It may be a uniquely British perspective, given the prevalence of broadcast media (I.e. book publishing, music, theatre, radio and television) here, but it is pretty common to encounter the belief that broadcast and games are destined to come together. In particular the idea that games will grow up, that they will mature much as other media have and so get to sit at the adult's table, is highly resilient.
I think this is entirely the wrong way to look at their relationship. For me, the future of broadcast is to report on what happens in games and realise that games are powerful generators of the narratives that they so desperately need.
The Walking Dead is superbly written, well-voiced and complex. Its characters all have hidden sides. Its sombre music adds a quiet but persistent sense to the horror of its setting. It is beautifully animated, soulful and occasionally very sad. And it uses the fact that it is episodic well, foreshadowing events that might happen and taking account of different branches in the story that you may have chosen.
It’s really great. Until, that is, I play it for a little while.
"There is no such thing as a player character" is the kind of tagline that gets me into trouble in some places. So is "the emotional connection between player and character that many game makers believe exists in fact does not". Both contain a powerful subtext, questioning everything from a player's sense of identity to the validity of their experiences. Read the wrong way, they can seem to say that all the emotion you feel in playing games is made up.
Of course that's not my intent. When I say "there is no such thing as a player character" I don't mean that there is nothing. When I say play occurs through "dolls", likewise. My intent is to reinterpret the emotional experience of play within a game-native context, and so derive useful insight that could apply to all games. In otherwords, the emotions are real but our way of talking about them is broken.
This is an essay to fully explain this concept, to set what's really going on when most players play games in context, about the importance of identity and self expression. (Warning: this article is over 8000 words in length.)
I posed the title of this post as a topic at GameCamp.
The idea is this: We get very heated on the discussion of whether games are a storytelling medium or not, with members from all four lenses often talking at cross purposes. Games historically do a bad job of telling stories but sometimes do a good job of catalysing memorable experiences. Those experiences then go on to be formed into stories by players, post hoc.
Games have their own visual rules which are often contrary to other kinds of camera. Camera design dictates how players see into the game world, and ultimately how they play, so without good camera design your whole game may end up unplayable.
It’s very difficult (read: expensive) to change a poorly designed camera without rewriting a game entirely. This is why I consider gamatography (like photography, but for games) to be the first design task on any project, the first spec to be written and the first code that needs to be prototyped.
There need to be clear rules that will govern the camera throughout the whole of the game, sooner rather than later. Do it right and camera acts as a foundation on which you can build. Do it wrong and you’ll create a user experience nightmare.
One of the biggest misconceptions that game designers seem to carry around with them is the idea that games make people feel. This mistake manifests in a variety of ways, but for the most part the designer ends up making his game talk at the player, while they are unable to do anything. Using ham-handed dialogue and clumsy imagery, the game in effect lectures the player.
Games do not make people feel. No art does that. Feeling is a response, but the kind of response that it evokes is neither uniform nor a simple metric. It is partly a result of stimulus, but also partly what that stimulus means to them. Fear, love, humour, excitement and joy all come from within, and this is why art relies on symbols to try and draw them out.
Hot on the heels of my post about player characters actually being dolls, I came across a video (via Rock Paper Shotgun) from Game Theory with Scott Steinberg in which he asked about interactive fiction and storytelling in games. Have a look:
Interactive Fiction: The Art of Video Game Storytelling
This is the marketing story of games and storytelling that developers have told for decades. It’s an aspirational story, but look beyond the highlights to the substance underneath and it doesn’t really stack up.
Many of the struggles that game writers face today have not changed since the early days. Inherent contradictions prevent game storytelling from becoming more than it is, and I’d argue that it has reached the limits of technique. In 30 years of gamemaking there have never been, and likely never will be, any good game stories.
And yet, budding game writers, do not lose hope. Your contribution is more important than ever. Allow me to paint a new picture of your future for you:
When asking whether games are an art capable of greatness, the question is often conflated with stories. Games are played on a screen, where films and TV also exist, and have epic moments of tension that seem dramatic (but are actually thaumatic). The language becomes confusing, and some theories take this too far.
They posit that players becomes heroes in their own game stories, just as actors play heroes in movies. This is not really the case. In believing that games are special, the theory tries to borrow from other art forms’ specialness rather than define games on their own terms. It doesn’t work. Games are an art, period. But we can’t really own that statement properly until we deconstruct many of the tropes that have seeped in from other arts. So let’s start right here, right now:
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