Short douchy version: LOLVIDEOGAMESTORY
Long version video form:
Super Duper Long ass Novel dedicated to taking this thread seriously -
First the actual plots they tell don't stack up to the best films and novels, why gamers think they are making a point when they bring up Transformers and Avengers is beyond me. If your best only competes with the shitty stuff, that's not an argument. The other issue is that gaming as a story telling medium isn't an organic story telling medium for more straight forward stories like a book or a movie or a tv show. Video games are more in line with porn. A porn has to get to the fucking someway, it has to be contrived. A game usually has to find a gameplay sequence, and said sequence has to be fun or you get the non-gameplay haters of things like Journey, Her Story, Gone Home, etc. A film? if the next thing is two dudes talking, then it'll move on to two dudes talking. If the next natural thing in a game is that two dudes talk, a lot of game devs will have to be like but first we need to make an action sequence, because we've had too much non action already.
Story telling is what needs to be different. Because the strengths of both mediums is different, and games need to stop with the film comparison. Stop with the desire to be cinematic, and stop with this obsession that film is the golden ticket. If the medium is interactive it should be focusing on creating more stories that are told interactively, and in those cases there are some genuine gems: Shadow of the Colossus, Journey, Planescape Torment, and experimental stuff like Papers, Please, Her Story, and Gone Home deserve admiration and not a whole lot of vitriol because you're butthurt over a review score. It doesn't need to be a better game than triple A buttfuck 6000, but the least you can do is appreciate something that tries to be unique and better for the medium from a story telling standpoint.
Gaming is great for escapism. You can buy the world of Game of Thrones, but you can figuratively be in a setting like that with the likes of Pillars of Eternity and The Witcher 3. It's a different beast, and gaming is better for you telling your own personal stories, not the oscar bait shit. Gaming language is more in its infancy when it comes to how they tell plots, and when people take advantage of the strengths of this medium it's great. The thing is there needs to be a balance with that as well. Some games take the interactive thing too far and forget exposition or basic story telling tropes.
So when you say video game story telling is close to film? I say it doesn't need to be, because it doesn't need to be anything like it. It needs to be more like what Metroid Prime, Shadow of the Colossus, Journey, Demon's Souls, and less cutscene abusive like say Metal Gear and Final Fantasy. That's not to say the cutscene stuff hasn't done wonderful jobs, because The Last of Us is very well done, but it's because of the story it tells with the player as much as the cutscene. The cutscene storyline wouldn't hold a candle to Children of Men. And it takes one too many story beats from it for that comparison not to be a thing.
Let me use an example as it pertains to a sidequest The Witcher 3, that my buddy towers wrote as it gets a lot of my points across. If you do not want to be spoiled on Bloody Baron Witcher 3 sidequest, don't read the quote and skip it.
Major Bloody Baron-related Witcher 3 spoilers follow.
Story=the plot, literally just what happens. Sometimes (if not often) the story itself doesn’t actually matter much. And you can take any good story, and make it sound like complete shit in how you tell it.
Storyteling=how the plot unfolds; the thing that gives the plot impact. Not always, but very often the primary thing that makes a story immediately enjoyable.
The story of the Bloody Baron quest is basically: Fat dude hires anaemic man-witch to find his wife and daughter who have mysteriously disappeared, and anaemic man-witch agrees to help because the baron might know where his daughter in-law is; she has also mysteriously disappeared... But it turns out that the fat dude actually drove his main bitch and daughter away by being a dick for the past 20 years (but wifey was a cuckolding ****, so yolo) and causing her to have a miscarriage. Anaemic man-witch finds his daughter in the big apple, but she hates her dad and is now a racist evangelist, and mummy’s run off to the convent—but been cursed by the evil, cannibalistic nuns in residence. After taking the baron to his main squeeze, she’s either insane and runs off into the hills with the baron to possibly be cured, or dies in his arms after the curse is removed (if you answer the quiz correctly), then the baron doesn’t give you your promised reward due to hanging himself—which is probably just to get out of paying you, the slippery prick.
Anyway…now the storytelling:
At the beginning of the Bloody Baron's quest, the storytelling makes it intriguing. As you're talking to him and exploring his house, it's obvious he's hiding something; and probably somehow partly to blame, and this impression is achieved with his defensive, suspicious dialogue and the clues Geralt uncovers. Here the story is that he’s hiding something, but the storytelling is what lets us know that he is, and also what makes this fact interesting.
The magic and voodoo doll stuff not only foreshadows the wife's crone-involvement, but also gives you a clue that the baron side quest is related to the witch side quest, which adds to the mystery by introducing new elements to the story, so that you want to figure out how they fit into what is actually going on.
But what really makes things interesting is how the exposition is handled, which allows the Bloody Baron to grow into a character you can actually empathise with. Because it's perfectly natural that Geralt’d be interrogating him, it never feels contrived or jarring that he goes on long monologues about his past. So although it's 100% exposition, it doesn't feel like exposition because of this simple trick. Without all that info he gave you he wouldn’t be an interesting character, but if he’d just been telling you without a good reason (he’s even reluctant to tell you early on, and only starts to talk as he becomes more desperate and guilty) it would have felt jarring, and would have made him a shallower, less interesting character—even though the story itself wouldn’t change. The important thing here is how the story is told.
The baron also tells you about his daughter not just himself, so when Geralt finally catches up to her, we already have an idea of what she’s like, which means the story doesn’t have to spend as much time establishing her—which is a good thing, because that would have made the pacing too slow. The story and her character also would not have been able to justify such exposition as it wouldn’t have helped much in Geralt finding her mother, which is her only interest in him. Thanks to the Baron’s exposition, she’s already partly established, and now meeting her only a little bit is needed so that we can believe in her. In fact, we might even feel sympathy towards her because the Baron is a dick and she obviously ran away willingly, even though the Baron says he idolises her.
The witch side of the two quests could have been handled a bit better in terms of both story and storytelling, I feel. Because Geralt can only talk to the Baron’s wife after she’s already out of her mind, it robs us of the closure we got with both the Baron and his daughter (even though the Baron himself gets his closure, selfish prick), and makes her into more of a plot device than a character in and of herself. But what did work about linking the two quests together was that the fate of the Baron and his wife were ultimately determined by something that had nothing to do with them personally, making the world seem a more complicated and harrowing place—which suits the tone of The Witcher 3 perfectly. But that’s a good thing about the story, not the storytelling.
Throw in a few nice little videogame storytelling touches along the way like the confrontation with the miscarriage monster that connected the story to the gameplay very well, as rather than just fighting random drowners in the bog, you’re actually directly involved in fighting (or protecting) something actually relevant to the plot, and you’ve got an okay story that is very well told.
But videogame storytelling is often bad because good storytelling can get in the way of good gameplay. Going back and forth between the bog and the Baron, hell just going back to him every five fucking minutes, was a pain in the arse and not at all enjoyable in terms of actual gameplay, but it had to be that way so that the story unfolded at the right pace; metering out little titbits of information to keep things interesting as you went along.
Bottom line gaming needs to adapt story telling techniques, but not use them verbatim. They lose why they work when they enter the realm of interactivity, and that is what it is.
But I'm not going to be like slashkice or plenty of others who like using the concept that gaming stories have potential. Because potential is a disappointment. Potential is what could have been. Potential is what could be. Greatness is different. Greatness you don't talk about potential, you talk about why it's great. Story telling in film is fantastic, and all one needs to do is go over some great films.
Video games? For starters they need to make more of an effort at non-violent story telling. I like big dumb action games and movies as the next guy, but anyone pretending Uncharted and Gears of War are thematically deep is out of their mind. Ditto for a lot of stuff Rockstar make.
And while we're at it Final Fantasy and Metal Gear have always had bad stories. The former is straight garbage, the latter is like Robocop endearing in that it's a stupid thing, but it's got a heart of gold so those moments with a thematic punch to them have some merit to them. And I love Metal Gear for it, but lets not carried away.
Other than that, I think I covered my rambling. Considering I got name dropped on page 1, I hope I delivered on whatever douchanomics were expected of me.
Not even touching the music one. Music is fantastic.
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