lol Haven't made a blog post in over a year actually. But it's a new day.

Anyway, I was thinking about storylines and gaming. Gamespot's feature on narrative and gaming really intrigued me since I write stories of my own from time to time, and it's something I really enjoy doing. But yeah, I've read plenty of books, seen plenty of movies and played plenty of games and I'm of the opinion that gaming is a bit behind the other two mediums that I mentioned when it comes to storytelling. Don't get me wrong, there are quite a few games that do masterful jobs in terms of storytelling, some of the Metal Gear games instantly comes to mind, but... At the same time, I'm not sure gaming will ever quite capture the depth of a great novel or the intangible human element found in the acting performances of a motion picture. I think the underlying problem is in interactivity, games are an interactive medium, otherwise they'd be film. I think that ultimately hinders, at least from an emotional standpoint, how effective games can be at telling a great personal story. For example, let's say that the character you're controlling is supposed to be this tortured, complex individual who abhors violence or something, but he finds himself in a situation where he has to use it to obviously advance through the plot, the problem that I see, is that while the character may show these traits during the cutscenes, during gameplay you can make the guy a violent killing machine who goes after everything and anything with no mercy as opposed to what his character is actually supposed to be. Someone who wants to shed as little blood as necessary, and I think that, in many ways, kills any kind of moral complexity that said character could potentially have, or more accurately, the concrete, realistic element found in the characters in books and movies. I feel that that creates a contridiction in the character's supposedly established personality. The good news is that most video game writers get that, I'm not sure I've ever seen a video game character with such a realistically strict moral code or anything. The bad news, is that it also limits the kinds of characters we see in video games.

We all know the video game archtypes, the badass, the damsel-in-distress, the angsty, spiky-haired teenage hero, etc. And yeah, those can be great, if executed properly. I'd say Auron from FFX and Solid Snake from the Metal Gear series are two great examples of a video game "badass" who don't fall entirely into that stale cliche. The problem, is that we see characters who fall into the "stale" category too much, which leads to oversaturation, which then leads to Zzz... Boredom. What happens is that game writers try to feed us a "complex" character by giving them a "deep" backstory, and having that is wonderful, but that's not what a character is... That's not what a human being is. Yes, our backstories mold us into who we are, but they're not what we are. I haven't yet seen a truly dynamic video game character, one that truly changes, aside from crying in a cutscene or something, when something emotional has happened to them. (i.e., the death of someone they loved or at least anything that strikes a personal chord.) What we end up seeing is a nice cutscene or two but that's it. After that, the character's gameplay retains the same, there's no feeling. You lose the sense that the character has been affected. Maybe make the character's movements sluggish, weaken his stats briefly, or something just so I know that said death wasn't just a part of the plot. Films, many times, are guilty of this too, but obviously less often than video games. Highly realistic, detailed graphics have made characters look human-like, but they still haven't quite captured the human element. They've advanced little from the SNES days of storytelling, particularly RPGs whose foundation is mostly based on the story, the only difference is... you guessed it, the graphics.

Dialogue is another thing preventing games from really taking that next level, in my opinion, toward becoming an appreciated form of narrative for the general public. If you're speech sounds awkward and/or robotic, it really lessens that chance that someone will take you seriously. This is really becoming a glaring issue with the growing use of voice actors and actresses, yeah, sometimes they're the ones at fault, but a terrible script will make the best VA sound like a moron. Video game writers, and translators need to take a little more time developing coherent dialogue so we can have less cheesy, and more engaging interactions. A great example of this, for me anyway, is Final Fantasy VII. That game could have really used a tune-up for its horrendous script. It's riddled with typos that, at times, killed the plot's momentum because you have to sit there and figure out what the hell is it that they're saying.

Just like how video game characters are hindered by the fact that we "play" them, video game plots are, as well. Think about the games that you've played that you consider to have deep plots, or great storylines. I bet a lot of them have similiar scenarios, "The End of the World is approaching," "Some random evil dictator," etc, and that's fine. It's wonderful, the problem is that... with gaming, you can't really see much else. It's almost always an "epic," why? Because you have to play the game. We love to shoot, use swords, punch, kick, whatever, and it's great, it's why we play, but that also kinda leads us to more of the same... The same ol' epic with a few twists here and there every so often. Subplots sometimes delve into a character's more personal story, but then again, does it really end up affecting how you save the world, or really the fact that you have to save it at all? Not usually. In the end, most game narratives would fall into the action category of film, the category where we often find lots of action, of course, but little character development... Again, not a terrible thing, but it doesn't foster creativity on a literary level. Now some genres, particularly the point-and-click adventure genre, can be, and usually are, an exception to the rule, but... How many point-and-click games, that aren't gimmicky, do you see nowadays?

I'm not hating on video game narratives, they're wonderful and a few have even inspired me. I love the stories that some video games provide, I just am not yet ready to put them on the level of a novel, or a film. Maybe in the future, it'll change but from what I've seen, we're still some time away from that, if we get there at all.