/say at certain points in the story, etc. The only problem is that these choices are nothing more than shallow smoke screens designed to fool the player into thinking he has some amount of control. In reality, there is only one path to take - you can't side with Page and Simmons no matter how much you want to. Another problem is that while JC remains loyal to UNATCO (spouting their propaganda left and right), the player knows from the beginning that he is working for the bad guys - and how’s that supposed to be immersive? And when the hero jumps ship to the resistance, he becomes equally ignorant of their schemes. JC simply does not come of as a blank slate for the player to fill in. Rather, he is that infuriatingly ignorant man that you're forced to play as - and that's exactly the kind of bad design that the author of the article objected to. But like others have said, I think there is room for different kinds of games in this industry. While the greats will always use some technique to merge story and gameplay into one, the way this is done is (at this point) up to the individual designer. |
MGS(especially 4) does that as well. Despite what that article says. The story actually compliments the gameplay in the series. The Colonal or Otacon repeatly tell Snake to be careful and not to get caught in the codec conversations and cutscenes. In the gameplay, you attempt to sneak pass the guards in order to avoid getting caught. Am I wrong, or did that author of the article not actually play MGS?
