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Re: Cody Miller: No story in my entertainment plea | |
Posted By: Quantum | Date: 6/15/12 2:41 a.m. |
In Response To: Re: Cody Miller: No story in my entertainment plea (Hawaiian Pig) : Do you realize that this flies in the face of your old "Video games can : never tell a story" argument? : You just successfully demonstrated that a medium need not only function in
I really don't think it does. How does the capability of one particular medium to function in any given area have anything to do with what another does well? Different media are functionally different by definition. Film, as a more-or-less continuous sequence of images, can be a marvelous method for telling stories. That's what film is, essentially: a sequence of events perceived as progressing through time—one picture after another. Cody's argument (as I read it—correct me if I misrepresent you) is that the thing that makes video games video games is the gameplay. Interactivity is the only thing that separates game from film. Therefore, if the story is not told or created through gameplay, it's not really the video game telling the story. It may give context to what you're playing, and in that sense be plot-driven, but if the plot drives gameplay it sacrifices the fundamental essence of the video game. Exceedingly rarely does a game come along where your interaction with the software actually is the plot. I find this argument attractive (thought I'm not completely convinced) because it suggests that games can tell stories, stories that are radically new and different from what has come before, and that are unique to gaming and couldn't be presented properly in other media. I remember reading a bit Narcogen posted on Rampancy.net about video games as a storytelling medium, and how most of the potential had still not been explored. It was part of a larger and still unresolved dialogue about video games as art, but expressed frustration about how much of the debate was framed around an idea of storytelling that did not cater to the unique interactive quality of games. *20 minutes later* Ah, here it is.
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