| danasider said: @Mnementh I totally agree with you. I notice that when story debates occur within video game forums, people get defensive for our favorite pastime and don't want to admit that games are currently inferior to movies and books in that one aspect. Like you, I am not saying that video games as a whole are inferior. I actually enjoy them more than movies and books, myself. But one cannot simply reference the state of emotions that arise from the immersive factor inherent in video games as a means of arguing its storytelling prowess. Story is a narrative, an account of a sequence of events. I don't disagree with the argument that immersion makes the story better (I wholeheartedly agree, actually). But immersion isn't the story. To argue so would be like saying, Gran Turismo has a great story because you felt like a racecar driver who was about to get a heart attack while taking sharp turns and winning a race the very last second of the final lap, or NBA 2k13 has a great story because of the excitement it stirred in you when you got that winning three-point land buzzer beater in the Championship game. Just because video games have an ability to stir emotion and make the player that much more invested in it than in movies or books, does not mean that those events shape a superior story. Immerision is a tool used to make the player more engrossed in the story, but if you took a lot of game stories at face value (stripped of the nostalgia from IMMERSION), my opinion is that many would actually be cliche at best and laughable at worst. |
I present to you an example: Dark Souls. Now, the story of Dark Souls, the actual sequence of events is that you're an undead that goes against your fate of being locked up in an Asylum, you start murdering every unnatural beast in your path as you climb over obstacles and are repeatedly slapped down, only to rise again until you reach the last of the Lords and, in destroying him, you either become him or free the world of the oppresion of the light. There's a good book in that one if you think about.
Now, in assuming you've played the game, think about how it would have be if you turned that into literary form. And I don't mean just the sequence of events, I mean the visual part. The overgrown gardens which no keeper had touched in years, the black knights as they forever guard pathways, the frozen world as it sits trapped in a painting and so on. Grab the subtle details of the environment and craft the story with ALL of them in mind, with the people that tell you stories by the camp fire, with the desolation and the loneliness of the main character, with the subtle questions of what is actually right in what you're doing. A good author would probably be able to pull off a Hugo winer with this material.
You hang on to the concept that a story is just a sequence of events and a mash up of memorable characters. A good story needs to have impact, to have immersion, to stir the person that experiences it, it is not reduced to how many twists and how much action you can have in it. Games are unfairly judged by some absurd standards that aren't theirs.And that is why I said that a lot of people will be told a great story but they will never know it because the audience in general is not yet equiped to distinguish facets of a story that go beyond the clear and simple.
You said people get defensive about our favorite pastime. Well my favorite pastime is actually reading, not gaming. I read and buy books a lot more than I play or buy games. By your logic, I should be on the opposite side, but I believe that gaming is different than books and films and it should be treated as such, judged on its own merits and on its own terms. Story telling can indeed improve in games, but it shouldn't be improved towards books or films, to which the comparisons go, it should be grafted tightly to the interactivity of the medium.Characters in games need to be better rounded, to make sense and be believable, to interact with others in a human fashion rather than a plot device, which is where this discussion has started.
