Blips: Gimme Game-y Games

Source: Systems vs. Stories
Author: Dan Whitehead
Site: Eurogamer

It's not a new argument that video games should be developed around their systems, not as vehicles of cinematic storytelling. That's the crux of Dan Whitehead's stance in a new piece for Eurogamer, but his point is more salient with the comparison between two recent games that use a zombie apocalypse as a premise: The Last of Us and State of Decay. Sure there are new zombie games every week (sigh), but here Whitehead explains why he thinks State of Decay is a better "game" than the critically lauded The Last of Us, and it all boils down to story presentation. In The Last of Us, Whitehead felt like he was just keeping the main characters alive in between cutscenes where the story was told. In State of Decay, he claims that you're almost always playing the game to push the story forward, to the point where there's not even an explicit plot in the traditional sense.

Though I haven't played either of these games, I can see where Whitehead is coming from, and can hop on board except where he gets superlative with his claims in ways that restrict the narrative possibilities of various media. The topper is his closing line that refers to games as "the only truly new creative medium of the last 100 years." Cutting it pretty close to the invention of film, but I guess I can let that slide. However, let's not forget that games have existed prior to video games, and are founded on the same principles. Games in fact predate film and photography by hundreds, if not thousands of years. Furthermore, I don't have a problem with cinematic games with minimal interactivity, so long as the parts where I play aren't just there as boring filler to meet a "game" requirement.

If there's a problem it's how we lump all games under the same set of expectations. The kinds of interactivity should be what we use to classify games because they let the player know what kind of experience they're in for. If I know a game is going to be little more than a visual novel where I press a button to turn the page, so be it. I might be in a mood for that kind of game. If the story is interesting, that game could still be great. The interactivity might not get in the way and involves the player in the story just enough to be meaningful. I haven't played Asura's Wrath either, but isn't that the basic idea there? The real issue with most story-based games isn't interactivity, it's second-rate writing. By the sound of it, The Last of Us actually makes great strides on that front.

Blips: The Other Side of the Story

Source(s): Maybe Games Just Aren't For Telling Great Stories? and Games Are The Ideal Place For Telling Great Stories
Author: John Walker
Site: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

What to make of John Walker's dueling editorials on the competence of video games as a medium for telling great stories? The two pieces represent opposite viewpoints much like talking heads on cable news shows –each saying their piece without ever actually debating topics. The difference here is that since both articles were written by the same person, they represent internal conflict, one that seems unresolved.

However, certain arguments in the pro-game stories article seem to trump claims to the contrary in the other piece. Namely there's a part where Walker breaks down three kinds of narrative approaches in games, and when he gets to the third one, open-ended narratives where players, not designers, make the stories, he really makes his strongest point. In the anti-game stories editorial, Walker lists three games that he remembers having great stories in a more literary sense of the term, but makes no mention of the open-ended narrative in Minecraft and EVE Online that he cites in the other piece. Sure, bringing those games up would have strongly refuted the points he was making, but it also paints this pair of editorials as clever for cleverness' sake.

The issue isn't that game stories are doomed to be poor; there are plenty that aren't, and quite a bit of what makes others miss the mark could be corrected with a higher level of craft on the writing and performance front (a complicated issue, I'm aware). While I don't have an inherent problem with linear narratives in games, the ones that resonate most strongly are the ones that primarily use the game's mechanics to tell the story. These stories can still make use of smart writing, elegant performance capture, and fancy graphics, but treading to closely on the tropes of cinema or literature will just make players wonder why the game isn't just one of those instead.