Story and Games

[A Black Falcon]

That's really, really lame. I could then say that the crappy apple pie that grandma made was actually great because I used my imagination and imagined it as not being crappy.

Static characters with lifeless dialogue boxes scrolling over their heads is a terrible way of telling a story. I've explained in great depth many times in the past why that is, and will not continue any further.

Don't. Repeating yourself won't make it any more true that games without that are the worse off for it.

And lazy, saying that game designers can't be good storytellers is about as dumb as someone saying in the 30's that a filmmaker cannot be a good storyteller either, that they can only be a good photographer and editor. The medium is slowly becoming a better storytelling medium, and as long as this continues different kinds of people will want to make games, people who can tell good stories. There are already a number of game designers that can tell a good story. That Finnish guy (I can never spell that name), Hideo Kojima, Tim Shafer, and Fumito Ueda just to name a few. I agree that most games have shit stories and that there has yet to be a video game equivalent of Casablanca or Gone With the Wind, but I believe that that time is fast approaching.

There's nothing contradictory about saying that running around for hours in Mario 64 is more fun than playing through Grim Fandango or whatever. Of course it's more fun. Just as any Buster Keaton movie is more fun to watch than Citizen Kane. But there's a place, and an audience, for both types of games.

It's Tornquist (with dots over the o.) and Schaefer. :)

But yeah, I agree with that, pretty much... I guess I'm a bit more optimistic of the state of games as they are already, but certainly most games don't have great stories.