Video games are the best medium for story telling but hardly anyone does it right
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What makes them the best?
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What does doing it right look like?
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Player agency. You canāt influence a book or film or play, or any other way we traditionally tell stories. You are a passenger to the story; the audience to an event. With a game, you are the agent to which the events revolve around. The protagonistās decisions are guided by you, the stake of failure or the glories of victory are yours. You have the ability to experience settings in ways that you canāt in other media. Thereās not a 4th wall in the way that it normally exist in storytelling, and thatās exciting and interesting.
Encouraging investment by engaging with the agency of the player. One of the best examples I can think of is Papers, Please. The mechanics of checking passports is the story telling mechanism and itās effective. The ever increasing restrictions on travel tell you so much more than a cutscene or journal entry does.
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well said and i agree itās exciting and interesting, but i am not sure i agree with agency as an objectively good quality in art. if that were the case, dinner theater would be more popular than movies, all of our songs would sound like this, and all our novels would be mad libs.
but then again i guess thatās just, like, your contrarian opinion man
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I think the player agency aspect with respect to how deeply you interact with the story is unique. Easter eggs can exist in other mediums but with a game you choose whether to read that codec, listen to that audio file, follow that side quest. Some games use these more effectively/organically than others but the diverse way of relating story to player and at what level of depth is very unique to games.
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I was being a tad extreme for the sake of the thread lol.
But I stand by it is better to be part of a story then told one.
And dinner theater IS better than movies. Just cause it aināt as popular doesnāt mean itās not as good!
edit: Iāve never cared as much about any character in any TV show, book, or film dying as much as Iāve cared about a party member in a permadeath game getting got, just saying.
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I find the playerās agency interesting but extremely limiting in the kinds of narrative you can do well. It works for telling a story about a place, say My House or Blue Prince, or telling a metastory about agency, like in Davey Wredenās games. But those are usually the only ones where I wouldnāt rather watch a movie of whatever story a game is telling
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Iāll toss in Deus Ex (cue clip of Scottie telling the computer āno bloody D,C,B,or Aā) - og 2000 Deus Ex, nothing later, as an example of a powerful story should the player choose to engage with it fully. Itās one Iāve retold to friends over the years since playing it, bringing my own narrative flavourtown.
My memory of that game blends in with my lived experiences, hard to dissociate self from my instance of JC Denton.
I am JC Denton.
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I appreciate the focus on agency as a key element games do well and could do better. I also have to stand up for other media a moment, in two ways:
- Other media do have agency. Plays, for instance, allow a lot of agency in how actors and productions adapt the text to performance. Museums and other exhibits often use participatory elements as part of the experience. Lots of choices exist in the hands of the director and actor (player).
- I think there are many ways stories can be told. Sometimes agency is important for that. But I appreciate the existence of stories told from the outside as well. Sometimes itās better to position the audience as a listener and interpreter than as an agent in the narrative. Do we all need to be Macbeth or Lady Macbeth or Banquo to follow the lines of ambition, betrayal, and murder in the narrative? Iād carry that back to games. Itās fine that JRPGs and, really, most story-based games choose to take out player agency in the main storyline. Theyāre not better or worse for it; theyāre just not pursuing an experiential narrative. Agency is great - one can do a nuanced player-perspective story where the player character is partially mysterious or foreign to the player (hi, Pathologic 2). But Iād also say itās still worthwhile to read The Plague by Albert Camus.
ETA: To bring my thinking back to agency, one thing games do really well is highlight the workings of the system. The strategy or god-sim game player perspective - seeing the intersections and processes in a whole model or network - thatās something other media struggle with. That isnāt a narrative gift but a representational one, and itās one where agency (the capacity to tweak or change the model) plays a more important role.
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I did find an excitement in these as a kid
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Choose your own adventure books are more game than book.
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āChase the Chuck Wagonā from the Ralston Purina Company is another one on that line.
Look at that happy guy!
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Wait, is this not what weāre all doing?
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30 frames per second is fine and 1080p is clear enough.
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Iām only posting my deeply held, sincere religious beliefs (I am generally being honest, though, lol)
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my contrarian video game take is that starting games from a menu or OS, instead of booting directly into it, is for heathens and dilettantes
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