infalible wrote...
So I'm one of those people who - for many years - have widely believed Bioware to be the "best storyteller in gaming". Of late however I've been considering the statement: what does it actually mean? Does it mean that Bioware deserve our respect as storytellers? Does it mean that they are standing on the shoulders of giants and telling tales that we will remember as great works of art? Or does it mean that in an industry swathed in the mediocrity of the masses Bioware is just managing to present enough of a narrative for us to not dispare at the lack of creativity in a market dominated by "graphics and gameplay"?
Go to your bookcase and look at your books. I'd say that many of you have books like Harry Potter, Twilight, or books from the Discworld series. Some of you may even have classics like Moby Dick, or Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, or The Count of Monte Cristo. A few may have books like The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, or The Gap Conflict. And then there are the modern classics like A Song of Ice and Fire, and The Wheel of Time. Can you say with confidence that the stories presented by Bioware even vaguely compare to those presented in the greatest (or even average) works of written fiction? I can't. I don't believe it when I say it. I find the notion to be a mockery of my sense.
Most video games tell fairly external stories. Like Uncharted. It's competently done. But it's an adventure. You have this unchanging character that faces constant setbacks while seeing lots of interesting places until it's over.
Books though tend to be internal--stories of the mind, so to speak. You get to see a character's mind in even more detail than you often do in your interactions in life with real people. Bioware gets closer to that than a lot of other game writers do, and that makes them interesting. Morrigan, Alistair, Leliana, Zevran all unfolded in interesting ways and could grow. Mass Effect 2 is also notable for being, primarily, built around character quests.
Again though, can they be as good as books? Well, Dragon Age Origins pulled off the trick of getting me inside the Warden's head (even though I'm the one that created much of what I remember about the Warden and supplied him his thoughts) and kept me engaged via conversations with NPC's and tough decisions about the game world. Dragon Age II--not so much. It did it sometimes but overall it felt like a less pscyhological experience--more like a movie than a book.
So with DAO I thought that it was a comparable experience to reading a good fantasy novel. Not so much the Blight storyline which was just another save-the-world plot. But the stuff with the NPC's was really good as were some of the decisions I had to make (even if I didn't always see the consequences in game, just making the decisions was still interesting...though ideally I'd see consequences in game as well).
With DAII, I kept thinking about all the ways it was a worse framed narrative than Name of the Wind. In short, NotW has a better outer frame. Why a man has given up and sort of died inside is just more interesting than Cassandra trying to find Hawke and then not finding him. And the inner frame is better too because Kvothe (from NotW) has a purpose and all his setbacks draw his psychology out and thus bring you closer to the character. For me, Hawke setbacks may have made me feel sorry for him but they didn't make me feel like I knew him any better. So it's important for writers to torture and abuse their protagonists. But Rothfuss got more for Kvothe's blood than Bioware did for Hawke's. I don't want to be too negative here though as I did like DAII. There were some good moments with the NPC's, and I liked the NPC side quests in all acts and Act II overall.
Now if they can just duplicate their feat in DAO--have me feel inside the main character's mind and get me to make decisions that cause me to re-evaluate and deepen my character as I play him--then I think they can deliver experiences comparable to good books even if it's a different medium and involves using some different techniques.
And let's look at the themes of Bioware's latest foray into mature story telling: Dragon Age and Dragon Age 2 were supposed to be mature games with mature stories, and yet they shied away from nudity, they presented sexuality behind a protective vale of montages, and the use of language was shallow and pointless (as in swearing was not used to create character, but just used for the sake of swearing). They handeled none of the mature elements of the tale with anything resembling the finese of a proven author, or screen writer. They hid away from a mature narrative and instead delivered a vale of stylised violence and infrequent crudeness and branded it "mature story telling" for the sake of the marketting gimmick. Compare the maturity of Dragon Age to the maturity of Spartacus: Gods of the Arena, or A Song of Ice and Fire, and you find Dragon Age and Dragon Age 2 direly lacking. It's an insult to tasteful and compotent story telling to say that Dragon Age even vaguely manages to present a deep and meaningful tale, let alone a mature one.
I don't really equate nudity with maturity. That said I have a keen appreciation of the female form and thus like nudity. I think the sex in Dragon Age says more about the perception of the video gaming audience than it does about Bioware's ability to write about sex.
Modifié par Giltspur, 10 juillet 2011 - 10:27 .
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