For School: What Games for a Games as Lit. Class?

[Srrrh]

Probably mentioned (at least I hope so) but Silent Hill 2 has the best storyline of any video game I have yet to encounter. It could be worth doing a whole section on the Silent Hill series (or at least the original three) as you then see the story with the Cult's involvement with Harry (Harry's involvement in the Cult?) and then later on, how Heather plays into it all.

However, Silent Hill 2 stands out as the best storyline because although you have your protagonist, James, you can be equally invested in Eddie's and Angela's stories. So I don't know if it would quite come into First-Person Storytelling but it has to come in somewhere!

As for Immersion, I get quite completely immersed in Prince of Persia: Sands of Time. However I would say that's less about the plot itself (it's not a great plot) but how the game plays out. So at first glance, I'm advocating this because the gameplay is fun and therefore has no place here, right? I disagree. If you're reading a book, sometimes the plot can be boring but the writing itself keeps you engaged. So similarly, with a game, the plot can be boring but the gameplay itself keeps you engaged. However, I suppose if you go too far down this road you'll start getting games like CoD included just because they're immersive, so maybe PoP isn't such a great idea.

I hope this helps

 

[Thaius]

I'm just going to ignore the Final Fantasy comment, as it's simply not true. That may be all you do in battle, but not in the entire game. Do you mean that the game also has wandering around the world map? I was taking that for grant it considering that adventure games do that too. I was being literal when I said the game only had two button. The direction pad navigates the menu, A chooses, B cancels and start and select only activate outside of a menu and have the function of bringing up a menu.

But if you want to discuss a completely modern JRPG, how about the most recent JRPG to have a demo released on XBOX live (the name is in Katakana.) It's basically pure Menu navigation and visual novel style NPC interactions along with a small amount of exploration.

Man, you consistently misinterpret so many things I say on so many levels I literally cannot explain what I actually mean here. It would take far too long. You're severely misunderstanding the levels of activity in games. It's not a matter of how many buttons you push, it's what they mean. Final Fantasy games have menu systems that allow for complex gameplay. The true gameplay of a Final Fantasy game is not in pressing two buttons on a battle screen, it's in customizing your characters and abilities outside of battle and effectively using them in combat. Just because only two buttons are used does not mean it is as simple as only ever clicking dialogue choices. You're comparing them in a way that makes me think you would boil down the entirely of Basketball to "throwing a ball," or chess to "moving a piece of plastic."

I never said we have to look for intent, I said there has to be intent. Way I see it, at least. Perhaps in more complex artworks this is not the case, but in such a simple game as Pong we would be doing nothing but making up strained analogies. It is not necessarily that we have to uncover the originally intended meaning of the creator (though I hardly see as little value in that pursuit as you do, but authorial intent is one of those issues), but if the creator had no particular intent it is rare that the artwork will be worth analyzing.

And it's impossible for their to be NO intent. "Here's my little Newgrounds flash game, my intent is trolling people with a pointless game."

Again with taking what I say every way except that which I mean it. It's like you look for interpretations of what I say that will most effectively make me look like an idiot. Let me specify: artistic intent. If someone is not trying to make a work of art, it is debatable whether it is actually art or not in the first place, but regardless, there will rarely be anything artistic worth looking into. Pong was developed as nothing more than a simple game, with no intended artistic meaning whatsoever. Finding symbolism in Pong would be an exercise in futility and taking things out of context. Perhaps we cannot know the author's intent for a work, but it is extremely dangerous to take things entirely out of context when analyzing an artwork. An exercise made entirely of that activity? No thank you.

 

[KingofMadCows]

Legacy of Kain series - Immersion, First Person Storytelling
Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines - Immersion, First Person Storytelling, and RPG study
Planescape: Torment - Immersion, First Person Storytelling, and RPG study
Neverwinter Nights 2: Mask of the Betrayer - Immersion, First Person Storytelling, and RPG study

 

[Halo Fanboy]

Man, you consistently misinterpret so many things I say on so many levels I literally cannot explain what I actually mean here. It would take far too long. You're severely misunderstanding the levels of activity in games. It's not a matter of how many buttons you push, it's what they mean. Final Fantasy games have menu systems that allow for complex gameplay. The true gameplay of a Final Fantasy game is not in pressing two buttons on a battle screen, it's in customizing your characters and abilities outside of battle and effectively using them in combat.

Did you lose track of the conversation? Here you said:

As for menu-based battle systems, I said this concept of gameplay generalization had been used before. What makes adventure games and visual novels different is that it's all they do.

...

Your argument was that only Adventure games and visual novels rely on menu based interaction.
And later you said:

But tons of genres do use nothing but menu navigation context sensetive commands. Final Fantasy has just about two buttons, select and go back/cancel, and I can say the same for pretty much any console rpg of that era...

I'm just going to ignore the Final Fantasy comment, as it's simply not true. That may be all you do in battle, but not in the entire game. At all.

So how is what you do at the equip screen so different from what you do in battle that it doesn't deserve to be called a menu naigation system?

Just because only two buttons are used does not mean it is as simple as only ever clicking dialogue choices. You're comparing them in a way that makes me think you would boil down the entirely of Basketball to "throwing a ball," or chess to "moving a piece of plastic."

Have you forgotten the entire point of this conversation? The entire point of which is to demonstrate that the use of context sensative commands and menus is a tenuous reasoning to link genres together. You are arguing against your own point and you haven't even realized it.

Pong was developed as nothing more than a simple game, with no intended artistic meaning whatsoever.

And how do you know this?

 

[Pakkie]

Portal 2.

 

[Thaius]

The entire point of which is to demonstrate that the use of context sensative commands and menus is a tenuous reasoning to link genres together.

Perhaps this is where the problem is coming from. I am not arguing that just because two genres use context sensitive commands and menus means they are linked. Heck, Legend of Zelda has been using context-sensitive commands to an extent for ages; many games do. I'm saying certain genres (namely, visual novels and adventure games) tend to use them in such a way that violence is not an integral aspect of the gameplay. This results in vastly different storytelling from the vast majority of other games. Final Fantasy may be entirely menu-based, but it differs from visual novels in that, while any menu navigation in a visual novel is simply story choice (outside of many menu and game settings), menu navigation in Final Fantasy is a complex set of rules and settings that all go toward customizing and organizing one's battle tactics, which are then implemented in battles. While adventure games are a bit more complex than visual novels, they follow a similar pattern; their actions are about applying things, talking to people, giving people things; the context-sensitive commands are used in such a way that violence is not a part of the gameplay. I know this is not true of every game in the genre, but this is an art form; not everything will fall neatly into genre definitions. Nothing ever does.

What I am linking together are genres that use context-sensitive commands to a huge, if not complete, extent in a way that eliminates violence as a necessary part of gameplay. Violence allows concrete game structure (which is necessary to a game: live to win, die to lose, clear-cut criteria for winning and losing) to a story, where structure should not be known to the one experiencing the work. This is harder to do for stories not involving violence because "winning" is a much more abstract concept. Visual novels and adventure games generalize or minimize the controls in such a way that their stories are capable of more variance. I think that's worth studying.

Pong was developed as nothing more than a simple game, with no intended artistic meaning whatsoever.

And how do you know this?

I suppose I can't quote a source that says, "Pong was not developed as a work of art," but I bet you anything that's because no one has ever thought something so absurd. I bet you even more you will never find anything saying the creators of Pong had any artistic vision for it. When games were that simple, who was thinking about art? You could barely put five pixels on the screen; it simply was not a concern. It was still amazing that user input could have such an effect on onscreen actions. It was akin to when movie theaters just showed video of a running horse for five minutes; no one filmed that because it meant something powerful, they filmed it because cool, moving pony! Same goes for Pong, and I highly doubt you'll find anything that contradicts that.

 

[Thaius]

I think it is important to consider that video games are much more diverse than any other artistic medium.

Lol. Go to the theatre someday, or read more than 1 book sometime. Videogames are one of the narrowest media, because of the constraints of setting the story in a gameplay framework. That what makes them a fun challenge. That and writing non-linear narratives.

Despite your awesome avatar, I have to say that if you read the context of that claim you would understand that I am not talking about the diversity of storytelling in the medium (an area in which you are absolutely right), but the diversity of the medium itself. This is not about the variety of stories being told but the variety of things the medium can do. Games can tell stories like film and literature, but film and literature cannot be "games," especially competitive ones. Games could use a lot more diversity in terms of their stories, but the very nature of the medium allows for more applications, both story-based and not, than other mediums.