In this post, following G-Hero's Alan Wake discussion, I am going to address what I like to call "Smart games" and how they are impacting the world of video games and making some game design companies rethink before they launch their game(s).
Gaming has come along way. From eating tiny orbs and fruits with a little yellow man and his wife while being chased by ghosts(?) to high octane first person shooters and even now where the controller is no longer needed and the body of the player becomes the remote (Kinect). Gaming has broken from the traditional form of storytelling and allows the player to experience the story instead of only reading and interpreting it. In the beginning, games like Mario and duck hunter gave the world of gaming a bad name. Yes they were loads of fun to play and experience but they lacked a sense of narrative and carried no worth after the control was put down. The player would simply turn on the console, play the game, loose or win, then replay it or shut it off. This left no room for any sort of educational value or even any attempt to entertain the player with a well thought out and written story. These games had little worth in the eyes of academics or parents who saw gaming, and still do today, as a waste of time. But gaming has proved itself worthy and after all, playing a well scripted game is like watching a film except you, the player, are in control of the story and the characters within it.
Eventually game designers caught onto the idea of writing better story lines for their games with hopes to attract more people into the gaming craze. People who would see video games a silly hobbies or means to waste perfectly good time to read or watch a film. Games such as Zelda, Halo, and Medal of Honor brought about new methods to tell a great story while keeping the player enthralled into the game and enjoying him/herself all the while. But even still, during a time where graphics and gameplay had made a landmark statement by improving tenfold since the previous consoles such as Sega Saturn. Nintendo 64 and the Playstation and evolved into systems such as the xbox360 and the PS3. Using these new and intense operating systems, gamers were now immersed into worlds far more graphically enhanced than in the past.
Gaming has become the new frontier for story telling. Not as an absolute but as a new doorway into the vast methods of storytelling. As spoken word turned into literature and literature into film and film into video games (obviously not directly), video games have now evolved into "smart games" a.k.a. well-scripted gaming experiences.
An example of this sort of game would be Bioware's Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2. Mass Effect or M.E. has revolutionized the way gaming companies form, create, an tell the story of games by introducing the concept of you, as the player, as the hero. YOU are required to make choices that can shape or misshape the world, in this case the entire galaxy and then some. YOU are in charge of a team that can only function if you have taken the time to talk with each and every character. The game is full of characters both human and alien and the graphics alone make this game a landmark achievement for visual aesthetics in a video game. But the real genius of the game comes from the script which the player has a wide selection on different variations of response for each dialogue moment throughout the entire game. This brings a whole new dynamic to gaming. Allowing the player to feel as though they are truly communicating with each person they come across and having these conversations that may ripple across the game and the story, which can be altered all the way to the end-- in other words if you as the player d not make the right choices throughout the game or take the time to assemble a proper team then you may die in the last segment of the story.
Also, games such as Mass Effect and other smart games whose designers and producers have hired voice actors both celebrity and free lance enhance the feeling of gameplay and truly bring out a "realness" in the dialogue.
It's games like these, like Mass Effect and other games like Assassins Creed (1 & 2) that address a high demand for proper story telling in a game that brings video gamers away from being judged for wasting time playing some meaningless game with no plot and instead transporting them into a story, as film can do, and immerse the player, virtually, into a story that they play a part in and feel at the end like they have either learned something new about the real world or enjoyed a great story such as the feeling once gets when finishing a great film or fine work of literature.
Nick
Mass Effect website incase you wondering or curious:
Mass Effect 2 trailer
In response to your ode to video games nick, couldn't you say that there is a sense of lost reality involved? I'd like to politely disagree to what your saying. As a person who likes to read traditional short-stoies and poetry I don't think that you can really compare video games to the written word. Yes it may tell a story but doesn't it ultimately lose it's meaning if you are watching virtual characters create a story rather then real people writing about real emotion that they've actually expeirenced? Reading a book, a short story, a poem, these are things that people have carefully put emotion into and crafted in an art form a way to reach YOU the reader. Video games simply are made for entertainment not to dig deep and find raw emotion. I think the mistake people make is trying to create TOO much reality in video games and get lost in it forgeting what is actually involved in the real world. You could also say (since I just posted this) a "death of the author" scenario is created. By playing games where you put so much significance on the characters in the game, your creating versions of real people but what actually is NOT REAL..what happens in real life to the person involved becomes irrelevant..just a thought.
ReplyDelete-Jodie
There's a fair amount of discussion on the internet as to whether or not games are capable of being analyzed in terms of Modern/Post-modernism. Some argue that Video games are incapable of being analyzed in these terms because games as an art form are too young, that we could well be in the classical stage of gaming, let alone modern or post-modern. Other's argue that Gaming is developing so fast that we've perhaps moved beyond post-modern, or that we might be hovering on the edge of post-modern gaming with the development of self-referencing and sarcastic Games. there's a decent article about it here: http://fromthegutter.org/?p=956.
ReplyDeleteI would argue that while video games refer to worlds that are not real and people that are not real, they are capable of providing real emotional responses, even if those responses are to fictional characters. While non-fiction and poetry are wonderful things, there's a lot of fiction that can evoke equal emotional responses, and in my mind video games would fall into that category.
something else I came across today that it suddenly occured to me might be relevant. Someone has produced a small flash game based on "The Navidson Record." it's a simple maze game that loosely follows the plot of the documentary, including excerpts from the book, finding Holloway's body, and hearing the sounds of the beast growling. It's not a great game, and the controls are somewhat poor, but it is video games responding to other art forms, namely literature.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/552862
"Reading a book, a short story, a poem, these are things that people have carefully put emotion into and crafted in an art form a way to reach YOU the reader. Video games simply are made for entertainment not to dig deep and find raw emotion."
ReplyDeleteThis may have been true, but with many of the games that Nick mentioned, there is a lot of effort into making video games an emotional experience. Yes, the goal is to be entertaining. But when you're playing as a character you care about, in a storyline that you're deeply involved in the experience becomes even more powerful and enjoyable. Good storytelling is good storytelling, whether for a novel, movie or video game.
For example, in Assassin's Creed II, you spend a good deal of time interacting with the player character Ezio's family. And once you've become attached to them, you get this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxXXXCkKjCI (skip to 1:10). If the player were not emotionally involved with the characters, this scene would have no meaning. It doesn't. This is the turning point of the game, and the player is just as eager as Ezio to gain revenge.
Ubisoft also created a prequel short film. The game translates incredibly well to this medium.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcE8xJkK6t4
Assassin's Creed has a fan following that plenty of books and films would envy. Just because it's fun to play? No. Because this is a franchise that makes you connect to the characters on a level that perhaps would not work as well in print or on film. You don't just read or see what Ezio feels: You experience it for yourself.
I think you can reach some emotion in a game though. I don't think they can hit upon caring emotions but I wdo think they can bring out fear. There are plenty of games that are designed to being in a psychological aspect to the game. Having the person chose how to play makes it interesting because the results are never the same.
ReplyDeleteWell we will have to agree to disagree I guess..Personally I would never feel emotion through a video game like I would when I read a great book..to me that makes no sense. Maybe some people do feel emotion but I think its completely different kind of emotion.
ReplyDeleteVideo games, good ones and ones with a great story which recently there has been a huge movement to make them so, can absolutely be emotional driven and can dog deep into the player's emotions and truly make you care about these characters. When people who don't play games think of video games they think of games like grand theft auto, Sims, Halo online, and mario, etc. But unless you have tried the new age games like Mass Effect, Assassins Creed, Bioshock, Gears of War, even Metal Gear Solid-- then you haven't experience video games capable of captivating the mind and really drawing on real emotions felt by us, the players. I f I sat someone down, even if they weren't fans of video games, and made you watch the first fifteen minutes of Assassins Creed, I would bet money, no free beer, that the person watching would beg me to keep playing. It would be equivalent to playing a movie and pausing it right after the opening clincher.
ReplyDelete