Therumancer said:
Right now everyone realizes that storytelling is an important aspect of doing games, irregardless of the genere.
Using the word "irregardless" is a good way to make people ignore everything else you have to say, being as it's a pretentious word that actually contradicts itself on closer inspection (ir-regardless? So, we're
with regard?).
Therumancer said:
It's a cornerstone of the whole "games as art" arguement which was just sort of won by the goverment acknowleging them as such (I say 'sort of' because we still have a Supreme Court ruling in the pipe, and by it's nature The Surpreme court overrules everything else and can cause sweeping changes by overturning laws and precedents on a large scale with a single ruling.
There is a difference between games being a form of art and games being a form of art
where storytelling is an important element. Architecture is a form of art too, that doesn't mean you have to stuff a fucking 3-act play into every building. Cooking is a form of art, but cooking is certainly
not a means of telling a story.
Games are still a very insecure medium that are trying to show they're art by apeing the conventions of other mediums that already are; primarily books and film. A painting doesn't need a writer to furnish it with a really well-written plaque to tell you what's going on; indeed, art critics
shit on such paintings, saying you should tell any story entirely through the medium of the work itself. Statues don't come with supplementary novels. Only games feel they need to do this kind of thing, and the sooner they realise they don't, the sooner they'll start being their own artform.
Therumancer said:
The thing is that Storytelling had to be given EQUAL time to the game development itself
You are insane. Again, it's like saying the carpenter who makes a picture frame is as important as the painter who makes the picture. The story can only ever act as a frame and setup for the play aspect of the game, which is what makes the medium what it is. Games will
never be art while people like you are trying to force them to be something they're not.
Therumancer said:
The thing is that blending storytelling and gameplay together isn't EASY so nobody wants to take the time to do it right.
Or maybe it's that the modern non-play approach to game storytelling is totally wrong. Remember in
Castlevania, how Simon Belmont slew the fearsome Medusa? How did we know he'd done that? Why, because we did it ourselves, without needing anything but our actions in the game to tell us that.
Is
Sonic better for the asinine "universe" that's been built around it? Most people would rather it was just Sonic fighting Robotnik because he's evil.
Mega Man has recently gone back to that. Is
Homefront a better game than
Black and
Doom 2 because it's more willing to interrupt the actual gameplay with tedious storyline?
Therumancer said:
It's not a matter of "carpentry has nothing to do with painting" so much as the storyline being the paint, and the game design itself being the brush (the mechanical part) used to deliver it.
If you seriously think that's how important story is then you have no idea what videogames are. What about
Tetris? Are you saying
Tetris would be
better with a plot? What about chess? Would chess be a better game if on white's turn ten white had to lose their kingside knight to the corrupt black Bishop because on move five it was established that knight had great faith and it would be both tragic and ironic for him to die at the Bishop's hands? Don't worry, on white's turn fourteen the E-file pawn is going to avenge his father.
Nevermind that none of this is
playing chess, we're having a story now!
A game needs as much story as a game needs. Story provides a basis for visualising the game's mechanics in a less abstract way; more story suits games with more complex mechanics that need to be tied together. For example,
Mastermind has no story; it's just a guessing / logic game on a board with coloured pieces.
Battleships has more story; the pieces are ships, the board is a radar screen.
Clue has even more storyline, with each piece a character, the board a house with secret passages, and even an overall outline of what the players are trying to do in the place. In each case it's as much as they need;
Mastermind would seem absurd with the level of story
Clue has, while
Clue would seem like an abstract collection of arbitrary rules without the story to frame them.
Narrative is something games are terrible at; the best they tend to be able to do with it is have the game and narrative alternate, meaning the "story" (as you call it) is just the thing that happens between the game. They're much better when the narrative is built around the player's actions, which is the "no story" that the games-are-art crowd so despise.
Therumancer said:
Simply put if your going to create a story where permadeath is an option for one of the major characters, then by definition the game developers should not be creating a world where pople actually die in combat and get brought back to life casually by spells and items bought from stores. Rather they should be working around the idea of characters being knocked out, and ensure that the graphics, items, and spell names reflect that reality.
Wait, have you ever played any game that isn't an RPG?
