impertinence said:
Contest it all you want. It still remains a fact. 100% of the time people say that there are videogames with great stories they acts as if there are no objective standards for good story telling. When they say "This story is great" they mean: "I really enjoyed this story". In the real world however, there are standards both for story telling, and for game design. Furthemore, these standards are in direct conflict on many fronts. Most easily seen in the linear structure of stories vs the interactivity of a videogame. This chasm can not be crossed, and any attempt to do so will necessarily mean that one or the other has to compromise it's structure, or as is most often the case when people try to make a story driven videogame: they are both compromised. |
You lost the majority of your credibility when you equated story quality to an objective measurement. How good a story is is by and large subjective, an opinion. There is no definitive right and wrong where opinions are concerned.
There certainly are some ground rules for storytelling that are applicable to all stories, and many video games follow these rules. Many games have underlying themes, subtle commentaries, expertly developed characters, twists and turns in plots. Regardless, not every single one of these rules needs to be kept for a story to be good. For example, stories do not need to linear in order to succeed; a story does not have to progress single mindedly from point A to point B, with no room for deviations, in order to be quality. The Deus Ex series is a perfect example of that.
But regardless, this assumes that all stories must follow a checklist of items in order to qualify as "good." I will grant that there are some areas in which the design of video games makes it more difficult to tell a standard story (i.e, it's hard to switch back and forth between developing various characters is harder to do in a game than a novel or movie), but that merely restricts what video games can do; it does not prohibit them from telling good stories. The interactivity of video games also opens up a whole new realm of storytelling possibilities as well via interactiveness. I'll bring up Deus Ex again, a story that would have been nowhere near as good as it was were it not for the player's ability to make decisions and watch how the world around them changes. That is a type of excellent storytelling that is exclusive to interactive entertainment.
And before you bring up the "no, you just enjoy it because it's immersive" argument, let me keep within your shallow expectations of what a story is allowed to be by saying that the immersion is only one part of how good the story is. The character reactions are all expertly written, and the way events shift and play out in response are expertly crafted and told as well. If nothing else, it does an expert job of communicating how one single person can change events simply by speaking a few words differently here and there.
Or I could reference the Ace Attorney titles. I watched the first two games on Youtube before finally purchasing the third and getting into the series that way, and found myself incredibly engrossed in the story without even playing the game. I can also easily list reasons as to why I enjoyed the story as well besides "I enjoyed it." The narrative balances humor and seriousness very well, keeping tongue in cheek references going while continuously pushing forward a highly engrossing and captivating plot; the characters are all expertly developed, and the main characters in particular all have well fleshed out motivations that make it easy to care about them. The pacing is done incredibly well, the various twists and turns of the narrative are all expertly laid out, and the resolution of each case is incredibly satisfying. If that doesn't prove that a game can have a good story, when I can enjoy the story without even playing the game, I'm not sure what possibly could.
To summarize, traditional movie/novel methods of storytelling and video games don't perfectly go together, certainly. However, narratives do not have to abide by the "by the book" (pun intended) method of storytelling to be good. Saying that no video game can have a good story, when a good story is in and of itself nearly entirely subjective, is incredibly pretentious for one, and quite arguably ignorant for two. The interactive element of video games doesn't exclude them from telling a good story, it just means that they have to adjust their method of story telling, and rely on certain things less and other things more. In the same way that good stories cannot be told exactly the same way through a movie and a novel, so to do stories have to adjust their methods of communication when they move to an interactive medium.
