Are Video Games the New Great Medium for Telling Stories?

[inmunitas]

The problem with games is that they're made by hundreds of people who 99% of the time are not united under a singular artistic vision such as a filmmaker's, and that's if you buy into the auteur theory. When we talk about games we talk about companies. "The EA game, the Ubisoft game, the Nintendo game". Most of the time there's very little personal input into the games.

I've never played a game where I could reach out to the artist behind it, if that makes sense. I've never felt the artist, let alone the person, behind a game. I can read Raymond Carver and Sylvia Plath and Kurt Vonnegut and feel how these people bare themselves for me. I can read Aeschylus and Sophocles and Eurypides and sense how they tackle the grand questions that plagued humanity for thousands of years, before and ever since.

Games get an emotional response from the gamer. They make you happy, sad, scared, whatever. I was very sorry the horse died in Shadow of the Colossus, I thought Okami was very pretty, I got feelings of melancholy while playing ICO. And Silent Hill 2 has a tremendously heart-wrenching story. Fair enough. But I feel that, for all the emotions I find in myself, there's very little emotion in the game. You're not looking into anybody's soul. There's a lot of artistic input, but little personal input.

Most artistic decisions in a game have a practical nature. Everything serves a purpose. And if not, you compromise, because time and money. But you take a brush or a pencil and you can go anywhere you want.

It'll be a long, long time before gaming produces anything that can be compared to the literary classics.

The difference being the creation of a video game is a feat of engineering, so you need to view it in the way you would any other product of engineering.

Well there you go, it's a feat of engineering such as a bridge or Christina Hendricks' bra.

I guess, depending how you look at it.

Artistic input may go into it, but in most cases your end-game is a product, nor a work of art.

Erm? I think you misunderstood?

A thing or person that is the result of an action or process

http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/product

 

[Biran53]

It's already happened.

The Legend of Zelda (1986) is a story and a game. And it's pretty damn good on both fronts. A story doesn't have to be complicated to be great or timeless. Of course, we have a ways to go before we reach gaming's full potential (and it's possible that games have infinitely expanding potential).

I've played so many games with terrific stories, not only in concept but (most importantly) in execution. Metroid Prime isn't all that textually compelling but on a level of interactivity its damn masterful.
Comparing the storytelling of a book to the storytelling in a game really doesn't work, as a compelling narrative in a book might not work at all as a game (and vice versa).

 

[Scars Unseen]

I prefer visual novels to video games for the purposes of telling stories. I haven't played a video game yet that is as good at making me care for the characters involved.

 

[Fox12]

It's not about care, as you repeatedly put it, it's about experiencing something other than a product.
I don't question your own "emotional enjoyment", I question the emotional spectrum of the game itself.
Every game instructs you to achieve an objective and gives you the means to an end. So you do exactly that. You connect the dots with gameplay. It's difficult, it's easy, you do it well, you do it worse. And when you're done, you "win".
There's no "winning" in art.

I'm sorry, I've heard this argument before, and I just don't understand it. Plenty of games unfold much more organically then that. Silent Hill 2 changes based upon the behavior of the character. How much concern he shows for others, whether or not he takes care of himself, ect. There is no "winning," and there is no official ending. All the endings fit thematically with the work, and say something about both James and the player. And, if you believe the purgatory theory, then all the ending are technically canon. It's a deeply sophisticated and symbolic piece of work with a lot of thought put into the narrative design. By what standard is it not art? And how on earth do you separate "art" from "product?" The two are not mutually exclusive.

The same could be said about books or film. You read it fast, you read it slow, it was easy, it was hard, but in the end you turn the last page and its done. But none of that matters. What matters are the story and the intellectual themes of the work, and how well those themes were carried out through the use of narrative tools, like symbolism. In fact, if you're a clever game designer then the aspects of the game reinforce the themes. The nihilistic themes of Dark Souls is reinforced by the grueling difficulty and fruitless endings. Games are a very different kind of art, but they are just as legitimate as film and literature, I think.

 

[Strazdas]

It's not about care, as you repeatedly put it, it's about experiencing something other than a product.
I don't question your own "emotional enjoyment", I question the emotional spectrum of the game itself.
Every game instructs you to achieve an objective and gives you the means to an end. So you do exactly that. You connect the dots with gameplay. It's difficult, it's easy, you do it well, you do it worse. And when you're done, you "win".
There's no "winning" in art.

It's not a dead-end medium but it has quite a lot of mileage to cover. Mileage that is incalculable since the industry - it's an industry - shapeshifts constantly. It's also the only industry (within the "arts") to have crashed and continue to threaten to crash, because it relies less on human nature and more on supply and demand.

What is there to experience but the product? I mean beside the ridiculous impossible stuff like memory transfer from the author.
Yes, there are objectives, goals and win conditions in games. but there is also everything in between. In Spec Ops your mission was to kill one man. The journey to do that however was where the emotional spectrum shown itself. Boiling it down to what you did would bel ike saying the point of every movie is for you to sit in front of a screen for a few hours. its nonsensical.

All industries rely on supply and demand. If there was no demand for paintings there would be far less of them than we have now. sure, some would paint anyway, and some would create games even if there was nothing to gain from it (i myself have created mods that noone but me played. did them for my own enjoyment).

Oh, and gaming industry has never crashed. The so called "gaming crash" would more appropriately be called North American console game crash of 1983. This is because it only crashed in north american and only in console market. And there is absolutely no threat whatsoever of a similar crash now. the gaming scene is way too dirverse and diluted for that to even be possible. at worst we can have another "console crash", but that wouldnt matter, since consoles now are the smallest of the gaming industries (PC being bigger and mobile being bigger than both PC and consoles put together).

Well there you go, it's a feat of engineering such as a bridge or Christina Hendricks' bra. Artistic input may go into it, but in most cases your end-game is a product, nor a work of art.

Its both.