Which tells the better story for a game?

[Killergran]

Torillian said:

I don't really get what he means about losing a fight not affecting the story in an FF game.  Whenever I've lost a battle that meant we all died, or I ran away.  Both of which seem to fit fine in the story because obviously if the main character died you couldn't continue the story and you'd have to restart, and you can't run away from battle that are part of the main story.  I haven't played an FF where I can lose a main story battle and continue on with the story as though nothing happenned, unless you were meant to lose that specirfic fight.

In Final Fantasy VII there is a scene where you get cornered by soldiers, and are forced to jump onto a train roof. The thing is, you get the option to fight the soldiers. Winning against two soldiers spawns two more soldiers, and your character retreats. You win one fight, but it doesn't help. You could be level 99 and able to beat the final boss, but you'd still retreat from two low-level soldiers.

In short, how the story progresses has nothing to do with how you act as a player. It can very often make for pretty horrifying results. Worse yet is when the motivations of you as your avatar collides with the motivations of the directors avatar. That often alienates you from the main characters in the story (this is shown with true brilliance in Bioshock - "A man chooses, a slave obeys").

Because developers are still finding new ways to tell a story in a video game.  Also, even it though it doesn't apply to every game, some games offer choices that affect how the story plays out.  Implementing something like this is far from easy.  I don't think the developers of Heavy Rain are having it so easy either.  There is definitely room for linear storytelling.  Heck, most video game stories are mostly if not totally linear.  I find that it's easier to accept that losing a fight in FF thing to me due to suspension of disbelief.  Either I am bad at knowing when my suspension of disbelief is broken or yours is a lot easier to break than mine.  Breaking mine would probably take some distracting elements such as laughable voice acting and have severe plot hole

Right. I'd say that you're not that good at knowing when your suspension of disbelief is broken, but that's only a guess on my part. It really depends on the answer to the following question; Does games grip you as tightly, move you as much, or creates the same types of bonds with the characters as regular storytelling medium does? If yes, then disregard just about everything I'm saying. The general answer to this question I imagine would be a resounding no, and it's been my quest to find out why that is so.

What you are talking about in games like Heavy Rain is (as far as I can tell) only a more ellaborate version of the "For option a, go to page x..." type of interactive novels. It's no different than what we're already doing, but although we face the same type of problems, the symptoms can be lessened this way. It just requires a lot of scripting.

What Valve is trying to do is go the direct opposite direction. Instead of controlling what we can do, they control what we want to do. It's much more subtle, and avoids a whole lot of the obstacles we face. The only problem is that it fails miserably if the subject playing isn't easilly controlled. It is an entirely new aproach to storytelling that only exists in the gaming medium.

They also have the AI director in Left 4 Dead, the first real attempt I know of to create a real, responsive and interactive storyteller that takes part in your game. This is more like the interactive oral storytelling tradition than anything else, with someone responding to how you react and what you do/say.