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
