Video game designers have hit a brick wall where storytelling elements seem unable to evolve as pleasingly as graphics do. Last week I interviewed game designer and firsttime novelist Austin Grossman about this – you'll see my profile of him on Wired* *in a few days – and we talked about how videogames still can't beat old-fashioned novels when it comes to compelling stories.
As a longtime fan of the novel, and only a sporadic player of video games, I have always thought that I would get into video games more if they could just do whatever it is that novels do for me.
But Grossman said his experiences writing stories for games, followed by writing a novel, have persuaded him that games can't be like novels (or movies, for that matter) because those media use linear narratives. Games can't be linear: they're interactive, often repeat similar scenarios on each level, and players change the story as it unfolds. Nevertheless video games keep trying to be like movies, even though the best video game stories fall short of the crappiest straight-to-video fare.
What's the solution? Possibly, we need a new language to describe what's happening in video games.
The problem is that we're still coming up with accurate ways to describe video game "stories." This sounds a little nuts until you consider that it wasn't until the 1940s – roughly 45 years after the first films were shown publicly – that critics and filmmakers fully realized the potentials of this new medium. A French film magazine,
Cahiers du Cinema, brought to 1950s audiences a whole new vocabulary for talking about film, including the idea of a mise en scene, which refers to the design composition of a particular shot. Today, almost 40 years after geeks were playing the first crude video games with mainframes, I think we're entering an era when we can begin to understand what this medium is really about.
A positive sign is that universities are treating video games as legitimate objects of critical study, on par with books and movies. Terranova recently had a short thread about graduate programs where students in the social sciences and humanities can study video games. Where do we look to figure out what's unique about video game expression, what sets it apart from cinematic or literary art? Grossman thinks the key lies in the videogame aesthetics of the 1980s, which made no effort to imitate movies and yet changed the visual style of movies themselves (think Tron). He believes that video games today are so busy trying to look and feel like movies that they aren't playing to their medium's strengths.
How, exactly, do video games tell stories better than novels and movies do? What makes a video game story "good"? I'm not talking about good graphics, though obviously that helps. I'm talking about what makes a game emotionally and intellectually engaging. And what are some of the best "storytelling" games? Grossman suggests some standouts are Shadow of the Colossus, Ico, Halflife, and Grand Theft Auto.
