Ever feel like most games nowadays don't have compelling narratives, characters or plot? Well, you're not alone: Game Career Guide writer Lee Sheldon has posted an op-ed piece about the games industry's disturbing trend of underplaying the value of game writers. Sheldon, a teacher, writer and game designer for nearly 15 years, expresses his displeasure with how both the industry and the writers themselves are not realizing the potential of narrative-driven game design.
"I recently learned that with few exceptions, game studios still have a very limited idea of what writing a game means, or how writers can be used in games, and as a result rarely hire writers on staff or utilize contract writers to their fullest potential.
Now that I'm in academia and beginning to attend academic conferences, I've quickly realized that many programs professing to train students for careers in game development share this mindset; therefore they provide limited to no training in writing for games."
Sheldon goes on to state how this concern led to his career in teaching
"My reason for taking on the added burden of teaching as I continue to create commercial games was a realization that despite many advances in techniques for storytelling in games, a huge number of people and companies in our industry seem unaware of them. This includes writers of games themselves. My hope was to help raise a new generation of writers proficient in the skills we have learned, and find new ones to suit our ever-evolving industry."
We all know that writing for a game is extremely different from writing for film or other media, but exactly
what defines this difference, aside from the presence or absence of interactivity?
You can read the whole article on
GameCareerGuide.com
Zen Albatross's blog
Follow
RSS
Contact
:P
Now, obviously, there are some games where story has nothing to do with buying it. Soul Caliber and most fighting games for example. Sure they have story, but in general it is very lacking.
The people who appreciate games as art are unfortunately always going to be in the minority. I wish this wasn't the case, because my favorite games almost always are ones that are well written. The old school LucasGames adventure games, Psychonaunts, and Portal come to mind as examples of these.
While I'm sure many people are going to disagree with me here, my opinion is most JRPGs (like most anime) are ridiculous, convoluted rehashes of the same three or four plots. Western RPGs are usually only slightly better. So why would people play RPGS? Because they enjoy the leveling/item collecting/stat building RPG gameplay, or they have weeaboo blinders on and couldn't recognize a decent plot if it smacked them upside the head. :)
There are certainly gamers out there who appreciate a good story, myself included. But like I said, they're in the minority and not the ones who drive the sales charts.
@ Zen Albatross: I agree with you completely. When I can get all of a game's plot by going to YouTube and watching the cutscenes *cough MGS4*, then it's pretty clear the developers are still a decade behind when it comes to storytelling. Valve is definitely one of the companies who are doing it right.
I don't want to just write a script. I've played video games all my life, so I know that many times the quality of the story comes down to letting the player execute the denouement, and not have the final scene play out in some poorly rendered iteration of a B-grade Hollywood script. I also hate the whole cutscene-gameplay-cutscene set up. You can deliver the story all in game, if you do it right, and it doesn't just have to involve collecting journals or waiting in rooms for characters to blabber on.
That said, a lovingly rendered CG movie for the opening and finale are a must have, provided they fit with the rest of the story telling method of course.