A1 said:
""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.
Well sorry if I sounded a bit elitist. It's just that there are a lot of people that are getting some facts wrong and it irks me.
""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.
Alright, that one was a bit of personal opinion. I think that most FF stories are incredibly cliche. But see, a good story can save a bad game such as good gameplay can save a bad story. But when you trim so much gameplay elements (as it seem with FFXIII if I follow Simon Parkin's hands-on with the game back on Eurogamer) that all you have left is non-interactive story sections inter-cut with with very linear gameplay section, you better have a damn good story to keep me hooked.
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.
Yeah, I fucked up the the link, here it is [http://experiencepoints.blogspot.com/2010/01/uncharted-2-avatar-and-mistaken-mediums.html]. The point is again, games are not movies. Why should the ultimate goal of the videoludic medium to be more like the cinematographic medium? You can throw a "Personal tastes/opinions alert." at me but still, why should game do away with what makes them games and become more like movie. Having better stories does not mean having less interaction and more non-interactive sections. It means, for video games, integrating story to what makes a game a game, interaction, rules, gameplay. Every art form has its own way of telling us story, giving us a narrative. Let me quote you an excerpt form Ryan's book, Avatar of Story, where she herself quotes movie theorist David Bordwell:
[...] for Bordwell, narration occurs when signs are arranged in such a way as to inspire the mental construction of a story, and it does not necessarily imply a narratorial speech act (2006, p. 185).
Dance, painting, music, architecture, sculpture, literature, photography and movies all use what is unique to them and use it to make stories. So should video games if they want to evolve as an expressive medium and an art.
""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.
Sure, goes back to my opinion on FF in general but you express the problem yourself. To fully appreciate the movie you need to know about the story o the game beforehand, thus, the movie hardly holds on itself. Sure, it's a special case because the reason this movie exist is especially for the fans and not, you know, movie people.
""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.
Dude, I was not pulling that out of my ass as some kind of "I think that...". This is an argument that is made in many video game theories books, university essays and articles. Hell, it's probably the best concept that came out of the narratologist/ludologist debate some years ago. You can call me out on "oh it's only a theory" and so on but don't say it's my taste/opinion. Second, if you look back at that quote from Bordwell, you'll understand that all those games you talked about may not be narrative in the old sense of the term, but the narrative act is implicit. The story is both in the signs for some of those (best example being Flower) or in the emergent narrative for all the other, such as sport games. There's even an whole chapter in Ryan's book Avatar of Story about the narration being sports events.
""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.
Maybe I made a few bad choice of words but are you really ready to argue with me that the fact Cloud killed one or two more slimes matters that much when talking about what is canon? The overall narrative arc stays the same (in most FF games anyway) no matter what the player does in the interactive sections. They are still under that narrative arc but does not affect it directly. They only affect the player's experience, his own narrative.
""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.
I don't know if you are talking about Oblivion or something when you talk about "water" but that is an whole other issue. I'm starting to have trouble following 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.""
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.
Yeah, okay.
""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.
A) Sorry I didn't use his/her all through this but I'm just trying to save time.
B) It's not about blurring them but rather have them work together in order to give a fuller experience to the player. Environmental storytelling (using the environment to tell the player a story or parts of it) can be used toward this and is both placed there by the designer but left to the player to experience or not on his own.
"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.
Touché. may have been more careful when choosing my weapons. I won't talk too much about this since I haven't read too much about the concept of superimposition. I'll look into this and how it works with games.
""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.
Well now we're going into populism vs. intellectualism. I was just trying to bring something maybe a bit more complete and new to the table. If I want to debate about narration, I'd rather quote some university professors than a blogger. Nothing against the man, but not my go to guy when it comes to theoretical debate.
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.
Fair point. But as I said, just trying to bring something new to the table here.
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. 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
Nice article. But I'm not an hypocrite. It's not because Burch and Sterling are both columnist for Destructoid that I consider them on the same level. Burch writes for other websites (like the Escapist) and make some of the best posts on Destructoid. Seriously. Sterling made a post where he criticized indie games [http://www.destructoid.com/indie-games-don-t-have-to-act-like-indie-games-162789.phtml](nothing really wrong with that although he did sound a bit anti-intellectual), got himself criticized by G4's Sterling McGarvey, loved by David Jaffe [http://criminalcrackdown.blogspot.com/2010/02/go-destructoid.html] who took every good arguments Sterling made and proceeded to rant about anything that does not blow up, and intelligently analyzed by GameSetWatch [http://www.gamesetwatch.com/2010/02/opinion_in_defense_of_that_rec.php]. What did Sterling do? He made a funny video [http://www.destructoid.com/the-videogame-show-what-i-ve-done-art-games-163502.phtml].
Anyways, that's about it for now.
