A1 said:
ShadowKirby said:
Terramax said:
Games are games, not movies. Linearity is not the issue in itself, but it goes back to a balance between emergent and embedded narrative. Sure, jRPGs are going to put a much bigger focus on the story they created for the player but by removing any chances(or seriously reducing them) for the player to create his own little narrative, you are putting way too much weight on cinematographic language in your game. At a certain point you can ask yourself: "Why are they making a game and not a movie?"
Simple. The story couldn't hold itself has a movie and it needs that little part of interactivity they put in to pace said poor story in order to keep the player hooked.
Okay, now I'm don't agree with you on THAT.
Alright. *cracks knuckles* Looks like I'll need to take out the chainsaw and go through your comments to get some things straight in both your and quite a few other commenter perspective.
Whether or not a video game story could hold itself as a movie without the factor of interactivity is a question which I think is best handled on a case-by-case basis as opposed to the generalization that you seem to be making.
I think there are indeed video games out there that have stories and/or scripts that are indeed worthy of a movie. And interestingly enough there are numerous video games that have film adaptations in the works like Gears of War, Uncharted, inFAMOUS, and Mass Effect (although I find this one rather ironic). And I suppose the recently released Halo Legends also counts. It would seem that as video game stories, scripts, and technologies become more and more sophisticated the line between video games and movies has slowly started to blur. Perhaps the most noteworthy example of this is Uncharted 2.
I was mostly talking about FFXIII in particular but still, most videogame-based movies don't work as well as their games counterpart for some simple reasons [http://blogs.amctv.com/scifi-scanner/2010/01/why-video-game-movies-suck.php#more]. You also have to replace interactivity with cinematography, and then you basically loose what makes games interesting in the first place. As for Uncharted 2, [url-http://experiencepoints.blogspot.com/2010/01/uncharted-2-avatar-and-mistaken-mediums.html]this blog [/url] makes a much better job at explaining some issues with it.
How to best blend the factor of interactivity with a good, movie-worthy story and/or script is a good question that I think a number of individuals and developers are putting some real effort into answering such as Hideo Kojima, Naughty Dog, BioWare, and David Cage. And so far the results have been both noteworthy and promising.
Yes, those and indie developers such as Jason Rohrer and Jonathan Blow. No question on that.
And if you want an example of a video game story that ACTUALLY HAS been made into a movie then look no farther than Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children.
Unless you are a FF7 fanboys, there is no way you can think this has a good story.
For the record I believe that the idea of players being able to create their own little narratives as you put it is overrated because it essentially compromises the story. But to be more specific I'll break it down into two reasons.
Overrated? The whole medium hinges around that very concept of emergent narrative. Let's get in the details while I follow your post...
First, their own little narratives can essentially never be more than that: their own little narratives. Their narratives can't be canon. Or they can't be THE official narrative or official story of the game. And the reason for this brings me to my second reason.
This very section makes me think that we don't even know what we are arguing about. Maybe I'm lost. Lets track back to linearity (or over-linearity) as the central issue here. The concept of "canon" has nothing to do with the discussion at hand. In the case of a FF game, the main narrative arc will remain the same no matter the action taken by the player. Nobody cares if what he experienced was canon or not. It's about the potential of the videoludic medium to allow the player to experience their own little story, an emergent narrative, within the context of a bigger embedded narrative. Both are working together in the enjoyment of the game. The fact it's not "canon" doesn't take anything away from the experience.
Second, the reason that their own little narratives can't be THE narrative or story is essentially because their is no official narrative or story to the game. The game essentially is a deliberately incomplete story with a number of blanks carefully placed here and there for the player to fill in. But no matter how the player chooses to fill in those blanks there are going to be a number of other players doing the same thing and doing it differently with ultimately no player's own little narrative being THE narrative. Or in other words because a game is at least somewhat malleable and can be influenced in such a way by the player the game essentially doesn't have a solid identity of it's own. Of course the developer could come along and declare certain ways of filling in the blanks to be canon, but even if they did that it might make you wonder exactly why they bothered to created those blanks in the first place.
Then again you are wrong. You are mixing up two concepts. We could go wild and develop on different genre of gameplay mechanics and how they mesh with narration but lets focus on jRPGs. Those "blank" sections as you call them are still within the overarching narrative of the game. Lets exemplify this.
"Old Sage tells you in a cut-scene that you need to go through the forest to meet the nymph.// You fight your way through the forest with your party and gain loot and stuff.// At the end you are greeted by the nymph in a sexy cut-scene."
That first part is non-interactive and part of the overall embedded narrative put there by the designer. The third one is the same. The second one is more interesting. On the macro level of narration, it is known by the designer that the player will go through the forest. On the level micro level, you have the emergent narrative. Whatever the player experience in that forest, whatever he does and the decision he makes are part of his own little narrative that is his and his alone. It's not the point if what he did in there was canon or not. The important, in the videoludic medium, is that it was his.
Perhaps a decent example of this is Bioware having default and quite possibly canon settings for Commander Shepard's first name, gender, appearance, class, and voice. These things being featured ever so prominently in at least one of the commercials for Mass Effect 2.
This is also the main reason that I find the idea of a Mass Effect movie to be ironic.
See above.
I think this is fundamentally a question of finding the right balance between story and interactivity.
Yes!
And quite frankly I don't think that the BioWare-style method of leaving blanks and having players create their own little narratives is the best way to do it.
No! Wrong answer.
That is totally gaming's strength, to let the player experience his own narrative.
I think a better alternative for example is having a silent protagonist. This way the players are given the opportunity to project their own thoughts, feelings, and ideas onto the protagonist. Or to essentially "make the character their own" as I once heard it put. But this way would able to avoid compromising the story with actual blanks. Although in truth I think this would best be done with an in-story explanation as to why the character doesn't speak. Like a childhood accident or something. But anyway I think that the best example of the silent protagonist approach is probably Gordon Freeman and the Half-Life series.
I?m gonna bring movies here for a second. There are two pretty close but slightly different concepts we can bring here; empathy and identification. I'm not going to go on a big class on cognitivism but identification is, quite simply, identifying yourself to an avatar/character, taking along his moral values and so on. Empathy, on the other hand, is about putting yourself in the shoes of the avatar/character and wonder how you would react in his situation. Silent or speaking doesn't change a thing, it's just a myth. You can never totally identify yourself to an avatar/character, especially if he/she is morally ambiguous. On the other hand, you can feel empathy. You don't identify to a silent protagonist since there is nothing to identify to. But you can feel empathy for Nico Bellic and wonder what you'd do in his situation.
I think that I've said all that I need to say in this post so let me end it with a link to an article which I believe is quite relevant to this topic.
http://www.destructoid.com/the-path-of-no-divergence-why-linear-games-have-their-place-90753.phtml
Jim Sterling? Seriously?
Here's a couple of paper by Marie-Laure Ryan and Jan Simons to really get a grasp on narration and games.
http://www.gamestudies.org/0101/ryan/
http://gamestudies.org/0701/articles/simons
ShadowKirby said:
A1 said:
ShadowKirby said:
Terramax said:
Likewise, games with incredible stories don't need to be told in a variety of ways. Take... any good film for instance.
Games are games, not movies. Linearity is not the issue in itself, but it goes back to a balance between emergent and embedded narrative. Sure, jRPGs are going to put a much bigger focus on the story they created for the player but by removing any chances(or seriously reducing them) for the player to create his own little narrative, you are putting way too much weight on cinematographic language in your game. At a certain point you can ask yourself: "Why are they making a game and not a movie?"
Simple. The story couldn't hold itself has a movie and it needs that little part of interactivity they put in to pace said poor story in order to keep the player hooked.
Okay, now I'm don't agree with you on THAT.
Alright. *cracks knuckles* Looks like I'll need to take out the chainsaw and go through your comments to get some things straight in both your and quite a few other commenter perspective.
Whether or not a video game story could hold itself as a movie without the factor of interactivity is a question which I think is best handled on a case-by-case basis as opposed to the generalization that you seem to be making.
I think there are indeed video games out there that have stories and/or scripts that are indeed worthy of a movie. And interestingly enough there are numerous video games that have film adaptations in the works like Gears of War, Uncharted, inFAMOUS, and Mass Effect (although I find this one rather ironic). And I suppose the recently released Halo Legends also counts. It would seem that as video game stories, scripts, and technologies become more and more sophisticated the line between video games and movies has slowly started to blur. Perhaps the most noteworthy example of this is Uncharted 2.
I was mostly talking about FFXIII in particular but still, most videogame-based movies don't work as well as their games counterpart for some simple reasons [http://blogs.amctv.com/scifi-scanner/2010/01/why-video-game-movies-suck.php#more]. You also have to replace interactivity with cinematography, and then you basically loose what makes games interesting in the first place. As for Uncharted 2, [url-http://experiencepoints.blogspot.com/2010/01/uncharted-2-avatar-and-mistaken-mediums.html]this blog [/url] makes a much better job at explaining some issues with it.
How to best blend the factor of interactivity with a good, movie-worthy story and/or script is a good question that I think a number of individuals and developers are putting some real effort into answering such as Hideo Kojima, Naughty Dog, BioWare, and David Cage. And so far the results have been both noteworthy and promising.
Yes, those and indie developers such as Jason Rohrer and Jonathan Blow. No question on that.
And if you want an example of a video game story that ACTUALLY HAS been made into a movie then look no farther than Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children.
Unless you are a FF7 fanboys, there is no way you can think this has a good story.
For the record I believe that the idea of players being able to create their own little narratives as you put it is overrated because it essentially compromises the story. But to be more specific I'll break it down into two reasons.
Overrated? The whole medium hinges around that very concept of emergent narrative. Let's get in the details while I follow your post...
First, their own little narratives can essentially never be more than that: their own little narratives. Their narratives can't be canon. Or they can't be THE official narrative or official story of the game. And the reason for this brings me to my second reason.
This very section makes me think that we don't even know what we are arguing about. Maybe I'm lost. Lets track back to linearity (or over-linearity) as the central issue here. The concept of "canon" has nothing to do with the discussion at hand. In the case of a FF game, the main narrative arc will remain the same no matter the action taken by the player. Nobody cares if what he experienced was canon or not. It's about the potential of the videoludic medium to allow the player to experience their own little story, an emergent narrative, within the context of a bigger embedded narrative. Both are working together in the enjoyment of the game. The fact it's not "canon" doesn't take anything away from the experience.
Second, the reason that their own little narratives can't be THE narrative or story is essentially because their is no official narrative or story to the game. The game essentially is a deliberately incomplete story with a number of blanks carefully placed here and there for the player to fill in. But no matter how the player chooses to fill in those blanks there are going to be a number of other players doing the same thing and doing it differently with ultimately no player's own little narrative being THE narrative. Or in other words because a game is at least somewhat malleable and can be influenced in such a way by the player the game essentially doesn't have a solid identity of it's own. Of course the developer could come along and declare certain ways of filling in the blanks to be canon, but even if they did that it might make you wonder exactly why they bothered to created those blanks in the first place.
Then again you are wrong. You are mixing up two concepts. We could go wild and develop on different genre of gameplay mechanics and how they mesh with narration but lets focus on jRPGs. Those "blank" sections as you call them are still within the overarching narrative of the game. Lets exemplify this.
"Old Sage tells you in a cut-scene that you need to go through the forest to meet the nymph.// You fight your way through the forest with your party and gain loot and stuff.// At the end you are greeted by the nymph in a sexy cut-scene."
That first part is non-interactive and part of the overall embedded narrative put there by the designer. The third one is the same. The second one is more interesting. On the macro level of narration, it is known by the designer that the player will go through the forest. On the level micro level, you have the emergent narrative. Whatever the player experience in that forest, whatever he does and the decision he makes are part of his own little narrative that is his and his alone. It's not the point if what he did in there was canon or not. The important, in the videoludic medium, is that it was his.
Perhaps a decent example of this is Bioware having default and quite possibly canon settings for Commander Shepard's first name, gender, appearance, class, and voice. These things being featured ever so prominently in at least one of the commercials for Mass Effect 2.
This is also the main reason that I find the idea of a Mass Effect movie to be ironic.
See above.
I think this is fundamentally a question of finding the right balance between story and interactivity.
Yes!
And quite frankly I don't think that the BioWare-style method of leaving blanks and having players create their own little narratives is the best way to do it.
No! Wrong answer.
That is totally gaming's strength, to let the player experience his own narrative.
I think a better alternative for example is having a silent protagonist. This way the players are given the opportunity to project their own thoughts, feelings, and ideas onto the protagonist. Or to essentially "make the character their own" as I once heard it put. But this way would able to avoid compromising the story with actual blanks. Although in truth I think this would best be done with an in-story explanation as to why the character doesn't speak. Like a childhood accident or something. But anyway I think that the best example of the silent protagonist approach is probably Gordon Freeman and the Half-Life series.
""I?m gonna bring movies here for a second. There are two pretty close but slightly different concepts we can bring here; empathy and identification. I'm not going to go on a big class on cognitivism but identification is, quite simply, identifying yourself to an avatar/character, taking along his moral values and so on. Empathy, on the other hand, is about putting yourself in the shoes of the avatar/character and wonder how you would react in his situation. Silent or speaking doesn't change a thing, it's just a myth. You can never totally identify yourself to an avatar/character, especially if he/she is morally ambiguous. On the other hand, you can feel empathy. You don't identify to a silent protagonist since there is nothing to identify to. But you can feel empathy for Nico Bellic and wonder what you'd do in his situation.""
I think that I've said all that I need to say in this post so let me end it with a link to an article which I believe is quite relevant to this topic.
http://www.destructoid.com/the-path-of-no-divergence-why-linear-games-have-their-place-90753.phtml
Jim Sterling? Seriously?
Here's a couple of paper by Marie-Laure Ryan and Jan Simons to really get a grasp on narration and games.
http://www.gamestudies.org/0101/ryan/
http://gamestudies.org/0701/articles/simons
ShadowKirby said:
A1 said:
ShadowKirby said:
Terramax said:
Likewise, games with incredible stories don't need to be told in a variety of ways. Take... any good film for instance.
Games are games, not movies. Linearity is not the issue in itself, but it goes back to a balance between emergent and embedded narrative. Sure, jRPGs are going to put a much bigger focus on the story they created for the player but by removing any chances(or seriously reducing them) for the player to create his own little narrative, you are putting way too much weight on cinematographic language in your game. At a certain point you can ask yourself: "Why are they making a game and not a movie?"
Simple. The story couldn't hold itself has a movie and it needs that little part of interactivity they put in to pace said poor story in order to keep the player hooked.
Okay, now I'm don't agree with you on THAT.
Alright. *cracks knuckles* Looks like I'll need to take out the chainsaw and go through your comments to get some things straight in both your and quite a few other commenter perspective.
Whether or not a video game story could hold itself as a movie without the factor of interactivity is a question which I think is best handled on a case-by-case basis as opposed to the generalization that you seem to be making.
I think there are indeed video games out there that have stories and/or scripts that are indeed worthy of a movie. And interestingly enough there are numerous video games that have film adaptations in the works like Gears of War, Uncharted, inFAMOUS, and Mass Effect (although I find this one rather ironic). And I suppose the recently released Halo Legends also counts. It would seem that as video game stories, scripts, and technologies become more and more sophisticated the line between video games and movies has slowly started to blur. Perhaps the most noteworthy example of this is Uncharted 2.
I was mostly talking about FFXIII in particular but still, most videogame-based movies don't work as well as their games counterpart for some simple reasons [http://blogs.amctv.com/scifi-scanner/2010/01/why-video-game-movies-suck.php#more]. You also have to replace interactivity with cinematography, and then you basically loose what makes games interesting in the first place. As for Uncharted 2, [url-http://experiencepoints.blogspot.com/2010/01/uncharted-2-avatar-and-mistaken-mediums.html]this blog [/url] makes a much better job at explaining some issues with it.
How to best blend the factor of interactivity with a good, movie-worthy story and/or script is a good question that I think a number of individuals and developers are putting some real effort into answering such as Hideo Kojima, Naughty Dog, BioWare, and David Cage. And so far the results have been both noteworthy and promising.
Yes, those and indie developers such as Jason Rohrer and Jonathan Blow. No question on that.
And if you want an example of a video game story that ACTUALLY HAS been made into a movie then look no farther than Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children.
Unless you are a FF7 fanboys, there is no way you can think this has a good story.
For the record I believe that the idea of players being able to create their own little narratives as you put it is overrated because it essentially compromises the story. But to be more specific I'll break it down into two reasons.
Overrated? The whole medium hinges around that very concept of emergent narrative. Let's get in the details while I follow your post...
First, their own little narratives can essentially never be more than that: their own little narratives. Their narratives can't be canon. Or they can't be THE official narrative or official story of the game. And the reason for this brings me to my second reason.
This very section makes me think that we don't even know what we are arguing about. Maybe I'm lost. Lets track back to linearity (or over-linearity) as the central issue here. The concept of "canon" has nothing to do with the discussion at hand. In the case of a FF game, the main narrative arc will remain the same no matter the action taken by the player. Nobody cares if what he experienced was canon or not. It's about the potential of the videoludic medium to allow the player to experience their own little story, an emergent narrative, within the context of a bigger embedded narrative. Both are working together in the enjoyment of the game. The fact it's not "canon" doesn't take anything away from the experience.
Second, the reason that their own little narratives can't be THE narrative or story is essentially because their is no official narrative or story to the game. The game essentially is a deliberately incomplete story with a number of blanks carefully placed here and there for the player to fill in. But no matter how the player chooses to fill in those blanks there are going to be a number of other players doing the same thing and doing it differently with ultimately no player's own little narrative being THE narrative. Or in other words because a game is at least somewhat malleable and can be influenced in such a way by the player the game essentially doesn't have a solid identity of it's own. Of course the developer could come along and declare certain ways of filling in the blanks to be canon, but even if they did that it might make you wonder exactly why they bothered to created those blanks in the first place.
Then again you are wrong. You are mixing up two concepts. We could go wild and develop on different genre of gameplay mechanics and how they mesh with narration but lets focus on jRPGs. Those "blank" sections as you call them are still within the overarching narrative of the game. Lets exemplify this.
"Old Sage tells you in a cut-scene that you need to go through the forest to meet the nymph.// You fight your way through the forest with your party and gain loot and stuff.// At the end you are greeted by the nymph in a sexy cut-scene."
That first part is non-interactive and part of the overall embedded narrative put there by the designer. The third one is the same. The second one is more interesting. On the macro level of narration, it is known by the designer that the player will go through the forest. On the level micro level, you have the emergent narrative. Whatever the player experience in that forest, whatever he does and the decision he makes are part of his own little narrative that is his and his alone. It's not the point if what he did in there was canon or not. The important, in the videoludic medium, is that it was his.
Perhaps a decent example of this is Bioware having default and quite possibly canon settings for Commander Shepard's first name, gender, appearance, class, and voice. These things being featured ever so prominently in at least one of the commercials for Mass Effect 2.
This is also the main reason that I find the idea of a Mass Effect movie to be ironic.
See above.
I think this is fundamentally a question of finding the right balance between story and interactivity.
Yes!
And quite frankly I don't think that the BioWare-style method of leaving blanks and having players create their own little narratives is the best way to do it.
No! Wrong answer.
That is totally gaming's strength, to let the player experience his own narrative.
I think a better alternative for example is having a silent protagonist. This way the players are given the opportunity to project their own thoughts, feelings, and ideas onto the protagonist. Or to essentially "make the character their own" as I once heard it put. But this way would able to avoid compromising the story with actual blanks. Although in truth I think this would best be done with an in-story explanation as to why the character doesn't speak. Like a childhood accident or something. But anyway I think that the best example of the silent protagonist approach is probably Gordon Freeman and the Half-Life series.
I?m gonna bring movies here for a second. There are two pretty close but slightly different concepts we can bring here; empathy and identification. I'm not going to go on a big class on cognitivism but identification is, quite simply, identifying yourself to an avatar/character, taking along his moral values and so on. Empathy, on the other hand, is about putting yourself in the shoes of the avatar/character and wonder how you would react in his situation. Silent or speaking doesn't change a thing, it's just a myth. You can never totally identify yourself to an avatar/character, especially if he/she is morally ambiguous. On the other hand, you can feel empathy. You don't identify to a silent protagonist since there is nothing to identify to. But you can feel empathy for Nico Bellic and wonder what you'd do in his situation.
I think that I've said all that I need to say in this post so let me end it with a link to an article which I believe is quite relevant to this topic.
http://www.destructoid.com/the-path-of-no-divergence-why-linear-games-have-their-place-90753.phtml
Jim Sterling? Seriously?
Here's a couple of paper by Marie-Laure Ryan and Jan Simons to really get a grasp on narration and games.
http://www.gamestudies.org/0101/ryan/
http://gamestudies.org/0701/articles/simons
""Alright. *cracks knuckles* Looks like I'll need to take out the chainsaw and go through your comments to get some things straight in both your and quite a few other commenter perspective.""
First, I'm getting a bit of an elitist vibe from you here. Second, I'm strongly sensing that the factor of personal opinion or personal tastes is largely present here. And when that happens two people seem to be essentially hitting a conversational dead-end so to speak. And I think it's safe to say that the only plausible way out of that apparent deadlock is to agree to disagree, regardless of how cliche that may sound. So as I respond to you I'll be keeping an eye out for this.
""I was mostly talking about FFXIII in particular but still, most videogame-based movies don't work as well as their games counterpart for some simple reasons. You also have to replace interactivity with cinematography, and then you basically loose what makes games interesting in the first place. As for Uncharted 2, this blog makes a much better job at explaining some issues with it.""
Personal tastes/opinions alert.
Yes. I understand that for the most part. If you tone down or outright remove the factor of interactivity then you generally have to enhance the story to compensate. So therefore the idea of having a movie that closely or too closely resembles it's video game source material seems to be an inherently flawed idea. However, I don't agree with you when you say that you loose what makes a game interesting by replacing interactivity with cinematography. A decent example would probably be Assassin's Creed. I honestly didn't like the gameplay very much because I thought it came off as WAY too repetitive. Nevertheless I still played through to the end and didn't regret it. I still generally liked the game because I found the story to be interesting and worthwhile even though I didn't care all that much for Altair as a character. Yahtzee has expressed similar sentiments with regard to the game. I think Assassin's Creed can plausibly be viewed as a game that was largely saved by it's story.
And I didn't say that Uncharted 2 actually destroys the line between video game stories and movie stories or anything like that. Video game stories have gradually grown more and more sophisticated over the years. And it would seem that games with solid, non-maleable, linear stories (most games it would seem) in particular have gradually become more and more like interactive novels and movies. I actually remember one of my classmates back in high school saying that Parasite Eve was "like a movie" (in a totally positive way). It would seem that games like Uncharted 2 openly embrace this trend and in doing so allow the medium to take a significant step in this direction, even if there is still a ways to go.
And this blog link you refer to seems to be dead end for some reason.
""Unless you are a FF7 fanboys, there is no way you can think this has a good story.""
Personal tastes/opinions alert.
First of all, I'm not fond of the term "fanboy" because I find it to be too presumptuous. It may be true that a majority of the world's dedicated gamers are male but dedicated female gamers do indeed exist. Perhaps this is well exemplified by Sony's upcoming reality series: "The Tester". I find the term "Fan" to be much more preferable. But with regard to Advent Children, the movie's critical reception has been mixed but perhaps that's for the most part beside the point. I think the main issue with the story is that it's very strongly linked to FFVII's story, therefore one would likely have a hard time understanding it if one doesn't know about FFVII. But even so I don't think one would actually have to be a fan of FFVII to be able to appreciate the story of Advent Children. Rather one would only have be familiar with the story of FFVII.
""Overrated? The whole medium hinges around that very concept of emergent narrative. Let's get in the details while I follow your post..""
Personal tastes/opinions alert.
Okay. Now I think you're starting to get weird. The medium of video games originally DIDN'T HAVE any narratives at all, with perhaps one of the best examples being Space Invaders. And to this day there are plenty of games that still don't, such as Flower, Shatter, Pain, Trash Panic, arguably any sports game, and who knows what else. For better or worse in world of video games having a narrative is, and always has been, ultimately optional.
""This very section makes me think that we don't even know what we are arguing about. Maybe I'm lost. Lets track back to linearity (or over-linearity) as the central issue here. The concept of "canon" has nothing to do with the discussion at hand. In the case of a FF game, the main narrative arc will remain the same no matter the action taken by the player. Nobody cares if what he experienced was canon or not. It's about the potential of the videoludic medium to allow the player to experience their own little story, an emergent narrative, within the context of a bigger embedded narrative. Both are working together in the enjoyment of the game. The fact it's not "canon" doesn't take anything away from the experience.""
I'm probably starting to sound like a broken record but: Personal tastes/opinions alert.
Or perhaps BIG personal tastes/opinions alert. You seem to have a habit of speaking in terms that can easily enough be described as "too absolute". In particular saying something like nobody cares if what he (being presumptuous with the issue of gender again) was canon or not. I think it's generally bad form to speak as if one is some kind of deity who knows everything there is to know in the universe and who's word is absolute infallible law. In this case if even one person cares then that technically makes you wrong. I care, and I'm willing to bet that I'm not alone in the world on this count, especially when taking into account the large fanbase of the Final Fantasy games. Doesn't take anything away from the experience? Maybe or maybe not depending on the person.
""Then again you are wrong. You are mixing up two concepts. We could go wild and develop on different genre of gameplay mechanics and how they mesh with narration but lets focus on jRPGs. Those "blank" sections as you call them are still within the overarching narrative of the game.""
I never said that such a game doesn't have story or narrative. What did say, or argue, is that the story is incomplete. Or more specifically it's deliberately left incomplete and invites the character to complete it themselves, even if the ways in which this is done are what you might call minor. In this way the story is malleable and arguably has no solid form or identity of it's own. It can be compared to water. As Bruce Lee once said when water goes into a cup it becomes the cup. A game's story can be made to be able to take on numerous forms or variations depending on who's playing, but it also means that the game's story essentially has little or no solid form of it's own. So it's essentially a tradeoff.
"""Old Sage tells you in a cut-scene that you need to go through the forest to meet the nymph.// You fight your way through the forest with your party and gain loot and stuff.// At the end you are greeted by the nymph in a sexy cut-scene."
That first part is non-interactive and part of the overall embedded narrative put there by the designer. The third one is the same. The second one is more interesting. On the macro level of narration, it is known by the designer that the player will go through the forest. On the level micro level, you have the emergent narrative. Whatever the player experience in that forest, whatever he does and the decision he makes are part of his own little narrative that is his and his alone. It's not the point if what he did in there was canon or not. The important, in the videoludic medium, is that it was his.""
This may surprise you but I actually have absolutely no problem with this. This is essentially why I pointed out the concept of the silent protagonist. A player's own personal, internalized narrative existing solely in the players own mind is one thing, but if it actually gets written into the actual software of the story portion of the game, that's another. It would seem that that's when the whole concept of the story not having a solid form of it's own comes into play. You may have misunderstood and thought I didn't even like the idea of personalized, internal narratives. But that's not true. I'm just a little skeptical of the idea of not keeping the personal narratives internalized and trying to essentially fuse them with what is physically written on the game disc. Or in other words to blur or eliminate the line between the players personal, internalized narrative and the narrative that the game designers have written. This it would seem is exactly the kind of thing that Bioware seems intent on doing and as I said before I'm a little skeptical with regard to it.
""See above.""
That's a little vague.
""That is totally gaming's strength, to let the player experience his own narrative.""
Personal tastes/opinion alert
I already said that it is, and always has been, optional for video games to have narratives, but I'll put that issue aside for a moment in addition to your continued use of presumptuous language with regard to gender.
Maybe it can indeed be a strength for the player to experience his OR HER own narrative. But if the line between the players narrative and the games narrative becomes blurred there would seem to be a very real possibility of that strength turning into weakness for at least some people and quite possibly a lot of people.
I'm gonna bring movies here for a second. There are two pretty close but slightly different concepts we can bring here; empathy and identification. I'm not going to go on a big class on cognitivism but identification is, quite simply, identifying yourself to an avatar/character, taking along his moral values and so on. Empathy, on the other hand, is about putting yourself in the shoes of the avatar/character and wonder how you would react in his situation. Silent or speaking doesn't change a thing, it's just a myth. You can never totally identify yourself to an avatar/character, especially if he/she is morally ambiguous. On the other hand, you can feel empathy. You don't identify to a silent protagonist since there is nothing to identify to. But you can feel empathy for Nico Bellic and wonder what you'd do in his situation.
There would seem to be more concepts than just empathy and identification that can be brought in. It would seem that another one would be superimposition. I'm starting to sense a little inconsistency on your part. The first reference you made on your post was Anthony Burch at acmtv.com. And he actually outright states,
"Video game protagonists are written like blank slates. The lead in Hitman may have dialogue and some semblance of a personality, but he remains totally silent for at least 90 percent of the game. This allows the player to superimpose their own personality onto him and become even more immersed in the experience."
This is essentially the same thing I said with regard to the silent protagonist model. Mr. Burch is simply putting it a different way. If you're going to make a reference to support your argument I think it would probably be a good idea to make sure that the reference actually and fully agrees with you, or at the very least can't be used against you. And this is might be irrelevant but theoretically if we're taking about the inside of someone's mind, then pretty much anything is possible.
And by the way, it's identify WITH, not identify TO.
""Jim Sterling? Seriously? 
Here's a couple of paper by Marie-Laure Ryan and Jan Simons to really get a grasp on narration and games.""
Okay, I'm getting another elitist vibe here. Not only that but now definitely starting to sense some hypocrisy now.
I'm not 100% sure what your issue with Jim Sterling is, but he definitely seems to have something that Marie-Laure Ryan and Jan Simons don't have. And that's populist appeal. I could read over both of these essays very carefully and slowly formulate a thoughtful and well organized response. But I'm not going to because this is an internet blog on a popular culture website. This is NOT a college course or lecture.
And what I mean by hypocrisy is the fact that the first reference you made on your post is Anthony Burch. Mr. Burch is also a columnist on Destructoid.com, THE SAME as Jim Sterling. And Destructoid.com is a popular culture gaming website just like the Escapist and their slogan is "By gamers. For gamers". Don't get me wrong. I have nothing against intellectualism but I don't think that a blog on a popular culture website is the proper place for it. In this regard we're probably already pushing it as it is. Nevertheless, if you would prefer an article that is both relevant to the topic of this blog and at least a bit more intellectually engaging, or something along those lines, then I guess this one may suffice:
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/26643/Analysis_The_Conundrum_of_Final_Fantasy_XIII.php
Okay, on reflection I think that all this personal tastes/opinion business is at least partially my fault. In my previous post I suppose I got a little TOO wrapped up in my own personal tastes/opinion. And I'm very sorry about that.
In truth I actually do very much understand the appeal of the malleable story, or "water" model of video game story. In fact one of the games I'm currently playing is Dragon Age: Origins.
It's just that I personally like the other model a little better: the model of pre-determined, unchangeable stories. Or what I like to call the "Earth" model. Or what you might call the "it is what it is model" as opposed to the "it is what you want it to be" model. This is partially because I believe the Earth model has more storytelling potential as opposed to the Water model which seems to throw in story writing to some extent. And it's also partially because this model has given rise to most, if not all, of my most treasured video game stories. But once again that's just me and my own personal tastes and opinion for whatever they're worth.
And on an interesting note I am very much looking forward to the upcoming Heavy Rain. It's true that the story is quite malleable, possibly to an even greater extent than in a game like Mass Effect 2. But on the other hand the characters are all pre-determined and well established with their own distinctive personalities, backgrounds, and motivations. So it seems to me that Heavy Rain is going to be a kind of fusion of the two video game story models. I must say that I'm quite interested.
And yes, I like to use metaphors. They make it easier to get your point across, and their often fun. Or at least I think so.
