BloatedGuppy said:
Mandalore_15 said:
By that logic all videogame characters would be marginal in novels, seeing as they're completely different mediums with different propensities to explore characterisation.
There is nothing in the medium of gaming that restricts it from having stronger characterization, unless we're referring to blank slate protagonists.
As for television shows, if you think Ellie is on par with characters as seen in The Sopranos, The Wire, Breaking Bad, Mad Men, et al than I'm afraid we're just going to have to agree to STRONGLY disagree. She is a one-note character that would be a relative afterthought in more established media. And I'm not having a go at The Last of Us or Ellie either. I liked both and thought she was a good step forward.
Actually, video games typically do restrict character depth, simply due to the length of content. Most games just don't have the time a TV show or novel has to flesh out characters. You're talking tens, if not hundreds of hours in TV shows, all of it character interaction or decision making. Take an episode of a law enforcement show for example. Most of the episode is spent examining the crime scene, collecting evidence, processing evidence, theorizing, etc. The fistfight/gunfight, IF the arrest in said episode even contains a fight, lasts minutes on average. Let's give that fight a very generous five minute duration. In an episode that occupies an hour time slot, there is about forty to forty-five minutes of actual programming. Once again, let's give it the benefit of the doubt and assume this episode fills the full forty-five minutes. So forty minutes of story, five minutes of fighting (which in TV shows generally still adds to the story, as the combatants generally converse). This is multiplied by however many episodes per season the show gets (usually around 20ish on average), to give eight hundred minutes, or slightly over 13 hours per season of story, compared to one hundred minutes, or less than two hours, of "combat".
Now let's look at a game. I'll use a forty-hour play time for my example, since that seems to be pretty average. More than double the length of a TV season in duration. Yet, in this forty hours, depending on the game, you'll likely see one to two hours of cutscenes, and spend thirty-eight or thirty-nine hours in "combat", or solving puzzles, or whatever obstacles that game uses (obvious exceptions are games like TellTale's The Walking Dead, which are structured more like a television show than a typical game).
How is a game supposed to flesh out characters as much as a show in less than ten percent of the time that show gets for character development?