Exhibit E

And I forgot, but seeing the comments reminded me:

It's rare these days to be surprised by the ending of a movie or book - particularly blockbusters.  You never go into one wondering, "Will the good guys win?"  They will win.  At best you ask yourself, "*How* will the good guys get out of this terrible predicament?" and the movie will surprise you with their ingenuity.  At best a supporting character gets killed.  There's been a recent notable exception and I won't tell you its name lest I spoil it for you, but it wasn't a genre blockbuster.

And that's one of the things that makes games, sporting events, and even politics pretty awesome.  You don't know if the good guys are going to win, and occasionally it's a titanic struggle as the opposing forces gain and lose ground against each other.  A struggle worth telling stories about.  (I think this is why, to this day, I still enjoy the practically decisionless core of D&D - the 'to hit' and 'damage' rolling - or "chopping down the flesh tree" as my friend Ed Del Castillo pejoratively calls it - essentially just a random staccato race down a pair of tracks, a mini-game of chutes and ladders, still compelling to me when properly tuned.  "I nearly didn't make it that time.")

Unless the game in question is one of these single-player story-telling games, in which case the outcome is as predestined as a summer blockbuster and the game is designed to lead you to that outcome...albeit after a lot of quicksaving.

Comments

[Justin Keverne]

That's a fair point to make about movies, but I'd argue that right now Television is the high water mark for storytelling. Look at something like Lost or Battlestar Galactica, shows that are unafraid to kill off major characters, where it's very difficult to predict what is going to happen but which manage to surprise without being implausible.

As for one of the other issues you brought up. Why would you even consider taking the story-centric elements of a game out to watch them separately? Would you want to watch only a few scenes of a movie separate from the whole? As you said games like BioShock or Portal couldn't be treated in such a fashion, and really any games that could are simply badly made games, the quality of the story isn't the problem the way it’s implemented is.

A lot of the issues are clearly personal ones, and that's fine, we all value different things. But for my part I think that there been a problem when it comes to game storytelling over the last decade or two, and that's that developers simply aren't experimenting with new ways of telling stories anymore. The majority of them found the Mission-Cutscene-Mission structure and stuck to it. It's a terrible way of telling stories in games because it doesn't play to the strength of either games or stories. It's too restrictive in structure for a good game, and too fractured to make for a well told story.

[Pat O'Hara]

Yes, I agree that the Mission-Cutscene-Mission approach is poor, but it's easy for the programmer and for certain gamers. I coach a Lego League team (Middle Schools boys). They don't talk about how cool the story is, they talk about how quickly they got to the end. Unfortunately they also buy a lot of games. Capitalism has many advantages, this is not one of them :-(.

Pat O