Once Upon A Game

Technopulp writes "In William Vitka's column on CBSNews.com, Henry Jenkins of MIT, author Warren Ellis and GDC Director Jamil Moledina wax philosophical about storytelling in video games and discuss whether or not gaming will ever have its own kind of great literature. 'Could a game be as good a work as War and Peace?'"

Comments

Well, videogames aren't about the story.

[Doom bucket]

You don't remember Super Mario Brothers because of story do you? "Oh my god, the princess is in ANOTHER castle? What a plot twist!"

No. You remember it because of the gameplay. I'm not saying that a game with story is impossible, I'm definitely not. Half Life, System Shock, Elder Scrolls, Final Fantasy... All games with great stories... but they are mostly remembered for their gameplay, right?

A game is great becuase it plays well and is fun. Story is just the icing on the cake, and does not alone make a great game make. :)

Re:Well, videogames aren't about the story.

[Red Flayer]

"A game is great becuase it plays well and is fun. Story is just the icing on the cake, and does not alone make a great game"

Absolutely true. But story isn't really what great literature is about -- the plot is a device to carry a theme, or multiple themes. The trappings are what make great literature great -- imagery, etc. And there's the inherent problem with videogames -- images are laid out for the player/viewer. Timing (which is cornerstone of Hitchcock's famous knack for suspense) is in the hands of the player, not the director/designer.

This is a major problem with video games as art -- the viewed product is never exactly as the developer intended. Whereas a great artwork is typically a 'finished' product by the artist, often with many revisions before achieving the piece intended, video games are never a single version. What we see in most artful videogames is, instead, the creation of a mood or atmosphere. Without complete control over the user experience, it's hard to have the same kind of art as the 'traditional' masterpieces of literature or film. And if the designer did have complete control of the user experience, well, then it's an animated movie.

As the industry (and its audience!)continues to mature, I think we'll see more games based on story. I can't imagine myself playing a twitch game when I'm 70 (even if I had the reflexes then, I'm not sure I'd want to risk the heart attack), but a good story might really appeal.

Re:Well, videogames aren't about the story.

[Dachannien]

Whereas a great artwork is typically a 'finished' product by the artist, often with many revisions before achieving the piece intended, video games are never a single version.

Insert George Lucas reference here.

Depends on your definition of "good".

[vertinox]

I got more enjoyment out of FFVII than War and Peace. Actually, I can remember the plot line and recognize characters from FFVII, but I am hard pressed to remember what War and Peace was about other than it was written by a Russian guy.

How strange... I just the oddest senation of thousands of World Lit 101 teachers spinning in their graves.

Re:Depends on your definition of "good".

[MilenCent]

How strange... I just the oddest senation of thousands of World Lit 101 teachers spinning in their graves.

I'm spinning, and I haven't even died yet!

Why shoot so low?

[AuMatar]

War and Peace isn't really that interesting. In fact, of all the "great literature" that english majors like to rave about, I find that less than 10% of it even makes the level of decent, much less good.

Thats the problem with people who talk about art and wether games are art- art doesn't exist. People tag some items as "art" and others as "not art" as pure snob appeal- a way to say this is what I like and others who like this are better than other people. Its nothing intrinsic in the item. There's no magical quality of an object that catapults it to the level or art or fine art. Its wether it appeals to a small group of snobs.

Hell, the set of what's included as art doesn't even stay the same. Remberandt and Van Gogh were starving artists. Shakespear was considered lewd and crude in his day and lambasted for appealing to the masses.

Forget about striving to become art or creating something for the ages. Make a game thats fun. In the end, thats all that matters.

Re:Why shoot so low?

[AuMatar]

I'm a geek who's a graduate student in English Literature, so perhaps I can provide some special insight into the matter. Ready? Here we go:

YOU'RE WRONG!!!!11!!

Okay seriously, the thing is that what makes "literature" lasting doesn't so much have to do with its engagingness as a story as to its level of philosophical insight into the human condition. Ideally it should work as *both* insight and a good story.

As I said in another part of the thread- appeal to authority is a logical fallacy.

And no, the thing that makes good books lasting has nothing to do with insight into the human condition. Thats not why I read books. Its not why the vast majority of people read books, as proven by the fact that "literature" is nowhere near the top of the best seller list. The story and its presentation is all that matters. As shown by the fact every Harry Potter book *does* hit the top of the best seller list.

Now *you* might like stories with hidden meanings and symbolism and allegory (despite the fact that I'm convinced the majority of the stuff people read into books is crap the author didn't mean). Thats great, keep at it. But its not what most people like, and it doesn't make the book better for having it. All it means is that you and people like you will be more likely to enjoy it, and me and people like me will be less likely to enjoy it.

As for what makes "literature" lasting- the fact that professors and high school english teachers make people continue to buy copies. The number of people who decide to read Kafka's Metamorphisis for fun is vanishingly small. Yet it speaks volumes about the human condition. Compare to Tolkien, who tells a great story. He's still selling orders of magnitude more the Kafka.

Anything older than you will have an unavoidable distance between the time it was written and your own perspective, and the greater the time, the larger the gulf that must be crossed. I think it's this distance that throws a lot of people off the study of literature.

Nope. Its the fact that people don't enjoy it. Most people don't enjoy symbolism, they don't enjoy allegory. But I know very few people who don't enjoy a good story.

Beyond that- of all the things you can do in your life, why the hell would you want to *study* literature? Reading a good tale is fun, its a great way to kill a few hours in the evening, or spend a lazy weekend. Studying a book? Boring as hell. If I wanted to read a philisophical treatsie, I'd read a philisophical treatsie. Not one that wastes my time by wrapping it in a story and making me guess at what he meant. Studying books is a great way to take a fun passtime and remove all the enjoyment from it.

In a way, if you're remembered eighty years after your death, you're automatically art.

Nope. I read some early 20s pulp sci-fi stories, and enjoy them greatly (far more so than I ever did Faulkner or Dickens). If I were to call them art, the english profs would be sneering at me. The very idea of "art" is appeal to authority- this group of snobs decides such and such is worthy of study and therefor art.

Now if we're discussing staying power- good stories seem to have that far more than "literature" does. If a story is good, people will read it regaurdless of how old it is. Other authors will write their take on it, or write derivatives. But the dustbin of history is filled with pretentious literature writers of the type you like who noone remembers. All their allegories and speaking of the human condition failed to get them remembered, because their stories sucked.

He is also considered lewd and crude today in many ways. That's not a problem with Shakespeare, it is a strength.

Depends on who you talk to. In his own time, it was considered a weakness. Now, with no change to the content of the play, its considered a strength. W

Re:Why shoot so low?

[AuMatar]

Well that brings up an interesting question: are readers the only measure of book quality that matters?

Whether you enjoyed reading it is the measure of quality. Other than that, no measure is possible.

We've already established that the people living at the time of a book's initial publication are not the best judges as to whether it'll become remembered through the ages or not.

Well, that is kind of self fullfilling- in 100 years, if we still remember it, its remembered through the ages :)

There is a school of thought that, even if the writer didn't consciously mean it, he still meant it subconsciously.

Utter bullshit. It translates to "I think this interpretation is cool, so I'm going to pretend its right wether it is or not". If you used logic like that in the sciences, you'd be laughed out of academia.

And there's another way of thinking about it that states, what the reader brings to the work, that's what really matters.

More BS. Another way of saying the same as the above.

You might be surprised, my friend.

Not likely. I kno the number *is* non-zero, but its pretty damn small.

The fact is, Tolkien does contain subtexts. It's not just a yarn. It does have something to say about the human condition. And it's ultimately a very, nay an extremely Catholic story. You don't have to be an English student to see that the story contains no less than three Christ figures, one of which is an almost literal messiah.

Dear god, when you read the book did you totally skip the introduction? The part where he says there is NO allegory or symbolism in the book? THis is an example of the worst kind of lit bullshit- the author friggin TELLS YOU that there is no symbolism, and you try and add it to try and prove your point. WHich goes back to my point that 90% of all symbolism you guys talk about doesn't exist.

so I ask, then, why so many books don't get more than a first printing?

A combination of economic issues (expense of printings and ROI), and the fact that there are so many books being written today (and people are reading less and less) that noone can keep up. Only the ones that get good word of mouth manage to get a following and sell large numbers.

Re:No. - Duke Nukem Forever

[eggsurplus]

Duke Nukem Forever

There are plenty of games that last longer!

[rabbitliberationfron]

Disgaea for starters. Isn't War and Peace more memorable for its length than its quality (sounds like a porn star in that respect)?

I do get fed up with the "games as storytellers" topic. I don't quite understand where it comes from. Just because games are played on TV, doesn't mean they *have* to be compared with movies. Football (soccer) is played on grass, but has nothing to do with tending one's lawn. In fact, quite the opposite!
Some games have stories, great. Not all games do. Games generate their own stories. Consider the storyline of the last game of chess you played or the last basketball match you watched. *If* a game sets out to tell a story (eg RPG), then fine, compare it with stories. If it doesn't, then stop bothering.

From the article: "Creating powerful narratives is the next step ... We need real emotional and intellectual experiences." Really? Maybe if the game is trying to tell a story. But not all games try. Not all games need to. Should families stop playing charades at Christmas until Grandad comes up with a better plot as justification for playing? What a load of rubbish. We should enjoy games for what they are. I still want a game that is fun for 30 minutes. If I want to read a book, then guess what ... I'll actually read one.

And, most of all, STOP LUMPING ALL GAMES INTO THE SAME POT.

war and peace

[vivIsel]

This article deeply misinterprets Tolstoy's novel. From TFA:

"Jenkins elaborates, "The last hundred pages [of "War and Peace"] is this essay that Tolstoy wrote, saying 'if the Russians had done this differently, then this would have been the result and if the French had done this differently then this would have been the result.' "It's not hard to look at 'War and Peace' and say that this wanted to be a video game."

Absurd. The last hundred pages of War and Peace describe the way in which events necessarily turned out as they did, and that those in power were so constrained by their roles that they had no more choice than the cannons that fired at Borodino. The true power, Tolstoy claims, lies with the people--but not in any concrete choices they make. In their mass action they constitute the integral of history, that which drives and shapes it. Tolstoy would never, ever, ever have said "if X had done Y differently, Z would have happened." He viciously attacked those who said precisely that--they were looking only at the manifestations of history, not its causes.

And for all of you who appreciate [insert videogame here] more than Tolstoy: it's your perogative, and there's no accounting for taste. But I've played a lot of videogames, and I've read a lot of Tolstoy (Anna Karenina, Resurrection, War and Peace, The Devil, The Forged Coupon, The Death of Ivan Illyich, Family Happiness, Sevastopol in May, Sevastopol in December, The Kreutzer Sonata, and countless other short stories). And as someone who met and appreciated video games (and I can think of several games I would classify as 'brilliant') before I encountered Tolstoy, I'll say this: I have never played a game that posessed anything like the fierce invention, modal clarity and deep insight of Tolstoy's works. It may be fashionable to bash literature on Slashdot--there was a discussion on Shakespeare vs. Video Games the other day on which I barely restrained myself from commenting--but the insight of War and Peace will never grow old or die.