The best games I have played tend to mix a good story with game play you have to think about. And to be honest, in my zealousness at trying to defend the medium, I’ve painted myself into a corner - in reality, I like many games, some of them violent and brainless (just as I like a range of films, from Merchant Ivory to Die Hard). I like feeling as though I’m in the game, controlling a character’s movements in realtime. What sort of adventure games do you mean? I’ve never really liked RPG games, if that’s what you mean, because I hate turn-based mechanics (although I quite liked Knights of the Old Republic, and I ought to give Mass Effect another go). Keith, how about Adventure games? You know, the graphical ones, the descendants from the old Infocom days? Even today there are some decent titles. Uncharted does it really well, and I’m also looking forward to Heavy Rain. It means engaging the player in something that’s tight, convincing and thrilling. And interactivity doesn’t necessarily mean arbitrary choices and storylines - heck, it multiplies the amount auf assets you’d have to generate. And a game always fails when it simply hires some Hollywood guy. Writing for games is a kind of writing that’s totally different from prose or movie scripts. But the player’s impression is: the story sucks … Just like a VERY bad actor breaks the illusion, it’s the same with technical and graphical shortcomings. Even if you have a great script with great dialogue - the story won’t work if there’s no time (or money, which is the same) to animate characters (faces and limbs) properly. With ingame storytelling you have to carefully look into the game mechanics - does it fit? Does it keep the controls simple? In many cases players have a lot to learn about basic game mechanics and controls - especially casual players - so they’re simply not able to pay attention to the story. If you choose the safe route, which is pre-defined cutscenes, you need to find a good balance with gameplay, because you don’t want to go all Metal Gear Solid. On the story side you have to decide, how to tell your story. The graphics you have to generate don’t have to fit in a certain frame that’s defined by a cinematographer - no, they have to be dynamic, the have to scale, they have to change. You have to spend an awful lot of time on the technical foundation, the engine. You always know what you’re aiming for, you have a certain amount of movie minutes to generate, and you know the tools how to achieve that. Pre-production, shooting, post-production. With movies you have a way of producing them that has been formed over decades. So I might be able to comment on why stories in games suck. And I’ve been writing screenplays for a TV show. Not necessarily huge titles like Uncharted (I only get to translate such games from time to time). I’m a writer for video games (and using Scrivener for those ). They change other media, and they are changed by them - it’s not like “the book” has been the same for centuries. Not so much on the Cheetos front, yes, there are “fast food” games which offer a quick fix of cheap enterntainment, and yes, the medium needs to mature, just like movies and novels did, but there already are games that offer unique experiences, storys, characters - games that are art.
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