• Log In | Sign Up

  • News
  • Reviews
  • Top Games
  • Search
  • New Releases
  • Daily Deals
  • Forums

Adventure Gamers - Forums

Welcome to Adventure Gamers. Please Sign In or Join Now to post.

You are here: HomeForum Home → Gaming → Adventure → Thread

Post Marker Legend:

  • New Topic New posts
  • Old Topic No new posts

Currently online

chrissieGabrielwalas74

Support us, by purchasing through these affiliate links

   

“Video Games Are Better Without Stories”

Avatar

Total Posts: 421

Joined 2007-08-13

PM

A few months ago, The Atlantic published an article headlined Video Games Are Better Without Stories. The author claims that film, television and literature will always be better mediums for stories. Such a statement is quite provocative for an adventure game enthusiast like me, considering how engaged I have been by many games focused on narrative.

The author seems to think that the dream for people interested in narrative games is to have fully interactive storytelling. A game where the player’s choices have full influence on the plot would however end up with no story at all, which is something that developers realized long ago. In reference to last week’s thread about nonlinearity, I usually prefer when there is only one possible successful ending of a game. I am not interested in being able to change the plot, but still play games for the stories.

Am I missing the point of the article?

     
Avatar

Total Posts: 8720

Joined 2012-01-02

PM

i dont wanna even start thinking about this story subject at ags whether vs puzzle or anything else..

but i can point my finger at the word Narrative esp after playing the Full Throttle remastered days ago, and say that this game has one of the greatest narrative at the history adventure gaming ever , i was in awe with its narrative all thru, maybe from the very start too, when i watched how Ben kicked the bike and ran after his gang without the narrative being wasted at whatever kinda potentials of the scenes provided, just threw all away , no matter if there were locations from dumpster to the bar to the parking lot could have been used diffrently, i actually consider i had a moment of an epiphany there considering all the talking about puzzles, story shit down the trash, adventure games only needs a bold design that can squeeze you thru its narrative without trying to turn (i.e) the game locations NPCs, item and and hotspot , even music and voice over because there were too much fuck sum of money spent into all of these and should be exhausted, hell no..

sorry Pegbiter if i seem like i was carried away from your main point, but i ve been needing to say what i said and this thread seemed like at least kinda related somehow .

     

Total Posts: 813

Joined 2004-08-01

PM

It’s an interesting topic but a shit article.

the player’s actions would have as much of an influence on the story as they might in the real world.

It’s an almost impossible bar to reach

That’s great, but why is that the bar? Neither movies nor books set the bar there, why should video games?

most of all, are they better stories than the more popular and proven ones in the cinema, on television, and in books?

On this measure, alas, the best interactive stories are still worse than even middling books and films.

What? Why? How?

those worlds feel even more incongruous when the people that inhabit them behave like animatronics and the environments work like Potemkin villages.

Because films never have issues with quality of effects or acting? Books are never poorly written? What?

it was still easily undermined. One player, for example, pretended to be a zombie, saying nothing but “brains” until the game’s simulated couple threw him out

How is this a problem? I can go watch the greatest cinematic masterpiece while playing with my phone and falling asleep halfway through - does it invalidate the value of the story somehow?

I called it the video-game equivalent of young-adult fiction

Well, surely if *you* called it that it must be true.

This entire article just keeps repeating opinions as facts without any basis. I think you could make a reasonable argument how games can’t tell really good stories (my wife holds this opinion) but that article does a really poor job at it.

     
Avatar

Total Posts: 84

Joined 2014-07-12

PM

That is such a bullshit! Not even gonna bother reading it, obviously the person that wrote it doesn´t know a thing about games.

     
Avatar

Total Posts: 7109

Joined 2005-09-29

PM

Pegbiter - 27 June 2017 11:17 AM

Am I missing the point of the article?

Point of article is clickbait

     

Total Posts: 930

Joined 2004-01-06

PM

I think the title of the article is misleading.
His example, “Edith Finch” is not “better without story” but better because of… and he tries to answer why…

The whole way through, I found myself wondering why I couldn’t experience Edith Finch as a traditional time-based narrative. Real-time rendering tools are as good as pre-rendered computer graphics these days, and little would have been compromised visually had the game been an animated film. Or even a live-action film. After all, most films are shot with green screens, the details added in postproduction. The story is entirely linear, and interacting with the environment only gets in the way, such as when a particularly dark hallway makes it unclear that the next scene is right around the corner.

and he finds his answer…

But a more compelling answer is that something would be lost in flattening What Remains of Edith Finch into a linear experience. The character vignettes take different forms, each keyed to a clever interpretation of the very idea of real-time 3-D modeling and interaction…

So he’s not saying video games are better without story. He’s saying that if you try telling the story in a video game as you would in a movie or book, you’ll fail to be as good as a movie or book. But if you tell the story using features only an interactive video game can provide, you can produce something more.

So he’s approaching the topic from the “is it art” point of view, not the “story vs. gameplay” point of view.

At least that’s how I’m interpreting the article.

     

Total Posts: 161

Joined 2007-09-11

PM

Looking at game’s story apart overall gameplay experience really doesn’t make sense. When player actually simulates things that her character has to do to reach her goals, she becomes immersed in a way that can’t be replicated in other media. So there isn’t lousy stories in games, some games are just without proper immersion.

     
Avatar

Total Posts: 421

Joined 2007-08-13

PM

Advie - 27 June 2017 12:16 PM

adventure games only needs a bold design that can squeeze you thru its narrative

sorry Pegbiter if i seem like i was carried away from your main point

No problem. Are you arguing that the artwork is more important than the storyline? This is true for a beautiful game like Samorost 3, but I have no problem with mediocre graphics if the plot is captivating. Different games have different qualities.

Antrax - 27 June 2017 12:31 PM

This entire article just keeps repeating opinions as facts without any basis. I think you could make a reasonable argument how games can’t tell really good stories (my wife holds this opinion) but that article does a really poor job at it.

It is an opinion piece after all. I do however agree that the lack of strong arguments makes the article nonsensical.

nomadsoul - 27 June 2017 02:12 PM

Point of article is clickbait

The title was obviously set to attract as many clicks as possible, but I would not be so harsh as to call the content of the article clickbait.

crabapple - 27 June 2017 06:40 PM

So he’s not saying video games are better without story. He’s saying that if you try telling the story in a video game as you would in a movie or book, you’ll fail to be as good as a movie or book. But if you tell the story using features only an interactive video game can provide, you can produce something more.

This insight should be obvious; in the same way as a film should not try to tell a story the same way as a book. But the author of the article still insists that games are inferior at telling stories.

garbo - 28 June 2017 04:34 AM

Looking at game’s story apart overall gameplay experience really doesn’t make sense. When player actually simulates things that her character has to do to reach her goals, she becomes immersed in a way that can’t be replicated in other media. So there isn’t lousy stories in games, some games are just without proper immersion.

This is exactly the point I wanted to make.

     
Avatar

Total Posts: 1813

Joined 2005-10-23

PM

I don’t really see the point the author tries to make. If he wants games to have no restrictions and no story, like the real world, well, there’s Second Life, and Myst Online, both of which still seem to be thriving. But they suffer from the same thing as the real world: for most Western people it’s not very exciting, and if it is it’s often painful and not enjoyable. People read and watch stories because they want to escape their real life and experience things without the pain and anxiety it causes the protagonists. That is what adventure games do too. The Tex Murphy games were not called interactive movies for nothing.  The difference between watching a movie or reading a book and playing an adventure game is that, by either making the protagonist do things you want them to do (third person) or doing them yourself (first person), you are deeper immersed in the story than by passively consuming it. This is what makes adventure games worth playing for a lot of people.

     
Avatar

Total Posts: 285

Joined 2017-01-12

PM

What is a video game without a story? Can anyone name one? Tetris?

     
Avatar

Total Posts: 1813

Joined 2005-10-23

PM

Headycakesofdoom - 28 June 2017 05:18 AM

What is a video game without a story? Can anyone name one? Tetris?

The article mentions quite a few of them.

     
Avatar

Total Posts: 285

Joined 2017-01-12

PM

tsa - 28 June 2017 06:13 AM
Headycakesofdoom - 28 June 2017 05:18 AM

What is a video game without a story? Can anyone name one? Tetris?

The article mentions quite a few of them.

No it doesn’t

     

Total Posts: 1891

Joined 2010-11-16

PM

Author has a very cursory understanding of the genre defined by trendy mainstream cases. They also try to say theres no reason the stories need to be told as videogames so they shouldnt be told as videogames. But you could say that about anything. A tv show could be told as a movie. That doesnt mean a tv show is inherently inferior. This is like the argument that all movies are bad because they would supposedly be better as books.

     

Total Posts: 82

Joined 2016-09-11

PM

Stories are more enjoyable when you interract and control them. B Movie level scripts that you would entertain in TV/Movie/Books become enjoyable experiences. You become the character or interract with them almost on a personal level.

     
Avatar

Total Posts: 2

Joined 2017-07-08

PM

I think it depends on the type of game and how the story is told. Some games like Dark Souls try to tell a story completely in the background separated from the actual gameplay and it does benefit from that. But inherently any game needs a story (unless it is a puzzle game like Tetris) but it should tell it in the form that it is somewhat separated from how a book or movie or TV show would tell the story. Rather than saying Video Games don’t need stories, we should say that Games should tell better stories that only Video Games can tell. Just like some of the sequences in What Remains of Edith Finch, it couldn’t be done in a book or movie.

     

Total Posts: 813

Joined 2004-08-01

PM

...why? Books are remade into TV shows or movies all the time. Why should video games stick to stories that only video games can tell?

     

You are here: HomeForum Home → Gaming → Adventure → Thread

Welcome to the Adventure Gamers forums!

Back to the top