Nintendo's Doing Something Right (response to Hating on the casuals thread)

[Pristine20]

Desroko said:

DTG said:

Desroko said:
Again, you'd be a lot more persuasive if you were able to frame this argument without viewing videogames through the lens of another medium. There's no reason why they should be trying to be more like cinema, or literature. That's the opposite of the artistc integrity you claim to want.

Video games should develop their own strengths instead of trying to contort themselves into something they're not. They're interactive - when you lose the interactivity, you've lost what makes them unique, and you probably shouldn't have bothered with the form in the first place.

And I think you have a rather simplistic and rigid view of human emotional complexity. You cite works of art that inspire negative emotions in the viewer, but it's a mistake to think that you can't feel bad about something and enjoy it at the same time. Requiem for a Dream is one hell of a downer, but it's simultaneously very enjoyable, for me at least. Emotions can coexist. The idea that serious art can't also be enjoyable is pretty shallow criticism.

 

RFAD is a downer and while you may find it enjoyable it does the opposite of what video games are seen to exist for. It throws you into an even darker reality than you are already living in while games are seen as a medium to help you escape from reality. That is one major perpective flaw that the industry has set in stone to follow in game design as it simply avoids diving into the realities, shadows and complexities of our existence and instead does the best to make you forget about them. To make you complacent in a virtual world rather than using the tools of interactive media to inspire you think about the things you're trying to avoid.

Wanting a good story doesn't mean I want a movie or a book. A story can be told interactively using the strength of the medium yet not sacrificing  any of the dialogue or detail that gives movies or books meaning. That said, story and dialogue are not a necessity in visual interactive media. You can create art and give meaning visually,  through actions or game design. Game designers of today however are a generation that is only interested in creating "bigger, better and more badass" rather than anything perhaps not inherently visually satisfying but rather deeply relevant, symbolic or meaningful.

I'm not

 

Not only are story and dialogue not necessary, they're probably not advisable. Non-interactivity in interactive art not only weakens its strength, but could probably be done better elsewhere.

I mean this in the traditional sense of cut scenes and text boxes. If you want the former, make a movie. If you want the latter, write a book.  Flipping the user back and forth between interactive and passive segments is counter-productive. If there's great play (for lack of a better word), I'm supremely annoyed  by the constant story interruptions, which disrupt the flow and jerk me right out of whatever immersion I've managed to achieve. And it's a two-way street - if I'm hooked by someone's dialogue, prose or cinema, the last thing I want to do is stop reading or watching it. By forcing the two tgether, you detract from each. So if you're capable of producing good dialogue or cinema, why make a video game instead of writing or filming?

If a great story can be told seemlessly without sacrificing interactivity, a la Half-Life or Bioshock, I'm all for that. My two problems with those examples are

1. While the presentation is excellent, the stories themselves aren't very good. I agree with you that video game makers suck at story.

2. They're not truly seemless. The one example that sticks in my mind is when you arrive at Black Mesa East in Half-Life 2, and have to sit through what seems like a half-hour of conversations. You can move, technically but you're not truly free. It's a cut scene in all but the most technical definition.

Its not an argument on what medium is better at doing a certain thing. Its up to the user whatever medium he/she wants to use to enjoy certain things. I rarely ever watch movies because I can rarely stand them for over 30 minutes yet I watched every last one of mgs4's cutscenes and loved very minute of it.