Going the Wrong Way

Everything I despise about gaming is advocated in this video:

You’re going the wrong way! No! No! No!

If I was in that ‘classroom’, I would calmly raise my hand and when called on, I would say:

“Your premise of writing is wrong. When you look at the best selling books, they are never the best WRITTEN books. There is a New York Times Best Seller list. There is no such thing as a New York Times Best Written list. When you look at the best selling movies, they are never the best WRITTEN movies. In movies, the director calls the shots.

“My question to you is this: ‘On what grounds can you complain about the lack of “good writing” in games when sales of books has nothing to do with writing quality?”

Now, he would be unable to answer this question. In fact, most writers cannot answer this question. This is why most writers never succeed. They aren’t interested in why books sell. They are interested solely in their own ‘vision’ and their own ‘writing’. They don’t care about the customers and how they view things.

In the video, he mocks the older games because their technological inferiority doesn’t allow them to tell ‘epic stories’. Well, too bad! Many gamers still really like the old games, and many think they are superior to the new games. I’d rather play a game of Asteroids or Tetris over any Next Generation game with their creepy cinematic cut-scenes and “awesome story”.

I would not be surprised if the ‘Narratologists’ truly despise and hate the Wii. With the DS, that was handheld gaming. No one can expect ‘movie games’ on a handheld because that doesn’t fit pick up and play nature of portable gaming. But the Wii is embracing an anti-narratology position in gaming. Wii gaming is not about huge storylines and cinematic experiences.

Note how at the end, he says that the final decision is with the consumer, good or bad. How can the consumers’ decision be bad? The only way the consumers’ decision is “bad” is if the developer believes HE DEFINES WHAT GAMING IS. One has to be so drunk on their own ‘vision’ to believe that.

Gaming is defined by the consumers. In fact, all business is defined by the consumers. The only way you can not do what the consumers want is to either become a criminal or work for the government. There is a third option in universities, but those are about to be massively disrupted.

Of all these people complaining about the writing in video games, I would like to see their bestselling books. So let us see how what one best selling author, Orson Scott Card, says about writing and gaming:

My comments will be red.

GT: Video games are notorious for having mediocre storylines, which I suppose can be blamed on the gamers themselves. I certainly am guilty of frantically trying to skip monotonous video game dialog, hitting the start button until I can get back into the action. As a writer, how do you go about facing the challenges inherit in writing for such a dynamic medium?

Note what I bolded. Already, the questioner is blaming the customers for the “quality” of video-games. I am sure this sentiment is probably more widespread. I am sure there are people in the “Games Industry” who truly believe that CUSTOMERS are what is holding back the “progress” of gaming! In other words, the customers are the problem.

OSC: Games CAN’T have the kind of storylines that movies and books have, or they wouldn’t be playable. You are correct to skip the tedious, badly written “scenes” that are usually a pathetic job of trying to paste story on top of a game. What makes a game work is the opposite of what makes a story work. In a story, you are seeking to find out what really happened – why people do what they do, what the results of their choices are. You identify with the character(s) but you do not control them. Instead, the author has the ultimate authority. When a movie is made from a book and the script changes key events, the readers are usually furious. Why? Since the original events weren’t real, why not change them? The answer is simple: Even in fiction, what the author put down on paper is “the truth” and anyone who fiddles with it is “lying” or “wrecking it.”

Orson Scott Card is arguing the nature of control. In a book or movie, the writer or director is controlling the events. In a game, the player is controlling the events.

In a game, the opposite illusion must be created. Even though most games absolutely force you to follow preset paths, the gamewrights try to give you the illusion that you are making free choices (even though you are actually, in almost all games, still being channeled through certain puzzles with fixed solutions).

There is no question about character motivation. The lead character is you, and your motivation is to beat the enemy and win.

It’s like golf. Sure, you could put on a World War II uniform and pretend that each ball was a bomb that needed to be dropped down into the underground bunker of some Nazi generals, and call it “Golf: The Dirty Dozen,” but the GAME is about you and your contest with the obstacles placed in your way by the course designer. You can compare your score with other players, but the things they do are completely irrelevant to your game. It’s just you against the golf course designer (and, of course, the groundskeepers).

I really like the ‘golf’ metaphor because it fits so well with games like Wii Sports and Wii Sports Resort. Note how he said a game is a ‘contest’ against the “course designer”.

I have long realized that when game designers channel their creative laser on the enemies or levels instead of “story” or “characters”, a very good game appears. When Super Mario Brothers was designed, the creative focus was on the monsters and the levels. The protagonist, Mario, was already established back in Mario Brothers or even Donkey Kong. The mushroom, fire flower, and star were placed in certain parts to HELP the player go through the obstacle course.

In modern games like Monster Hunter or World of Warcraft, they are more driven by the ‘arenas’ and ‘monstesr’ than the story or your character or ‘fancy dialogue’. The old RPGs were very monster and dungeon based for a reason.

Consider the original Legend of Zelda. What made Zelda sell to non-Zelda fans (which was 100% of the people who bought the original Legend of Zelda) really had nothing to do with Link or the Tri-force or the mythology. It was the design of the obstacles that made the game great: the monsters and the dungeons. Look at what the commercial says. The rap is about the monsters, not about Link or the mythology!

In another one, it is still about the monsters but you hear the actor crying, “Which way to go!!???” which is a signal to the dungeon design.

Look at how Link to the Past was advertised. They don’t even bother showing footage of the game. It focus on overcoming obstacles which is clearly shown with the actor climbing up the mountain.

In most videogames, you’re still just playing golf. The story exists only to justify cool new gameplay features. Yes, we respond to greater and greater realism; yes, there’s an element of escapism and power fantasy and all that crap that we hear about from psychologists – but lousy games have those just as much as good ones. What makes a difference is the degree of challenge and freshness in each new game. Everything else is window dressing. You’ve got to have it, but nobody should ever get confused and think that the window dressing IS the game.

This is what Narratologists are: confused. They believe the window dressing is why people play games.

I love when they say that gaming needs its Citizen Kane. Citizen Kane was a movie directed by a 25 year old kid who had never directed a movie before (but was a master of radio). A video game equivalent of ‘Citizen Kane’ would mean for a master of a medium outside of gaming to be given full control of making a game. The “Game Industry” would never allow that, and they would be incensed that such a ‘genius’ game came from completely outside the “industry”.

The “story” elements of game are the window dressing. No wonder you skip them.

Indeed.

To the degree that the game is fixed – the outcome predetermined – the game is a story. But to the degree that you SEE that the game is fixed, it becomes less fun to play! You want to have the feeling that you can also explore the world a little, maybe find stuff that has nothing to do with gameplay. Since when do you do that in a novel or movie? You can do that on a golf course, because the world is just a little bigger than the fairways and greens. But when you’re choosing weapons in a shooter, you’re just telling the caddy to give you a nine-iron instead of a wood.

I really like this golf metaphor.

I wish sometimes that I were so rich I could just finance the development of the games I want to play. The gamewrights would report only to me instead of pinheaded executives from the game publishing companies. Once I was happy with a game, then we’d release it to the public, and if nobody else likes it, screw ‘em. I’m happy.

Everyone has this fantasy!

Everyone keeps arguing that gaming needs to ‘grow up’. Strangely, the way for gaming to ‘grow up’, in their eyes, is to not BE gaming. Rather, it is for gaming to be MOVIES or to be NOVELS or to be TV EPISODES or something else.

When you are young, you rush to grow up. And once grown up, you mourn that you are no longer young. You spend your time trying to make money only to spend that money to generate more time. You die as if you have never lived. You never grew up, you just grew old.

Gaming isn’t ‘growing up’, it is just getting older. When gaming was young, it longed to be ‘complex’ and make ‘tons of money’. Now that it is ‘complex’ and makes ‘tons of money’, gaming wishes it were back in its youngster days of pre-3d simplicity. Creative games were made to make money. Now that money is being made, it is being spent on trying to desperately make ‘creative games’. If gaming is going to die, it will have died as if it has never lived.

Instead of trying to turn gaming into something that it is not, like a MOVIE or a NOVEL or a TV EPISODE, why don’t we love gaming for what it is? Let us explore gaming for what it is instead of attacking gaming for what it is not. Once we accept gaming for what it is, gaming, then gaming will truly begin to ‘grow up’.

Some people define gaming only through similarities of other entertainment mediums. But we should define gaming by its differences of other entertainment. Instead of condemning games for it not being like another medium, we should praise games precisely for its unique qualities.

There are two roads before us. One road leads to known entertainment mediums such as MOVIES or NOVELS or TV EPISODES. This road is known. But the other road leads away from these old mediums and leads further into the explorered realms of gaming.

I would much rather take a ride to explore gaming. It is the New World in entertainment; why settle on the initial islands when an entire continent awaits to be explored?