58 réponses à ce sujet

[mickey111]

Gameplay and story telling are natural enemies are at odds and frankly tend to go together not much better than dogs and cats, and the developers must choose which one to favor or choose to balance them equally. We're only human and our attention spans are finite and we tend to concentrate on one thing at any given time, so one second spent interacting with the game mechanics is one less spent enjoying the plot and characters, and the inverse tends to be true. Developers like bioware try to emphasize the story and the gameplay is extremely simple and shallow because they want to let us enjoy the story while 75% of your team just literally plays the game by themselves. Then you have the MMO and online sandbox kind of games like EVE online, where the story tends to emerge naturally from people interacting with the game. People in this game have long term agendas, people tend to come together to help and protect each other, and several groups form out of their needs and sometimes these groups go into other groups territory and this creates a really natural story of conflict. 

 

To be quite honest, I do think that games can have good stories. They don't come along very often, and they have a lot more bad than good, but I do enjoy the hell out of games like The Last of Us, Homeworld, Mass Effect and Half-Life for the plot. Thing is thoguh that whenever someone recommends a game for the story, I ask myself "is this story better than the dozens of classic movies, T.v shows and books that I could be seeing instead? Answer is usually no, and in any case they often distract me from the story with gameplay. Besides, none of the other mediums have any shortage of good story telling, and none of them can ever do anything like EVE online and people do get attached to gameplay as unlikely as I know many folks of BSN think that is, but these people who consider stuff like EVE immersive have been at it for years. 

[Morty Smith]

Gameplay and story telling are natural enemies ...

 

If you are trying to make a game into a movie, that statement is correct.

[Gravisanimi]

I remember story elements and characters from games far better than I remember from other media

 

I can name my favorite games based on the story faster and easier than I can my favorite books, TV shows, or movies

[o Ventus]

Books, TV, and movies just as often have sh*t stories like games can. I've played far more games where the characters and settings were interesting than I've seen movies and TV shows though.

 

I don't put too much stock into the narrative of whatever I'm viewing anyway, because 9/10 times it'll disappoint me in the end. The characters are almost always what keep me watching or playing when it comes to any part of a narrative.

 

That said, I don't understand the "games can't be as good as movies/TV for telling stories" mentality. It just makes me think the person saying it hasn't played games with good stories.

[Cyonan]

Games can easily be as good at story as books, TV shows, or movies.

 

As far as the characters go, I would argue that I get more invested in characters like Tali or Alistair over those in books, movies, or shows because you actually interact with them in a video game, as opposed to just watching them or reading about them.

 

The thing is that games are a relatively new thing in comparison to the others, especially books. On top of that, the level of interactivity we have is something we haven't had before in story telling. A lot of the standards of story telling that you see in books, shows, or movies just don't work in games.

[mybudgee]

TLK has officially been replaced

[mickey111]

Games can easily be as good at story as books, TV shows, or movies.

 

As far as the characters go, I would argue that I get more invested in characters like Tali or Alistair over those in books, movies, or shows because you actually interact with them in a video game, as opposed to just watching them or reading about them.

 

The thing is that games are a relatively new thing in comparison to the others, especially books. On top of that, the level of interactivity we have is something we haven't had before in story telling. A lot of the standards of story telling that you see in books, shows, or movies just don't work in games.

 

 

Its pros and cons. While you might not be able to interact with people on T.v or in movie, they get the benefit of much tigher direction in the hands of professional producers with an excellent understanding of how to enhance the mood with just the right lighting and camera angles... the player agency tends to muddy these things because most of us players aren't qualified for that sort of thing. 

[Cyonan]

Its pros and cons. While you might not be able to interact with people on T.v or in movie, they get the benefit of much tigher direction in the hands of professional producers with an excellent understanding of how to enhance the mood with just the right lighting and camera angles... the player agency tends to muddy these things because most of us players aren't qualified for that sort of thing. 

 

That's the kind of thing that will be sorted out with time in games as we get more experienced people in the industry with handling story in an interactive format. Right now not even companies BioWare, Obsidian, or Telltale have it entirely figured out.

 

but still like Ventus the characters are what I mainly watch or play things for if I'm in it for the story, and I get far more invested in Tali and Alistair than I do in Captain Picard or The Doctor(which are two of my favourite TV shows), even though they're still awesome characters.

[mybudgee]

Television seems to be where the best talent is going these days...

[Jaron Oberyn]

Games have done better than movies and tv in many cases. It's really dependent on the writer, not medium.

[mickey111]

Games have done better than movies and tv in many cases. It's really dependent on the writer, not medium.

 

I think that we gamers are the bi problem. We're so insistent for our main game mechanics to involve hacking and shooting that developers usually use any other form as minigames or something. It's games like Alpha Protocol, Papers, Please and L.A Noire that are trying to get gamers to open their minds up a little. Alpha Protocol asked us to bring as much information as possible to meetings with important plot characters and figure out how we wanted to resolve their differences. LA Noire made a game out of searching for clues, and papers please did something similar, but in a less exciting setting. 

[Dio Demon]

Television seems to be where the best talent is going these days...

Except for the writers... They're a rare breed.

[o Ventus]

Except for the writers... They're a rare breed.

Halfway decent writers are a rare breed, regardless of the medium.

[A Crusty Knight Of Colour]

This thread is better than the last one. But games are ultimately a young medium for story, and the current crop of developers are obsessed with trying to emulate film, or treating story as something that's to be divorced from gameplay.

 

There was a period in the late 90s and early 00s where design and artistry were appreciated in the PC arena. I'm not saying that purely on nostalgia, I wholly accept that a game like Baldur's Gate 2 is dated and unappealing to play compared to Dragon Age if your tastes don't already sway towards BG in the first place. It's very much a product of it's time. In 2015, it's old, clunky, the pathfinding is awful, it doesn't do enough to show you the state of your party, player dialog in particular is overrated, etc etc. And I also accept that there are still very very talented developers around.

 

But the modern industry is so caught up in kowtowing to identity politics, film emulation, retro emulation, anti-consumer practices and money-making that design and storytelling in games is not a conversation most people have. Hell, it may never have been, but with all the other crap that's going on in the industry, a large portion of developers have simply forgotten how to design immersive games that strike a fusion between gameplay and story. 

 

 

This video is a good rundown of what I mean. Skip to 11:08 for the bit about storytelling and gameplay. The captions are awful though, just ignore that. Easy for me being Aussie I guess, but yeah it's good stuff.

 

Until developers can capture that mindset back and pour that into their games, it will be difficult for even supposedly strong writers to make games with stories as great as the greatest films, novels, etc. Because until they do, they won't be utilising the medium to it's fullest potential.

[B.A. Broska]

Games have the potential to surpass books, shows and movies in the story telling department, it is all about not treating gameplay and storytelling as two separate things as each can be use to reinforce the other.

[Han Shot First]

Can they? Yes.

 

Have they? Only very rarely. As a whole I think the game industry lags well behind both the film industry and books as far as storytelling goes.

[o Ventus]

Can they? Yes.

 

Have they? Only very rarely. As a whole I think the game industry lags well behind both the film industry and books as far as storytelling goes.

Only because film has been around for more than a century, while books have been around for several thousand years.

 

By sheer advantage of time they are superior, because they've existed for so long and have been able to be refined to the point where techniques used in making a movie or book can be readily recognized by nearly anyone, even if they aren't authors or filmmakers themselves. Not many people know what it takes to make a game unless they actually work with making games.

[Liamv2]

Gameplay and story telling are natural enemies are at odds and frankly tend to go together not much better than dogs and cats,

 

Wrong. I can think of games that plain would not work as a Book. Movie or TV show. See Bioshock 1, Silent hill 2, Persona 3 and 4 (admittedly the anime attempted but did a pretty poor job), Bastion and Thomas was alone and many more.

[Sully13]

Anything can work well if done right.

[Liamv2]

It did? It captured most of the mechanics in the series and had improved pacing because of its very nature as a 24 episode anime.

 

Well Chris can probably do a better job of describing it but the characters lacked the depth that they had it the game.

[Cleveland Mark Blakemore]

Once Grimoire is finally released it will put everything else to shame with ITZ level of incline.