56773c No.15700544
Are games even a good media to tell stories?
As someone that started to read books and literature, I've noticed the best stories in games are nothing more than dumbed down sci fi or fantasy TV shows, Walking dead and The last of US are literally at the level of walking dead TV series.
Following this logic, It comes to mind that games can do interactive stories pretty well, but most of the potential of storytelling is kind of linear and static, sure, games can do random generation of stories, like Dwarve fortress come to mind, but I feel that's the best game should be trying to do, rather than trying to be cheap TV shows.
I do feel that every medium has diferent strenghts.
>movies
can tell dramatic stories in a fixed manner.
>anime
can tell fantasy and super natural stories better than film.
>TV
can tell pretty long stories, in a very detailed manner, and develop the characters.
>Books
can pretty much tell a story in any sense, integrate non visuals and explore the inner side of feelings and mental health of characters, and do things that are basically imposible or too expensive for the other medium.
>comics
can do as much as literature but is limited to visuals, like film.
94ff7a No.15700549
>frogposting
didnt read lol
9fca50 No.15700557
It's potentially the best medium for story telling, but that wont be realised until people stop just trying to ape other mediums.
b7e699 No.15700571
They are better than film and most network television.
The biggest problem is when you try and make an epic multi-game universe, you end up failing due to alienating newcommers to the series, or struggle with localization issues. Both Xenosaga and Kiseki had/have these issues.
249fc5 No.15700589
They can when choices both actually matter and are satisfying. Which is very rare. If the player cannot change the story significantly by his actions the mediums potential is wasted.
05acb7 No.15700595
I never got around to playing them, but how is the .Hack// series in terms of story?
The sheer unfulfilled potential of MGSV still hurts, but The Boss in MGS3 went some real way to showing how a boss can be integrated into story in a way that actually impacts the player.
pulling the trigger is always a hard thing to do
bf29f3 No.15700603
>>15700544
No, story in a videogame is as useless as story in porn.
When stories in vidya actually work, like in MGS3, then they're better suited for movies than games.
6fe655 No.15700608
Stop focusing on westernshit stories.
0312ca No.15700612
>>15700603
>hey guys I know that john carmack quote!
8a5c2b No.15700614
No book could ever tell a story as relatable, thought-provoking about the nature of consciousness and gut wrenching as Nier: Automata.
eac5bd No.15700638
>>15700549
Miyamoto would whip bottles of water at people during meetings.
98b930 No.15700643
>>15700614
That is honestly, a patrician-tier shitpost.
ce8b52 No.15700648
9d4f10 No.15700651
>>15700544
Depends on how its done and what experience you're looking for, putting yourself in the actual shoes of the character and seeing the world from their viewpoint is great but most modern games have very lackluster stories. Take Destiny 2 for example, the story isn't horrible, it's just bland, too short and fucking retardedly simple, if they padded it out, added more unique and diverse environments with long levels with combat and non combat then it'd be a lot better.
You'd honestly have to have literal down syndrome to not think games are a good medium for story telling, that or be the maker of a franchise about a white haired man with two swords, who likes money so much he'd fuck over his own work.
48199c No.15700653
The quality of a story is determined by the creator, not the medium. You can tell a good story with cave paintings.
The problem is that the overwhelming majority of "videogame writers" are bottom of the barrel artists who only got into vidya because they couldn't cut it in Hollywood. Hollywood writers are themselves people who would like nothing more than to create "serious" art like plays but couldn't cut it. So in essence, vidya artists are the rejects of the rejects.
366ee8 No.15700658
Every medium has weaknesses
>Film
2 hour limit really hurts. It results in a lot of movies either being split up into series or massively cut down. Like it's why certain books like Dune are considered "unfilmable". Unless they're EXTREMELY well directed they can also completely remove the ambiguity you were supposed to feel in the original work they were adapted from. (IE a nameless main character who was supposed to be the reader surrogate is often just given a random name/generic personality)
>Anime
Anime has the issue where a lot of anime stories are meant to continue forever almost like a soap opera. Shonen anime especially like Dragonball Z suffers from this. Where because Toriyama wrote the series week by week he just kept running out of ideas and went "okay Goku just killed the Devil? Well now he fights SPACE DEVIL" and just rehashed "Space devil" again and again.
This isn't a problem that anime has to suffer from but the most successful ones do where they go on for way too long and have to fill the plot with pointless shit because the real reason the anime exists at that point is for merchandising.
>television
Most television shows either start off strong and get weaker overtime or start off shit and get stronger overtime. This is due to how because they're produced over the course of seasons and most writers don't plan ahead they either only had a really good premise to start with and do nothing with it, or have a shitty premise and make the most of it. Or a really good creator leaves/really shitty creator leaves and it becomes worse/better
>Books
Books have a problem in the sense that they're nonvisual. Meaning while you can spend a lot of time describing environments or battle scenes it's not the same as actually seeing it. It's why when films like Lord of the Rings were adapted they turned scenes that were described somewhat mundanely in the book and made them far more visually interesting. A good example is the scene at the start where Bilbo is refusing to give Gandalf the ring of power is done as just a tiny bit of banter between the two but in the film it's more of a genuine power struggle due to how it's shot.
>comics
Have the same problem as anime in the sense that they're expected to just continue forever and never end. A good example is deaths in comics are treated as a joke because you know the hero will just be resurrected. The Death of Superman jumps out for that reason.
Games have a strength in the sense that they're interactive. Meaning you can "feel" how a character acts more than you can really see it. And you can make choices and mistakes for the character that couldn't be done in a narrative piece. Like in an rpg where you can just fail a speech check and be forced into a battle. Or you can kill an NPC instead of do his quest. On the flipside games have an issue especially nowadays where they have to shoehorn in combat encounters everywhere. Like you can't have a scene like the ending of Resevoir dogs and have it be as engaging in a video game without shoehorning in a big elaborate gunfight sequence with mooks. When Die Hard was adapted into a game they changed tight frenetic action scenes where McClane is up against like 12 guys to ones where he's up against hundreds. The only genre that remains unscathed from this point and clicks which have a different issue in the sense that they can bore the player a lot unless they're extremely well paced and have tons of variety.
366ee8 No.15700663
>>15700658
One other thing to add onto film. A lot of books have poor adaptations because much of the appeal of reading them was just in the writing itself. Like the Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy, most of the jokes are in how the sentences are written. When it was finally adapted into a movie they just tried to make the jokes straightforward and it didn't work
176bda No.15700665
>>15700544
>Are games even a good media to tell stories?
No.
You play games mainly for gameplay, everything else is secondary and can be disregarded.
e9e237 No.15700852
>Are games even a good media to tell stories?
yes and no. The thing about games in the story telling department that they have a distinct advantage over compared to traditional storytelling medium is there is no set time limit to how long a game has to be, compared to the movies 2 hour sweet spot, or a TV shows 30 minute allowance, and the player is in more or less direct engagement with the other characters. There is an advantage that games share with animated media is that you don't see actors faces, sure you know David Hayter is Solid Snake but you see Solid Snake and you think "hey its solid snake" and its ingrained like that forever, whereas with movies the actors names will be plastered allover the product so you associate the character with the actor, you start to say things "yeah I liked [actors] job as [character]" instead of just "I liked [character]"
So you CAN tell a great story with a game, or at the least tell a story the player will be attached to and remember fondly because they were there for the whole thing and these effects can actually be enhanced through gameplay but story-heavy game developers don't understand this, they think "make it more like a movie right?" instead of playing to the strengths of a video game. A good example I can think of is Yakuza 5, specifically it's final boss fight. Kazuma Kiryu is faced with a new challenger but you already know through playing the games that most men aren't a threat to Kiryu, how do you deliver this threat? Well the game gives the boss about 10 fucking health bars and you go "oh shit". MGS3 making the player pull the trigger on the boss is also a good example of this. Hell even FF7 killing aerith has an impact on the player even if he didn't like Aerith or feel attached to her because that party member is gone, you can't use her now, they've been directly affected by an event in the story which may make them more attached to the situation
Then you get these boneheaded modern developers who think "oh a BOSS FIGHT? that's not serious enough to tell a story with, how about we do a long walking exposition segment that's all in-game" and set any story telling potential the medium had back 10 years because it's just knocking off other mediums instead of using the strengths it has in a desperate gamble to be viewed as "mature" despite making a video game.
e9e237 No.15700868
>>15700852
holy fuck that post came out way more dense than I intended. Apologies Fellas
tldr:
>games provide direct interaction with characters and setting, allowing for better attachment to the story
>no set time limit like movies or TV, giving time to flesh out parts of the story or characters
>no actors faces, you only associate the character with the character
>modern devs are spineless cunts who just do what movies do but worse
249fc5 No.15700879
>>15700658
>all anime is shonen
>uses a manga as an example of whats wrong with anime
5dcd0b No.15700908
>OP is a (1)
feels pointless to even comment here
e41e0a No.15701002
it bugs me when people say
>lol kojima should just make movies
when he's one of the only game designers/writers to consistently acknowledge the existence of a player agent in the story in unique and interesting ways.
it's pretty shallow when most games try to put some of the blame or responsibility on the player, like in Spec Ops The Line.
>Oh you've been killing good guys this entire game. Shame on you. Feel guilty.
f5e257 No.15701011
It feels great when you get really into a game's setting, but then you die and try that part over and all the emotion is gone.
e9e237 No.15701013
>>15701002
>when he's one of the only game designers/writers to consistently acknowledge the existence of a player agent in the story in unique and interesting ways.
well maybe WAS, the ball was very much dropped in MGS4 and 5
d0c983 No.15701058
>>15700868
Don't need to apologize, it was a well written post.
a7288b No.15701082
There are dozens of good movie and media franchise tie-in games. There is not a single good video game tie-in movie.
Art will never be video games.
215dcb No.15701093
>media
medium. and why not? its like you havent played any
33313f No.15701099
>>15700544
The way you can tell stories can be different in games but that fact remains its a video games and a story should supplement the game, not the other way around.
Of course there are always out layers.
what have you been reading?
c8cfc3 No.15701104
>>15700638
You never whipped water bottles at thirsty homeless people?
74a0f3 No.15701114
>>15700603
Yeah man a 3 hour movie can fit everything that happens in FFX, SOTC, or fucking MGS. Video games can do more than a movie by allowing you to directly interact and impact the narrative. You also get to experience the atmosphere first hand. Games will eventually become interactive movies theres just not much you can do with gameplay as theres only so many genres.
37f459 No.15701265
c8cfc3 No.15701456
>>15701445
Pathetic, this is how you get doubles
ca6171 No.15701908
>>15701013
More than likely he just got bored with the series considering it's been going on since '87. You do anything for long enough and its going to take the wind out of your sales. ZoE was pretty good from my recollection, but we just have to wait for Death Stranding to see if he's a hack or not.
1a9bad No.15701964
>>15700544
As you said, games are best at interactive stories. But most story-based games don't try to do that.
That Dragon, Cancer was adapted directly from a book. It also tells a factual story of something that actually happened, so there's no room for interactivity. It didn't need to be a game –it shouldn't have been a game, it could have been a CGI film instead.
Devs don't try to write the kinds of stories that would be best suited for games, TellTale was infamous for the illusion of choice instead of actually giving the player real branching paths. Why? Because they wanted the 'games' to follow a cohesive narrative, they were built from the ground-up as traditional stories later retrofitted for vidya. If devs want games to be taken seriously as art they need to treat them with respect first, work with the strengths of the medium instead of working against them.
3bef39 No.15701973
Games will never be the "best" or necessarily even a good medium to tell stories in because there's a loose cannon trampling all over it, and it's the player.
People who claim it's better because "it has everything that movies have + interactivity!" are retards who want to feel superior to other mediums. Interactivity adds a whole world of new kinds of stories and ways to tell stories, but it will always always ALWAYS make traditional story telling worse.
586aad No.15701978
In my opinion a good story in a game is one that allows the game to go wild with its settings and mechanics, and not some self important low rate writer's drivel which keeps breaking the pace of the game just so it can be shat in your face.
You shouldn't be looking for good stories in games, you should be looking for good storytelling in games.
35e11e No.15701980
The greatest problem with video game storytelling is that it's always dependent on the main protagonist being a one man army.
6cd91a No.15702020
>Are games even a good media to tell stories?
Yes but everyone including (You) is too stupid too make it properly work.
e7da29 No.15702022
Games have a unique edge for certain types of stories, but that works best when conveyed via atmosphere rather than directly as in other media.
In particular, stories of fear, despair, and madness are among the hardest to convey in other media, but among the most powerful in games. The fact that preeminent lorefaggotry concentrates on titles such as the Silent Hill, Soulesbourne, and Team Ico games is not coincidental.
>>15700658
Note that there are a handful of works that carefully skirt around the genuine limits of their medium, surpassing what is taken for granted. LotGH in the case of anime (extremely long, but with a carefully considered end goal from the novels, and perfectly dovetailing with anime's ability to portray high-concept settings without the crushing FX budget of live-action).
>>15700663
It's worth mentioning in that specific instance that Adams' ventures into IF games actually strengthened this focus on prose, since the radioplays/books primarily worked on the level of fucking with the audience, and IF as a genre is absolutely all about fucking with you through the parser.
>>15700868
>no set time limit like movies or TV, giving time to flesh out parts of the story oar characters
I would add to this the ability of games to mislead the audience much more about their pacing. For instance, pulling off the World of Ruin twist from FFVI yes, the manual spoiled that, but I rented it.
1080d4 No.15702028
Persona still has the best story of any video game.
9883a0 No.15702058
Yes but honestly AAA does a shit job at it, they basically treat it as a movie without looking to see how gameplay can tell a story
9883a0 No.15702067
>>15700879
Moe doesn't even tell a story, and 99% of Anime is either Shoennen or Moe shit, so really you're left with very few titles to actually discus
1e23a0 No.15702082
Seeing low production quality scene is an instant turnoff in movies.
Seeing my character glitch during a cutscene in a game happens all day
dba8a7 No.15702123
>>15702067
>and 99% of Anime is either Shoennen or Moe shit
Couldnt be more wrong
743a5e No.15702124
>>15702028
>Implying it even has a decent story
9883a0 No.15702151
>>15702123
I mean in terms of Modern shit, of course when you go back you get good shit like LotGH, but these days is just Goku gets power up #6,000,000 and Japanese Garfeild does somegay shit
>inb4 Isegay
Literally Shoenen and Moe combined into something gayer
22fb59 No.15702160
>>15702028
It impressed me as a younger lad, in hindsight was mythology 101 plus bloody mary story flushed out. That said, nothing like it at the time. The first Parasite Eve was more interesting story wise, and silent hill series had some storied gems.
e7da29 No.15702192
>>15701980
Counterpoint: Myth and X-COM, where you repeatedly get your shit kicked in, and endgame victory results in a devastating stalemate at best.
>>15702151
Counterpoint: Made in Abyss
223242 No.15702216
>>15702151
LOGH babby detected. Don't think you're special just because you watched one series outside of the general 2010 block.
f0667d No.15702225
>>15701114
>hurr durr the game is too long to be turned into a movie
<what do you mean you can make several movies or tv shows
Holy shit you win the prize for most retarded comment of 2018. Please tell me you're mixed
d16067 No.15702234
>>15702192
Moe abuse simulator. Never understood why people liked that shit.
02d6e7 No.15702258
>>15700852
>>15700658
The reason games can be long and films/telly cannot is because vidya is consumed in private, at your own leisure, and the others are watched in public and have to adhere to a schedule. I wonder if arcades in Japan somehow got around arcade restrictions.
2f164c No.15702266
Why wouldn't they be? Been playing games since 98 and they have always been interactive movies or anime.
Take Vesperia, a fun anime adventure. Or C&C- when I was a kid I wanted to become a terrorist.
Why compare books to games? They are different media that offer a different kind of experience. And just because you play games doesn't mean you can't appreciate a book.
e7da29 No.15702273
>>15702258
LotGH (or, indeed, western stuff like the late-80s/early-90s miniseries adaptation of John le Carré's Karla series) put the lie to that, especially with hybrid distribution models like OVAs or on-demand streaming.
A better reason why super long, complex stories can work better in vidya than linear old media is because story can be made optional. Dumb little kids can breeze through something like Morrowind blithe to its incredible worldbuilding, thematics, atmosphere, and narrative, while patricians can engage autistically with every tiny shred of engagement and nuance Kirkbride offers you.
223242 No.15702275
>>15702266
>have always been interactive movies or anime
>Why compare books to games?
34e56a No.15702308
>>15700614
Retarded whorebot is retarded
10/10
e894eb No.15702316
>>15700544
>startd 2 red books
u jus got (((jewd))) monica
ef3b5b No.15702325
>>15700614
As obvious a shitpost as that is, it does have some truth to it
88c14e No.15702332
>>15701013
MGSV literally redoes the MGS2 thing of choosing your name and DOB. Where Raiden throws the player away and embraces his own path, Big Boss takes the players identity while the player gets to live the legend of Big Boss. Then there is Ground Zeroes being a VR/mind control reenactment.
49dccd No.15702336
>>15700544
Videogames aren't supposed to be about the story though, so the comparison is kind of strange. It's like saying it's hard to cut a cucumber with a screwdriver; no shit. Maybe the game journalists have been getting to you with their obsession over stories in games. Videogames have stories because for some reason,"finish the level" is not as motivating as "save the princess" even though if you'd still be doing the basically same thing. Games can still have good settings or atmosphere, which I value more than a good story.
133be5 No.15702349
>>15700544
>Are games even a good media to tell stories?
It can be with games like dwarf fortress, crusader kings 2, rimworld… Well, any 4x/grand strategy/management where there's a lots of variables and styles of play. Assuming you don't play in an optimal or game-breaking way, because then you tend to have the same shit happens.
The player just got to write the story between their interaction and the reactions from the game, see those After Action Reports some people write.
017c4b No.15702353
>The only medium other than CYOA that allows player direct interaction
>Unfortunately everyone in game industry is absolute dogshit at writing, programming and making anything interesting
enjoy the lust of ass 2: semitic boogaloo
>>15701002
>spec ops the line blames the player
No it doesn't. It blames the character the player controls whose actions were not preventable from a gameplay point. You're confusing it with a dev telling a game journo
>you should've turned the game off
>>15702332
MGSV shits on every good MGS game just because kojima was a spiteful fuck and wanted to go hang out with famous hollywood pedokikes.
feaaec No.15702366
>As someone that started to read books and literature
Underage detected.
>Are games even a good media to tell stories?
No.
The stories are there to give you a context within which you act and serve as a window into the game world.
I say this as someone who loves RPGs.
That said, a good story always makes a game much more interesting.
1b2496 No.15702553
>>15702234
I want to see cutesy shit go to war and get a taste of fuck-you-this-is-life. A sort of extreme of watching a coddled person suffer in the real world.
b308c0 No.15702664
>Are games even a good media to tell stories?
Yes.
1. Games are really closer to a play than other media. Typically, games are heavily focused on dialogue and setting and don't need to explain every detail to you because it is already visible. (Shakespeare speaks for himself)
2. Before books, cultures still told stories and we still know those stories because they were incredible. You don't need a story to be written for it to be good, you just need a good story-teller. Listening to grandpa talk about his life was more interesting and useful than any book I've ever read.
3. The length of a story is irrelevant. I've read short stories that have more meaning/impact than full-length novels. I've also played games with stories that had significantly limited dialogue in-between levels that still made me feel connected to the protagonist because of how well written it was.
In short, anything can be a good media but not this 8chan thread
a91e03 No.15702689
No, I skip all fucking cutscenes fuck story in games
1a9c10 No.15702695
>>15700544
books are a lot more detailed but take more attention and effort they're not limited by psychical world so you can write about whatever you can think. Books are pretty easy to get out and you can even self-publish these days.
movies are less effort and you don't need to put in as much effort but the story and plot is rushed to fit into 1 hour and a lot of stuff is cut. A lot of content is changed or shaped into the directors vision instead of the authors vision resulting in something like Stanly Kubrick's The Shining. Movies also are really expensive to make.
I don't know why you would bring up anime because its all just the same rehashed formulas with reskinned characters every time made by over worked gooks. If you watch a lot of shows you'll see how studios pump out countless anime's that all have similar plot lines like how Harem's the guy is always a weak loser with a childhood friend who suddenly has a bunch of superpower women take over his life and try to rape him but he's secretly gay or some stupid shit
e24884 No.15702706
>>15700544
Play something by Uchikoshi, brainlet, and experience the wonders of planar time
e24884 No.15702715
>>15702695
>If you watch a lot of shows you'll see how studios pump out countless anime's that all have similar plot lines
That’s true for everything though, not just anime. If you don’t realize this it is because you lack the introspection necessary to think critically about what you consume
e7da29 No.15702724
>>15702695
>I don't know why you would bring up anime because its all just the same rehashed formulas with reskinned characters every time made by over worked gooks.
Anime much like vidya can function as something of a bridge between the expensive world of live-action, and the less visually impressive but cheaper worlds of other media.
Anime has an essentially flat cost curve regardless of how low or high concept your setting is, meaning that while a generic Seinfeld knockoff is more expensive than live-action fucking why is there so much moeshit burning precious animator hours!?, a special effects extravaganza along the lines of Valerian or Heavy Metal will be much cheaper animated.
Anime much like vidya, more specifically its audience much like us, marks the crucial realization that you can tell any kind of story you want, not just dumb kiddie shit, for normalfags too stupid to take a story seriously without need to greenscreen the faces of zillion dollar actors in every scene of your photorealistic CGI cartoon.
adffdb No.15702735
>>15700544
>anime as a different medium from movies or tv.
c9a58d No.15702756
>>15702735
Back to cuckchan, nigger.
e9ba05 No.15702982
Story should be used in games to inform the protagonist's motives. It works best when the story is a framework to explore an interesting. Story is mixed with gameplay in Thief 2 rather well. Although it has cutscenes to set up the missions, you overhear conversations while sneaking past guards, giving you more information about the world and sometimes your objectives in a very natural way.
843a18 No.15703532
>>15702735
It kind of is, neither of those medium could have pulled off something visually similar to SE:L. It is unconstrained by the technical limitations of those mediums. This is true of western animators as well, but the last time the kikes at disney bothered to drop shekels for something hand-drawn was Treasure Planet (and even that had a lot of CGI).
e9e237 No.15703930
>>15702022
>I would add to this the ability of games to mislead the audience much more about their pacing.
unfortunately this is a lot less prevalent these days due to bad marketing and the internet leaking every single detail possible up to a games release
56e1c4 No.15704086
>>15700571
I think the Ogre Battle games did this the best. The story spans over each of the 4 games that were made (ant he other 4 that were planned but never made due to Quest shutting down in 2002), but each story is pretty self-contained and while they bleed slightly into one another, it's not to much to the point that you need to play all of them. In fact, it's mostly minor references to past events that aren't really connected to the game in question or characters from past games that get another introduction in the game in question.
56e1c4 No.15704116
>>15701980
That's not true in any tactical/strategy game with a story
17f58a No.15704511
It is. It's just that most people are lazy and would rather spoonfeed you the story via cutscenes. Resigning the story to cutscenes so heavily like that is the video game equivalent to writing a book and explaining the story as if it's a wikipedia article
79715c No.15704533
>>15702735
It literally is a different medium. Now run along retard. Back to cuckchan you go.
>>>/cuckchan/
611bd6 No.15704542
Vidia shouldn't be about telling stories, but letting you create ones.
361be4 No.15704570
>>15704542
I'd rather this than faggots forcing me to read 5 novels before playing a fucking video game.
598517 No.15704581
YouTube embed. Click thumbnail to play.
>>15700879
I chose DBZ as a specific example because the DBZ is generally known as an anime, and because it was full of filler arcs. I could've also used examples like Naruto or Bleach but DBZ fits a lot better.
There are also examples of anime adaptations of vidya that are noticeably worse than the vidya. A really good example is the Persona 5 anime.
>>15701002
>lol kojima should just make movies
His storytelling method wouldn't translate well to a movie. His characters are massively exaggerated and his dialogue is really really bad.
People like it because it's silly but if a Metal Gear movie was made and shit like "la le lu le lo" was chanted over and over film critics would see it as dumb and pointless. Especially if it was live action.
>>15702695
Another good example of a limitation books have compared to films is they must explain a great deal of things to the reader because they can't tell something visually. A good example is in Lord of the Rings where when Gandalf returns to the Shire to ask Frodo about if he kept the Ring of Power safe. The book then spends a good few hundred pages with Gandalf monologing about what the Ring of Power does, who Gollum was, how the forces of Mordor know who Bilbo was and how Frodo's in danger etc. Wheras in the film it just has Gandalf ask him "is it secret is it safe" it has Gandalf throw the ring into the fire and show the glowing letters on it, he says "you gotta cast it into the fire of mount doom and oh some orcs might murder you for it". It's so much more simple and concise and doesn't bog you down with needless information.
bc0269 No.15704621
>>15704581
>direct embed to jewtube
>it's cuckold's leafpile
>>>/reddit/
45f2b5 No.15704640
Short answer: yes, but.
As a medium, interactive vidya can present concepts in a novel way. Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons had a twist ending that tried to show the characters emotional connection through gameplay.
Problem is most game writers just suck shit and/or are dropouts from TV or movies and just try to write game like that. Think of the new big budget Womb Raider reboot. Rihanna Pratchett just wrote up some shitty story, most of which couldn't even be used or made no sense in the context of the actual gameplay. At this point, I think should just cut their losses and stick to really simple stories and focus on gameplay. Too bad retards are trying to make vidya the next Hollywood.
Even the best written vidya story is a wet cum rag compared to the best of books or other media.
c1e90c No.15704665
>>15700544
Yes. Video games give you something that other media don't, control over situations, even if just a little. It makes you feel you're in control and responsible for what is happening and even make you feel like you're in there.
Of course, I'm not talking about immersive walking simulator bullshit, but any good RPG can do this even with a simplistic story.
fa8cf7 No.15704675
>>15700614
While literature is a degenerate medium, you have bad taste. Automata is fairly entry level. I'd go with the likes of Deadly Premonition for "stories that can only be told with a video game," even if it was Twin Peaks fanfiction.
79d137 No.15704986
Yes, they can - but because of the interactive nature it requires significant alteration to the implementation that traditional storytelling methods. A significant hurdle is that traditional storytelling formats are linear or semi-linear experiences. In a game, the player has significant (if not total) control over the pacing - so much like humor (which relies heavily on leading and timing) - you can't rely on them in games. Nor can you necessarily rely on the player to perform certain story events in the correct order if you give them any sort of lateral freedom or exploration.
Bethesda has a huge problem with storytelling these days, particularly because Emil and their other staff hacks will just sit down and write a story as if they were telling a linear tale with all the pacing and story beats as you'd expect from a television show or movie. But then they write multiple other storylines and all just kind of superimpose them over each other… so you could be rushing to the Jarl to warn of an impending dragon attack, get sidelined by an NPC, and end up going on a month long-trek to a foreign land and solve their own mini-world ending crisis… and then when you get back, everything behaves as if the world was in total stasis. You pick up the original quest right where it left off with all urgency. Morrowind was the last game they made which payed even the slightest bit of attention to this discontinuity - and altered the game design by putting in several "break points" where NPCs will tell you to just fuck off for a while and clean up some side quests while they handle the paperwork or do some investigating or whatever. It felt natural, even if you never went back to finish up the main questline and you didn't have to run away from NPCs to keep them from bogging you down with their "urgent" quests which are all written as though they were the only quest in your log.
Just look at Skyrim. Even if you ignore everything except the main questline and DLC - the game treats them all as their own independent storylines to be played in the chronology of which they were released. Yet when you start a new game, you're stuck between two major conflicting questlines pretty much right off the bat - and both of which feature events which generally cannot be ignored because random attacks they enable will cause valuable NPCs (shopkeepers, quest givers, etc) to die - often without your knowledge because it happens when the cell loads, even if you're a cell or two away and never see it happen. So, unless you mod your game, you end up dancing around what places you can visit, in what order, and at what times - to avoid these random attacks or quest triggers. It's fucking assinine, but they wrote the DLC from the perspective that people would have already had and beaten most of the content of the main game - and be ready to pick right up on DLC events. FO3 also had some issues with this - though not to such an annoying degree. But certain places you'd want to avoid, such as the alien crash site - or ambush point Wernher (whatever his name is) sets up the ambush until you were ready. In New Vegas, you just got a radio signal that basically acted as a "DLC starts here" marker that you had to go to and perform specific actions (with a prompt to ask if you're sure you're ready). You didn't just get triggers or NPCs running up to you for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. They also all took place in their own self-contained environments so they didn't annoy you with negative effects on the main game, because you weren't clearing the DLC fast enough to match the pace the writers expected you to play it at - and they were all modular in that they could be played in any order, while still revolving around a central narrative that tied them all together.
But Obsidian knew how to structure a story to fit within a game, whereas Bethesda just writes like they're scripting a movie which happens to be broken up by gameplay.
598517 No.15705033
>>15704986
I feel like Bethesda's issue with storytelling has more to do with a lack of overall structure. They seem to build what the game is about, like its story and characters, completely independently of the rest of the game.
For comparison one of the reasons why people even remember the characters and story of Fallout New Vegas is because of the game's structure. The world of the game was structured around its first half where you loop around the southern end of the Mojave before heading to the north where New Vegas is. You remember Benny because the player is frequently reminded of him by other characters. (when you head to Primm you're told of Benny and co being there before you and the Deputy even mentions admiring Benny's suit). And eventually meetup with the men he hired to shoot you in the first place. And all along your way to find Benny you're told by NPCs about the war with the NCR and the Legion which all becomes more relevant during the second half where you get to side with a particular faction to take over.
This structure was widely disliked by people when the game released and even now you'll find people who dislike it and see it as linear. But it really showed that if you just structured the game just a little you made it far stronger. I've always seen this as the biggest problem with Bethesda games and it's startling that they've gone this long without changing it. Even Grand Theft Auto at least tried to shake up their formula by having you switch between three main characters and having the world open to you at the start of the game.
e51bd0 No.15705101
>>15700544
Vidya isn't a good storytelling medium because the audience must necessarily interact with it.
That said, the audience participation makes it a fucking fantastic experiential medium, and the fact that so few people seem to care about this distinction is fucking criminal.
2de2c5 No.15705138
Video games are not a particularly good storytelling medium, but no medium is any good at it so it doesn't matter.
df6125 No.15705177
>>15705033
>This structure was widely disliked by people when the game released and even now you'll find people who dislike it and see it as linear.
I never got this, because the first thing I did when I was told "you can't go there, the deathclaws are too dangerous" is to run over there and see if I could get through. I could, and it wasn't even difficult.
d9b490 No.15705401
>the best stories in games
>Walking dead and The last of US
kill yourself
ff7a32 No.15709572
Story should not be the main focus of a game, nor should it interfere with the gameplay. With these rules in mind, even a mediocre story works just fine.
dff9f3 No.15709589
>>15709557
>Implying others are stupid when he doesnt even realize that a picture is worth a thousand words
db04a5 No.15709609
>>15709557
>cuckchan image
bookfags are cuckchanners it seems. Video games and animation are objectively better mediums.
bfbf3a No.15709610
Your taste in games is shit, OP.
Anyway, a personal note, but I can get engaged in a video game story far easier than any other medium, mostly because there are tangible consequences for failure, so an epic battle can be an epic battle instead of an epic Broadway play that's going to end the same no matter whether I read/watch it or not.
3d5581 No.15709629
>>15700638
>not whipping piss bottles at people during meetings
why even live?
be0080 No.15709631
>make linear story game
<booo it's basically a cutscene!
>make linear story game with no cutscenes
<booo it's basically a walking simulator! where's the gameplay!
>make non linear story game
>spend most of your dev time doing branching paths
<boo where's the gameplay?
>spend less time on story and do 3 or 4 story lines with side characters
<boo it's basically on rails and the gameplay isn't even that good!
No.
You can make a game tell a story but a game is not going to be a story in the same way a book or film is, you have to interact with a story in a videogame in order for it to be worth being in a videogame in the first place.
The game should be the important thing about a game, then you do your story and worldbuilding
4b0908 No.15709846
>>15700544
People who play games for the story just want to be entertained. They're not the type of person that would read a book. As such, there's no incentive to create complex narratives and stories, instead you just hire some cheap hack who shits out some bottom of the barrel drivel for you. Made by retards for retards.
d63c96 No.15709939
Games are about GAME & PLAY. Gameplay.
Stories do two things, they will interfere with the gameplay and the pacing, and in return the gameplay will will interfere with the story-telling, make it slow and tedious. Those who want to know the story will feel like the gameplay is getting in the way, "fuck this dungeon and these random encounters, I want to go to the next town to read about So-And-So." Alternatively those who want the gameplay will feel bogged down by the heavy-handed story telling, the cut-scenes, the insessant dialogue, and the upkeep that is required to move the story forward. You can't just play the game for its mechanics you have to talk to NPC #159 to trigger event #15 and then backtrack to NPC #158 in town #5 after doing-X and Y in order to….blablabla you get the idea.
Story telling is for books and movies, where the story moves along at the pace the writers intend.
Games are for gameplay. You can sprinkle a paragraph or two if you want, but having a fully fleshed out 300page story is idiotic. Stop playing games for "stories" go read books, your brain will thank you for it. You will get better quality stories from novels, you will get better quality games by totally IGNORING THE RPG/STORYTELLING Genres.
THe only time story-games work is if they are pure story, with like 2% gameplay (i.e visual novels).
475093 No.15709981
>>15709610
>your taste is shit
>Posts picture of that autistic girl from madoka magika
df8c2d No.15709990
>>15700544
>I've noticed the best stories in games are nothing more than dumbed down sci fi or fantasy TV shows, Walking dead and The last of US are literally at the level of walking dead TV series.
Every time some nigger says this, and they always give an example of some shitty mainstream normalfag shitgame that is NOWHERE near what good writing in vidya can be. Even games like Bioshock and Half-Life, which are still incredibly mainstream examples have a better written narrative than the shit-pieces produced by the AAA industry. You are judging games by the equivalent of hollywood action movies.
I'm not saying that writing in video games is amazing, but it can be devent, or even good sometimes. Even games like Shin Megami Tensei use some very interesting ideas, Warcraft III had a very well written story, a shit ton of Japanese games, Deus Ex, Metal Gear Solid many of the older RPGs and older games, in general are very well written. Those aren't very unpopular, and probably not even the best examples, but they are still better than the overhyped trash you gave as the example of "height of storytelling in vidya" OP
df8c2d No.15710032
>>15704581
>His storytelling method wouldn't translate well to a movie. His characters are massively exaggerated and his dialogue is really really bad.
Nigger there is absolutely nothing wrong with characterss being exaggerated. It's filled with exaggerated characters and cheesy writing on fucking purpose, those games are themed after B spy movies. Characters in storytelling don't have to be subtle nor realistic to be good, that idea is a fallacy. Have you fucking seen Twin Peaks? This show is filled with the most exaggerated characters that act nothing like real human beings and are really nothing more than over the top archetypes. But yet they are extremelly lovable, and well written, because they are writtenn in this exaggerated manner ON PURPOSE.
There is no problem with putting exaggerated characters in live-action media, as long as it's used as a stylistic choice. Like it was in MGS.
adca57 No.15710356
2cd3b5 No.15710543
>>15700544
No, because video games are inherently a form of media designed for maximum freedom of the player, at least in it's intended form. You cannot tell a specific story in them as well as you can with a book or a movie and all those sub-IQ retards crowing about "muh freedom to shape the narrative" are proving this point. Once you start shaping and influencing the narrative, it is no longer a story to be told to you, it's a playground to screw around in. Which is exactly what games should be, John Carmack was absolutely right on this point, though in an even deeper sense than he probably realized.
dff9f3 No.15710665
>>15710543
>You cannot tell a specific story in them as well as you can with a book or a movie
You absolutely can, its just that its a boring as shit videogame if you do.
About as interactive as some visual novels, press and hold enter to get to end.
>Which is exactly what games should be
>Videogames should all be a certain type because some faggot and some dude the faggot worships says so
Such delusion of grandeur. Who crowned you the king of videogames?
6562f5 No.15710719
>>15700544
>Are games even a good media to tell stories?
if someone tells you a story, you're just listening, so a pillow biter, but as a player you're on top, so telling a story through the gameplay would be like.. getting 69?
673a85 No.15714562
4bc70b No.15718200
>>15714562
They're the same thing anyway.
c5fc09 No.15726666
>>15700544
tbh games are a better way to tell a story than tv but games with story are usually convoluted and boring
017c4b No.15726697
>>15704581
>People like it because it's silly but if a Metal Gear movie was made and shit like "la le lu le lo"
It was a mistranslation based on the fact that lalilulelo is something Japanese can't pronounce and the nanomachines filtered the Patriots in reference to the conspiracy group to gibberish
They shoudl've translated it to something like "brzęczyszczykiewicz" for the English version.
11f7f4 No.15726702
>>15704581
>directlinking to mother's basement
c1e90c No.15726758
>>15726702
Can I ask for those pictures? I have a thing for revenge porn, specially if it's against faggots like this.
02a925 No.15726763
>>15726743
Thanks for your input, cuckchanner.
0ab67a No.15726792
No, it's not a good medium for story'telling'. It is a good medium to write and direct stories however. Every time a game is played, the player is acting out a new story.
0ab67a No.15726796
>>15709939
Underrated post. Though Einhander sucks. Play better STDs.
9fe9e3 No.15726821
>>15726774
Is correct, it's wild to think that Silent Hill 2 was in 2001 and nothing has really come close to it since.
8bc786 No.15726822
>>15705138
>no medium is any good at storytelling so it doesn't matter
No wonder we're fucked.
1bee0e No.15726978
>>15700544
Games shouldn't have a storyline more complex than a short story. RPGs work better as a collection of short stories. Where games can excel in comparison to other mediums is worldbuilding.
b96d1e No.15727021
>2018 and /v/ still has shit taste in anime
292f7b No.15727057
>>15727021
let's hear yours then, fag
4e553d No.15727625
>>15702022
>Games have a unique edge for certain types of stories, but that works best when conveyed via atmosphere rather than directly
Yume Nikki is a good example of this. The setting is a collection of strange dream worlds that are interesting and often scary to explore because of how otherworldly and/or ominous they are. There's no written dialogue or explanatory text outside of the gameplay instructions so what the player experiences through controlling Madotsuki is all that informs him about the world and its characters. This kind of narrative experience can't be replicated in other mediums. Only other video games like .flow and Eastern Mind have given me the same kind of experience that exploring the world of Yume Nikki did.
>>15702336
>Games can still have good settings or atmosphere, which I value more than a good story.
I agree strongly with this sentiment. Morrowind, STALKER, SMT, and the Soulsborne games are good examples of a game's setting being better than its story, even if the story is pretty good in its own right. Setting is more important than story in videos games because video games are interactive and exploratory in nature.
>>15726774
>>15726821
>it's wild to think that Silent Hill 2 was in 2001 and nothing has really come close to it since.
Agreed. There are other games I've played with really good stories, like Planescape: Torment and 999, but none of them are as compelling or concise as the story of Silent Hill 2.
ee955a No.15727982
>>15700614
>basic bitch philosophy 101
d03464 No.15728145
>Walking dead and The last of US are literally at the level of walking dead TV series
But faggot OP, nobody on here considers these good stories, even for a game.
2cf360 No.15728222
>>15700658
The VAST majority of anime are made and ended with 26 episodes, there are plenty of exceptions, but fuck man don't talk about shit that you're not versed in.
6cecbc No.15728538
>>15700544
>best stories in games
>Walking dead and The last of US
wow OP I didn't think that was actually you in OP pic
77a1b7 No.15729322
Hey, what's going on, everypony?
2f84d7 No.15729368
>>15700544
>games
can tell a story where the player plays an active role in it better than any other media.
that's it
db6599 No.15731787
>>15700544
My reasoning that games are not a good medium for stories is because they always have to break up the story flow to have gameplay sections. In a movie or a book every scene builds on the last to create emotion in the audience. Any emotion a game tries to build is petered out while you're shooting bad guys or slaying monsters. The games with the best stories in my opinion are CRPGs, and they are the one genre of video game that's the most like an interactive book.
add5a7 No.15731854
>>15726702
>gamergator
So Mother's Basement is against Gamergate? Is he also a cuck? I knew he was a faggot but I didn't know that much of a cuck.
a20641 No.15738663
>>15729368
This. RPGs are just books.
002067 No.15738841
>>15700544
It can work in games, yeah. Player interaction can ruin some parts of a narrative, which is why almost every game has cutscenes where they take it away, or quick time events where they rail you along instead. But being able to interact with random NPCs and objects like in an RPG allows the game's setting and some details of the narrative to be fleshed out in a way that feels natural because we choose to explore them. If a book or movie just had the main character going around and talking to random people to get flavor text, it would rightly feel incredibly stupid. But when we do it in a game, it doesn't feel stupid.
04c725 No.15738942
The only type of story that games can do that other mediums can't is player driven ones. Best examples of this would be Dwarf Fortress or Minecraft. Games where there's no premade story and the narrative is told by the player. Any actual story can be done by either movies or books or comics. and better at that. No matter how something is told, by cutscenes or walls of text or the Half-Life approach, the story can be told just as competently by a movie or anime.
There's really no point in pushing games to be some deep artistic form of expression. When this happens we get walking simulators. Games are just that, games. Entertainment.
e8304d No.15739493
The problem with games is storytelling is interactive. Too many games with plot try and fail to show the player the story rather than allow the player to play it for themselves. It's like exposition in bad movies, things that are said not shown. Fact is game plot can be irrelevant to the game itself and for the player to have fun. Good plots are things that leave the player musing about the game they played and maybe drive them to come back and pay the game some more. Otherwise bad plot gets in the way of gameplay because. And at that point just not have plot at all.
Priority in games is first and foremost player interaction. Similar to film, it's the visual spectacle that comes first and the story telling afterward. You can enjoy bad movie plots with good visuals. Art films exist and most are shit, like Hollywood big budget films anyway. And like some games with bad gameplay and good plot some movies have bad acting but good writing.
If you want pure storytelling read books. Books are pure words with nothing else in the way. If anything I say books are an interactive medium because the reader has to actively interpret the words with their mind, not with their eyes and ears. There are reasons why people say books are better than the movies and that's because books are read to your own interpretation. Not the interpretation of the film makers.
b76984 No.15739584
>>15738663
They're basically just those "choose your own adventure" books you read as a kid.
598517 No.15739601
>>15702258
Regardless if that was done unironically in a movie it'd be seen as retarded by movie viewers. Metal Gear's high camp juxtaposed with srsness would be seen as schizophrenic if it was in a movie but in a video game it's well liked. This is why I strongly disagree that Kojima should just "make films" because if he made films they'd be seen as on the same level as something like The Room in terms of quality.
>>15710032
You can't have wacky characters just by itself and make it well liked. Twin peaks is a good example of this where the silly aspects to it juxtapose the more surreal aspects. David Lynch was an expert at not telling the audience more than they really needed to know and keeping ambiguity in the story. Kojimbo meanwhile doesn't have any ambiguity in his stories and over explains things. See the massive exposition dump in the middle of MGS4.
>>15702258
>the others are watched in public and have to adhere to a schedule
Not anymore. Films can be watched in your home and most television shows now are streamed and seasons are released with all the episodes at once so they can be watched at your leisure. You can also choose to only watch a television show after it's completed and ingest the story at your own pace. Books and comic books don't apply either.
>>15702273
>A better reason why super long, complex stories can work better in vidya than linear old media is because story can be made optional
A lot of the time the story is made optional because of the focus on combat. Like a good example is players are more inclined to skip dialogue in games even if it's really good because they want to get back to the combat.
>>15728222
I was specifically referring to the flaws with the medium, a lot of the flaws with anime parallel flaws with television and comic books. Since the OP was talking about the flaws with vidya stories. There's numerous examples of vidya stories that completely subvert the things people view as problems with typical video game story structure. (A good example is Dark Souls choosing to tell its story largely through item descriptions and level design as opposed to using any direct exposition).
b76984 No.15739633
The best stories in video games are the ones you make up in your own mind while playing like with The Sims or Paradox Interactive games tbh.
dd0c1b No.15739642
>Are games even a good media to tell stories?
no
f4b093 No.15739730
>>15700544
I'd say, yes and no.
Modern AAA video games use cutscenes and other bs to hamfistedly tell the low iq drones exactly what the story is about, rather than making it about the game play and telling a story through the game play.
If this doesn't make sense, the "storytelling through gameplay" in talking about can be seen in stuff like Super Metroid. The game literally has no cut scenes, no readable text, etc (other than the opening text which is simply their way of explaining what happened in the previous two games).
There are a ton of games that do this, but Super Metroid always sticks in my mind, because as a kid that was the first game that really showed me how much a game can tell a story, without having to ham fist it into the game via cut scenes.
Cut scenes are, to me, a sign that a game fails at being a game with a story, because they couldn't incorporate it into the gameplay, and had to rely on old media to tell it.
Ultimately, nothing touches reading a well written book, but games can tell a story and stay loyal to the medium, but few do it right these days.
452ca2 No.15740471
>>15726758
> I have a thing for revenge porn, specially if it's against faggots like this.
me too anon, me too
5d8795 No.15743507
games would be perfect for telling a story, instead they got kiked into making a buck off derps. it's sad.
the last game that transported a good story, was deus ex. literally everything after that, was sub par. well, bloodlines was decent. but the good games are over, it's a shitty business now, like marvel movies featuring niggers and genderbender men in rubber suits.
enjoy the decline. its over.
5da739 No.15746809
>>15700544
VNs are much better way to tell a story than games
a20641 No.15748400
>>15746809
Sure but visual novels aren't actually video games. The clue is in the name.
a20641 No.15748402
5f5dea No.15748417
>>15710665
>Such delusion of grandeur. Who crowned you the king of videogames?
Gameplay is suppose to be the strongest point in video games and stories is just a supplement, not the other way around.