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Khuutra said: ------ Tons of text ------- Do you see? Edit: This was not more brief at all
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True, it was not brief at all, but very interesting.
I do see. I also understand. I just do not share your values. I'm a story junkie. A good story draws me in completely and I cannot think about anything else even long after I finish it. Only once have I had that experience with a game, at least because of the story. Civilization, Torchlight, Mass Effect, Gran Turismo and other great games can produce the same high, but for different reasons. There, the gameplay is always the center of attention. Collection, progression, perfection, that's what gets to me when I play other games.
Never ever before had I played a game only because I want to know how it ends. And for me, how much I want to know what happens next/how it ends is the true measure of storytelling. It's a measure of how deeply immersed I am in the story, how much I care about what happens on the screen and about the characters, how deeply what happens moves me. Without that level of immersion I will always be detatched and cold to what happens to characters or worlds.
Unfortunately I have not played any of the games you mentioned to finish. I have never owned any of them, but played some with friends. I could never quite become immersed in the world of Shadow of the Colossus even though it's probably the most beautiful world gaming has ever seen. I have never really cared about any link, and Metal Gear Solid 2 left me completely bored and practically itching to get some control over what happened, only to be disappointed by the limitations of that control when I did. Super Metroid is probably the most atmospheric 2D game of all time, but the thing that kept me playing was collection and progression, not story.
I have never felt that a gaming world has been real enough for my actions to have any meaning whatsoever outside of that experience. When a character dies in a game I think mostly of lost equipment and skills, but when a character dies in a book I can feel incredibly bad about it. I once put down Jane Eyre in the middle because I knew that from that point on, things could only get worse. I didn't want to spoil their happiness (I later did finish the book).
When it comes to taking control of my mind and putting it singly on a story, there has been no game that has ever succeeded as well as Phoenix Wright. But I think I understand that you do not consider this to be the true measure of storytelling in games. I can agree with you that as far as gameplay goes Phoenix Wright is sorely lacking and that this is a direct result of the way story and gameplay is fused together. This is not the end all way of storytelling in games, it's even highly inappropriate for most games. But it is the first game that can rival the experience I get from non interactive mediums.
I have been trying to put my feelings into words here, and I'm not very good at that. If it sounds like I'm rambling, I probably am. I do apologize.
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