Garcian Smith said:
Riachu said:
And a wordy cutscene fest is bad how? Do the way a story gets told in a video games really affect the quality of the story that much? MGS series, for example, works better with cutscenes than with dialouge trees.
BTW, aren't most of these cutscene fest games coming from Japan?
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The way a story is told, in any medium, is even more important than the content of the story itself. If you've ever taken a college-level creative writing class, for example, one of the first things they tell you is, "show, don't tell." To illustrate, here's an example:
Telling: "A man stood in the forest. He was shot in the head. He fell down and died."
Showing: "A crack rang out in the night air, and a stream of crimson began to cascade down his forehead. Autumn leaves scattered below him as his body crumpled like a rag doll. A craclking thump echoed amongst the trees. He twitched, once, twice, and then moved no more."
Which one would you rather read? The second, right? As you can see, "telling" is simple exposition - an explanation of what happened. Showing, however, immerses the reader in what's going on through sensory detail; instead of simply relaying events, it allows the reader to feel as though he's actually there, experiencing the events of the story with his own eyes, ears, nostrils, and so on. In the above example of "showing," you're not actually told that the man dies; however, you can easily glean from the sensory details that he did. And, furthermore, that showing is much more interesting than simply being told that he dies.
In other words, any amateur writer can put a bunch of events down on paper. It takes someone with talent to go one step further, taking the medium to new levels.
Most cutscenes and non-interactive dialogue are the equivalent of telling - they relate a series of events in a mundane fashion. However, something like Bioshock, where the story is told by your surroundings and a series of interactive events, shows the player what is going on by involving him in the action. Instead of watching events play out, the player experiences the events, sometimes to the point of actually having some control over their outcome. Through those means, the player can figure out the story in a much more intuitive and interesting way.
And that is the difference between good and bad storytelling in video games.
Get what I'm saying?
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