impertinence said:
MTZehvor said:
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.
|
As I said before this long, long post: The people who think video games have great stories are the people who don't think there are objective standards that applies to storytelling. I know that you don't think these standards exsist, simply based on your attempts to nominate a slew of mediocre to poor stories as great story telling achievements.
In reality however, there are many well established rules for story telling. And yes, linearity is one of them. The Deux Ex series is not a perfect example of otherwise, and I suspect you mistake linearity here as chronology. To put it simply, a great story requires structure, a great game requires interactivity. These two elements are incompatible, to get them to work at all you have to compromise one or both and so compromise the end result. That's not to say that a great interactive story is inherently impossible, but the complexities of something like this are so mind bending that I don't think we will ever see it implemented.
Of course, if you don't know of or want to acknowledge that there are standards that can be applied to both video games and stories and want to live in a fantasy land where the quality of something is subjective then of course, you will forever claim that The Last Story is a great story based on your own arbitrary enjoyment of the game, and your opinion will carry as much weight as someone who claims 'Call me maybe' is a great work of music based on how much they like it.
|
And as I said before, there certainly are objective standards; it's just said objective standards do not apply to all types of storytelling. Not every great story needs to be structured. Not every great story needs to be linear. It's as simple as that.
Even if there were absolute standards that applied to all stories, regardless of style, your argument still wouldn't hold water, because it would be quite possibly for a video game to include some interactivity, and some linearity, and still have a great story and great gameplay. Take Bioshock Infinite, which tells a compelling story mostly through certain mostly non-interactive segments that break up rounds of interactive gameplay. Or, as I've already mentioned, the Ace Attorney games. Very linear, rigid story structure, and player interactivity cannot derail the story away from it, and yet it still remains engrossing to play. You could easily (and people have easily) tell a great story simply by breaking up the flow of gameplay. There's no need to "compromise" anything in this scenario, you simply contrast gameplay and storytelling, using one to pace the other. It's already worked quite effectively in titles such as Devil May Cry 3, for instance, despite that game's story in and of itself not being that great.
I've never claimed that there are no objective guidelines to anything, just that not every single one of those guidelines apply across all forms of media. For instance, good character development and interesting underlying themes are essentials to nearly every story. But some others, such as a deep commentary on some aspect of life, are not necessary to have a good story for all forms of entertainment. It would be quite silly to think that a deep social commentary on Capitalism would have benefitted Wall-E, for instance.
Regardless, you've been talking for quite some time about these supposed "objective standards to story greatness" for some time now, without actually listing any of them besides a rigid story structure. To that end, I'd like to hear: what exactly are these requirements that a story must meet in order to qualify as good? I'd be willing to bet the majority of the games I've listed so far will meet your standards.
