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Forums - Gaming - Anyone stop to think of the level of dysfunction their interest in videogames enables?

richardhutnik on 20 February 2013
SvennoJ said:
Soleron said:
richardhutnik said:
Turkish said:
"* People are paying for inferior storytelling by wannabe filmmakers who weren't able to break into the movie business."

Lmao. Why do these people think videogame storytelling is inferior to the movies? And stop acting like a white knight, the industry has always worked like this. Did you just start this hobby? 20 years ago we had the same fanboys, the same journalists, the same arguments, the same shitty games that would be remembered forever.

There is one aspect to videogames, that like the Star Trek Next Generation Holodeck, where people see a game not as a gaame, but as a device to escape reality and go on an adventure.  There ARE game games, but that is it.  Because of this, you then see people seeing them as stories and the entire videogame industry has built itself around looking like movie studios, and you have people working in the industry now who are wannabee storytellers, who see videohgames as their mediums as scripts  It wouldbe better to ask: Why would anyone thing videogame storytelling is as good as movies?

Now, they just got much larger budgets, so they are going the "Let's make a blockbuster" route.

Playing through a videogame and telling your own story through doing so can be more powerful and meaningful than a movie story because it's yours and because it's more immersive. The story of dying to the first Goomba. Or when you almost had that headshot lined up. Or your Minecraft castle.

I agree with you that all stories written by a developer to be displayed through dialogue and cutscene are inferior to movies (which have tighter control of the delivery of those elements), but videogame storytelling is not that. Developers who tell a fixed and linear story are just doing it wrong.

Not necessarily. There are plenty of lineair video game stories that beat your average hollywood movie plot any day.
From indie To the moon, to The walking dead, to blockbusters like Heavy rain. It is no where near award winning story writing but I sure was a lot more invested in the characters and story in Heavy rain then in Transformers.

Maybe it's not as good as it used to be with Planescape torment, Grim Fandango, Silent Hill 2, Gabriel Knight, MGS etc. But fixed and lineair stories can still work in video games.

I don't believe that the appropriate way to do the comparisons is to compare the best of videogames to average stuff in the theaters.  The movie industry is getting to be more and more abysmal actually.  How about comparing the best of the best of both, or the average vs the average?  In both cases, videogames are going to pale in comparison.  That doesn't mean that one can't have a more engrossing experience with an average videogame than they do with an average movie, because they do involve interaction.



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richardhutnik on 20 February 2013
Gamerace said:
The industry is still young and indeed in many ways flawed - like many other industries were before it.

One could make similar rants about the comic industry or music industry or movie industry or book publishing (which is in shambles in Canada because all the bookstores are now owned by one person (or Wal-f---ing-mart) and there is no profit margin and hence as a writer - you better market your own dang book (unless it's a sure seller). Porn industry. In the end it's all about the almighty buck. And I haven't seen journalistic integraty in a long time. CNN sucks up the the government so hard it's practically government propaganda (or was haven't watched in ages). And Fox... please. All news outlets of all forms prostitute themselves for ratings - or die.

But for the games industry it's undergoing a huge transformation, new giants are forming, old ones are dying and must certainly old business models are being shook to their foundations. The next five years will be interesting.

I think a point of concern is that the videogame industry is skating on really thin profit margins.  While it isn't as doomish as what you had with the fallout in the early 1980s (videogames just dropped off the shelves completely), and you are likely do have videogames established as part of the cultural landscape, being young, it can get very adversely affected by another crash.  You may end up being down to, AT MOST, one home console maker, and the net sum of videogames being 99 cent apps you download.  This ends up marginalizing videogames even more3 than they are now.  

I would say that it might be appropriate to not say that my concerns about the videogame industry (minus specific quirks to it) is valid to all forms of entertainment we can distribute today, where you have to make it big, or you fall out.  It could be that the videogame industry, without the established mainstream outlets, shows greater dysfunction than the other forms of entertainment and media.

I have also had visions of creator Hell, around the Internet, where it is like Second Life in that, you have to work decades on things in a media, UNPAID, in order to eventually get a break you did.  There is so much content that you end up not being able to charge for it.  But you can't drop out either.  What happens if this becomes the norm across across large numbers of industry?  Not a lot of money means no trusted gatekeepers.  No trusted gatekeepers means pot lota and devaluation of properties.  This devaluation ends up leading to a hell of no income.



hunter_alien on 20 February 2013

Yeah, have you seen the snake den Hollywood is? Or do you want us to go out an d switch hobbies, to lets say hunting? What do you want us to do? Go and join a sect and become religious, overpacifist zealots?

The industry is far from being a new born sheep, but lets be honest nothing is a new born sheep these days.



Vote the Mayor for Mayor!

SvennoJ on 20 February 2013
richardhutnik said:
SvennoJ said:

Not necessarily. There are plenty of lineair video game stories that beat your average hollywood movie plot any day.
From indie To the moon, to The walking dead, to blockbusters like Heavy rain. It is no where near award winning story writing but I sure was a lot more invested in the characters and story in Heavy rain then in Transformers.

Maybe it's not as good as it used to be with Planescape torment, Grim Fandango, Silent Hill 2, Gabriel Knight, MGS etc. But fixed and lineair stories can still work in video games.

I don't believe that the appropriate way to do the comparisons is to compare the best of videogames to average stuff in the theaters.  The movie industry is getting to be more and more abysmal actually.  How about comparing the best of the best of both, or the average vs the average?  In both cases, videogames are going to pale in comparison.  That doesn't mean that one can't have a more engrossing experience with an average videogame than they do with an average movie, because they do involve interaction.

The movie industry has had since 1878 to produce the best of the best (plus thousands of years of experience in plays) So comparing the best of that against the best of 30 years of video games isn't that appropriate either.
Sure as it stands now, the best of movies are a lot more immersive then the best of videogames. Doesn't mean I often prefer a video game story since it keeps you more engaged in the process. Let's see how it is in a hundred years.



sethnintendo on 20 February 2013

I would like to point out that there is a difference between a fan and a fanboy.