Jaffe: ’storytelling not cracked properly yet’

[rocketpig]

Cryoakira said:

Reasonable said:
Sorry guys, but ME has good storytelling for a videogame but pretty weak storytelling in context to other mediums.

But why do you need to compare to other mediums ?

storytelling in games isen't anything like movies or books. In fact, I believe great movies stories will be very weak in games context, simply because many tools used by scenarist are lost in games. 

VG storytellers must answer to very different constraints. The player control the pace of the game, not only when he plays, but also when he stops (not like watching TV episodes). Building intensity, emotional rythm, climax and such, is WAY harder (if not impossible). Some games run for 50+ hours and you have to keep things both interesting and clear. Many games allow a freedom that requiere fragmented story parts that can be assembled by the player in a non linear way (even if the outcome of the plot is forced) and that's something that doesn't really exist in movies.

VG, while they can learn some storytelling tricks from movies and books, should not try to follow the same path at all.

And let's not forget, as it was said in the original video, that you have two very different kind of "story-games". One is about telling the story of a character (Kratos for instance) to the player, the other about letting the player make its own story through an avatar. Once again, the means and ends are very different. What Jaffe said is very interesting, but IMO, doesn't apply to the two.

At some point, you can already see the "natal's slap" approach in ME2, when you can interrupt a scene with an instant action, and it works pretty well.

 

Games deserve to be compared to other media because they've try to hard to BE those other media. Some games still do it through mindless gameplay interrupted by long narrative sequences to move the story forward. Virtually no story progression happens in an interactive environment. This disjointed form of gaming is HORRIBLE at telling a story because the player is constantly being jerked from one environment to another.

As I said earlier, I think less "storytelling" needs to happen in games and more "experience" needs to happen. Don't worry about the pre-determined story so much as how the player gets there and how he or she changes the game environment in the process. In itself, that will help the player make a "story" their own without hurdling the difficulties of forcibly inserting narrative to get things moving again.