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Im in South Africa at the moment, broke the little finger of my left hand, so I cant play guitar..... :(
Back on Oct 7th (hopefully) :( Anyhoo CYA, Loveya, etc, etc, etc, ra ra ra broke the little finger of my left hand, so I cant play guitar..... :(
Set that pinky with some tape and a stick and do it like Django. Id..
No wonder Id have never managed to pull off a decent narrative. Willits seemed to completely glaze over the fact that one of the most important things for a compelling storyline is meaningful interaction between multiple characters. Personally I don't think a Game will EVER do that as well as a novel or movie so developers should stop harping on about wanting to create a narrative masterpiece and actually concentrate on bringing us awesome gameplay. YEH. No wonder Id have never managed to pull off a decent narrative. [...cut...] Personally I don't think a Game will EVER do that as well as a novel or movie so developers should stop harping on about wanting to create a narrative masterpiece and actually concentrate on bringing us awesome gameplay. YEH.
Storyline and Gameplay is a false division in the interactive arts. But the problem, and heart of the issue, is not that there are bad writers of games(though, honestly there are) or that somehow games cannot create meaningful interactions, but that the games industry as a whole has approached the problem in the wrong way and have only accidentally stumbled upon the solutions here and there. Even games championed for their 'story' are limited in their abilities to truely comb the depths that interactive narratives truely have. 'Storytelling' is wrong, 'Storycreation' is what games are about. Games are, fundimentally, all about the player's entertainment. My belief is that the entertainment derived from gaming is fundimentally linked to narrative and story... it's just that the story is your own and you're experiancing it. "I jumped into a pit and died." "I 0wned this n00b with a headshot." "I stole a car and ran down 3 hookers and then the cops caught me." "I misplaced the L shaped block, so now I can't get a tetris" The trick is making these minor stories somehow build and climax in a way that is natural and player driven. Half-Life 2, for instance, you naturally move from point to point along a story, and it feels very much like it is driven by the player. Things are reacting to you, or you stumble upon something, or a door blocks your path and you find the hatch on top of the building to sneak in. The few points of the game that jarred me was when it seemed I was given little choice but to follow the wishes and commands of the NPCs to head toward the next point of the story laid out for me. Let me find my own story! I never tell my buddies about how Gordan Freeman went to Xen... I talk about how I killed a helicopter with an RPG standing on a cliff. Stories are made of choices of the protaganist, and his reactions to the antagonist. In games, the protaganist is the player, and the antagonist(s) are what the game throws at him. All these minor stories, parts of the larger epic of your own gameplay experiance, are what are important in a game, and it feels like most 'story' games miss this point by attempting to force you to conform to 'their story'. RPGs such as Fallout or Obivion have generally let you take the minor stories and encounters you face, building them into that large epic. [...paste!...]Willits seemed to completely glaze over the fact that one of the most important things for a compelling storyline is meaningful interaction between multiple characters.[/...paste!...] This is true. We do need better characters to interact with, and be part of our story. It's sad that the Companion Cube is the best NPC character in a video game for a long time, though many RPGs do have some good ones. I think a key element missing here is that most NPCs don't do anything beside 'assist' the player, but don't have a goals or motives of their own. They don't appear to be 'playing' their own story out. Sidekicks are generally decent, but again break the illusion when they die and either it's planned by the game, and again not 'your story', or it's game over, which just sucks. People don't tell their friends the next day about the canned storyline they sat and watched, or the narrowly-scripted combat encounter they were led through, they tell their friends about the spontaneous events that THEY made happen.
What really needs to be explored is the thoughts/feelings resulting from when the player acts instead of just filling in a hole in a finished story.
what they should really do, is make an action game that's not-entirely-linear, with varied gameplay, for COOP. That way, you play with a few friends and plan (or not) how you play, leading to complex circumstances/interactions. Good AI would also help, if the game's supposed to be setting up interesting stories as opposed to simply arcade-type action.
By not-entirely-linear, I don't mean like MMORPGs or anything like that - I mean like Far Cry, (where there was really only 1 or 2 effective routes at any given time) except less linear (let the player decide to use vehicles or gameplay options for himself more often). People don't tell their friends the next day about the canned storyline they sat and watched, or the narrowly-scripted combat encounter they were led through, they tell their friends about the spontaneous events that THEY made happen.
I think one of the things that makes Portal work like that is the escape sequence. You have to make the decision to break out yourself, even though that's really what the designers intend you to do.
...and then you realised that a) everyone else loved GLaDoS too and b) that GLaDos is an old lady. Brrr, so dirty.
HL2 was too scripted for me, I felt pushed from sequence to sequence all the time. Damn mapping! Cave Story had a perfectly introduced story in my opinion. No long boring intro sequences with too much information to remember. But then I think that games to not need to have a story at all. At least certain genres can do very well without. ... dovetails with Warren Spector's prime directive of game storytelling: what makes games special is that the dialog can go both ways. They don't always have to do that (see games like hl2 or cod4) but the areas where they do (deus ex) is where the fertile ground truly lies.
So what do we all see in Quake, then? :P being able to slow monsters down to a crawl or teleporting a few meters in front of you (through monsters)?
but you can only click on monsters. puzzles are about how to get out of a map without running out of monsters to telefrag in the right places.
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