Jaffe: ’storytelling not cracked properly yet’

[richardhutnik]

I am worried that that an excess focus on trying to tell a story through a game, is going to end up causing the GAME side of things to get ignored. You know, the challenging and interactive part that motivates you to want to keep playing. I believe that a factor in game development costs shooting through the roof is an excessive focus to try to generate a movie-like experience and awesome storytelling. The moment the industry ends up, through an arms race mentality, to have to produce a game costing $300+ million (Avatar level) in order to be a monster hit, is the moment I believe we are heading for monster problems. Videogames do NOT have an outlike like movies to go to first. They no longer even have arcades to prove themselves in. The margins are way too tight here to have costs get that high. A game does NOT need to cost that much to develop.

If people want to go the game as story route, there are factors that end up needing to be kept in mind when trying to develop a story through a videogame:
* Making sure ALL actions of the player are accounted for, and get closure when players play through.
* Making sure the world's physics are credible, particularly when you want to go realism in your game for immersion.
* Ramp up the level of difficulty properly.
* Have captivating gameplay.
* Develop backstory for the lead character played by the player, and also the minor characters.
* Develop a backstory for the game world that is credible
* Hire quality voice acting
* Have a quality script with a good plot, pacing and solid narrative.
* Have quality direction.

Congrats! You have created a monster which no only has to have the costs of developing a fun game, it also has to factor in the costs of a small movie, without having a movie theater outlet to recover production costs. Well, I guess the videogame industry can lead itself to believe it can have a product that can compete with the likes of Avatar, with a production budget of a straight to DVD movie release.

Now excuse me as I go play some of my boardgames, or go see the latest release in the theater. The former costs more, but I get greater replayability out of it. The later costs me a lot less.