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« on: 06:51 PM - 01/07/13 »
I do these from time to time, much to the annoyance of people in my Facebook friends list. But, I figure that I can go ahead and post my thoughts/ramblings in other, slightly more relevant communities, so here goes.
Okay, let's talk about something in games that I haven't yet *I believe*. Story. At some points in this, I'm going to come across as one of those "Games can't be art" sorts of guys, but if you read through it you'll see I'm quite the opposite.
Different mediums have different strengths and weaknesses. A movie or anime is great at showing high pace, action scenes with a lot of complexity. A manga or comic is good at depicting intricate details on minute objects (given the effort), and facial expressions. A painting is good at having one particularly strong scene. A book is good at going into depth with character feelings, both emotional and physical. A movie is particularly badly suited towards individual emotions, and having minute details that are important being just scattered about the scenes. Manga and comics can become hard to follow with too much action with complexity, and books sometimes are hard to keep track of with a lack of visible imagery. A painting, for obvious reasons, is never going to give you that Tom Clancy level of political intrigue. Each of these mediums can, of course, play at and even succeed at what can be considered their weaknesses, but it's less effective and requires more work than playing the strengths; think using a shotgun at long range in MW3. You're better off cornering people.
So what is a video game good at? What is it best at in terms of conveying towards the viewer/player, or perhaps more accurately, the experiencer? It's not that complex, overarching political intrigue, games are usually too long to remember the finer details of what's going on, and players are too busy having fun to really care. It's not character emotions; players are too busy looking elsewhere to pay much attention to character faces, and forcing their view on someone is just an annoying tactic. What about high octane explosion fests? Well, despite what sales might dictate, that's little more than just satisfying the urge for bombs; there's no meat there, and it adds little to any lasting appeal. No, what the medium of games succeeds at is player emotion. A game doesn't have to explain, show, or paint anything for you in the "deep" sense; instead, you experience it. YOU are the story, the main character. Video games as a story telling medium is most powerful when they let the player be a part of the story, and I don't mean what first comes to mind. \
Take Shadow of the Collosus. The story, as it is presented to you, is "Your girlfriend died. If you kill these big @#$% animals you can bring her back. Have fun." That's it. The whole story. It doesn't sound powerful until you're out there, see a Collosus, a giant, hulking... animal. Not a beast. Not a monster. Just a big oafin animal going about its business. Doesn't even care that you are there. Until you start mercilessly stabbing its heart, metaphorically. For the nature of being a game, some of the Collosi are hostile upon sight, but most of them are just defending themselves. Yet the game never tells you this. It never tells you that you are a big fat dick murdering innocent wildlife. You just... notice. You figure it out, and then, at that point, caste yourself onto your avatar. The game never tries to shove how you, or your character is supposed to feel, outside of the determination to bring a loved one back. The result is that the character is an extension of yourself, and not just a puppet to drag through the motions to see what they'll do next.
To me, and perhaps many others, moments like the baby Metroid's sacrifice in Super Metroid are more memorable than... well I can't think of any comparable (that wouldn't be good examples
for rather than against) examples, if that tells you anything. The game implies that the Metroid that nearly killed you minutes ago was the one you spared at the end of Metroid 2, and
upon watching it sacrifice its life to save you, well, you get fuggin pissed at Mother Brain for killing it. You feel like you're taking vengeance out on them, not just fighting the
final boss, because the game lets you project your own thoughts, realizations, and emotions on Samus. Yes, there's a character behind Samus, but the game's story never gets in the way of
letting Samus be a female space pirate @#$% kicking version of yourself. Similarly, I felt more compelled to save Curly in Cave Story than I did many other characters, simply because the
game let -me- develop an attachment to her, rather than let me watch someone else develop it.
This doesn't mean that games can't have complex stories. Far from it. Baten Kaitos, for example, had literally the player, being the person sitting in the chair with the controller, as a main character, and played off of that very well, allowing the main character (being the one typically controlled) to surprise even the player in their intents and desires; they seperated the player as their own person to have a stake in the story, and as such in its own way gave the player the room to project their wants into the game. Mass Effect lets the player choose everything they are going to say, giving them full capability (within programming limits) to respond as they feel they want to, instead of being told how to feel.
There are countless examples of video games being used to push their mediums, in ways that play to their own strengths. Metroid Prime has you reading the diaries and accounts of a now dead population, as well as of the opposing force, and this is used to put an interesting spin on the term "Dues ex Machina", in that you are the saving grace, the god from nowhere that fixes everything on its own, and leaves you looking at the aftermath of the terrors throughout the story, during which you are absent. 999's story is set up much like that of a book, or a choose your own adventure, but geniusly plays to its strength as a video game to pull things that would never work or make sense in a traditional book.
Video games don't have the specific cinematography, the exacting camera angles, or perfectly scripted scenes that movies do; and if they do, you are playing Metal Gear Solid 4, which many people find to be annoying in execution. Mainly because it's primarily a cutscene collection. The point is that chasing the blockbuster success of action movies, while trying to employ the same strategies as those same movies, falls flat in comparison. Subtlety is completely lost, the strategies aren't as effective, as giving the player control means allowing them to completely break the narrative effect, and taking control away simply annoys the player. I could go on and on about how Assassin's Creed and Call of Duty are setting up their stories inneffectively, about how the simpler, or more player involved story telling is far more effective, but at just under 7000 characters, I believe this is a long enough delve into this.
tl;dr: Games are good at experiencing, not observing.
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