Who Says Linear Games are a Bad Thing?

[Garcian Smith]

shio said:

Entroper said:
I agree with the premise of the article, but he leaves out a big argument, which is that linear games actually have a pretty big advantage when it comes to storytelling and gameplay engineering.

Linearity does not equal better storytelling. There is still no jRPG that matches Planescape: Torment in story and writing. If anything, theroretically Linearity might break part of the Immersion due to not being able to make your own choices and truly Roleplay your character.

As for gameplay linear games are, by default, less complex, and therefore inferior gameplay.

Well, Planescape: Torment is an example of a game that uses non-linearity to a great effect. Every side-quest you do, you discover a little more about yourself, your nature, or the multiverse around you. But even then, the main story still represents a linear progression: you do one thing to get to the next plot point, then another to get to the next, and so on, even if the things you do may differ. (To get out of the undead city, for example, you can either earn the trust of the inhabitants, sneak out, find the Silent King and use that as blackmail, or simply kill everybody. But either way, you need to get out, and there's no option to avoid that part of the game if you want to advance the story.)

@ Munkeh111: Not necessarily. My favorite example is Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, the story of which can basically be summed up as, "some bad stuff happens, and now you need to get out of a pit- and peril-filled palace." The thing that kept me playing that game was figuring out the next puzzle, not the story.

@ Bodhesatva: I disagree. You confuse "the ability to make choices" as meaning the same thing as "interactivity." The main characteristic that differentiates games from other entertainment media is interactivity, of which the ability to make choices is only a constituent (and often entirely unnecessary) part. A linear adventure-puzzle game like Prince of Persia, to use the same example as above, couldn't be done as a movie, or a book, or a play. And yet, while there's very little choice-making in the game, there is a heck of a lot of interactivity. To say that the only thing that defines games as a media is the ability to make choices is a pretty narrow-minded viewpoint.