Games Need More Artfully Story-Entwined Gameplay

Movie and Game writer Justin Marks has written an impassioned plea for the industry to concentrate more on artfully story-entwined gameplay, exploring what he thinks major titles are missing these days. "But for the most part, we as an industry are stuck in the same trap that GTA exemplifies. We value narratives in games, we understand their purpose and their necessity, and yet we have no idea how to parse them effectively into the game's interactive structure. As technology gets better, the weaknesses of poor story integration are more exposed."

Comments

it's an interesting idea

[Nursie]

A lot of games will give you a long narrative about how important something is, how it must be achieved stealthily, how you need to go in, get something and get out again or spin a complex tail around which you play your mission.

then it finishes and you turn to your buddy and say "so it's 'wade in and kill everything' like last time then?"

OTOH, i like 'wade in and kill everything'. 'wade in and kill everything' is great.

Oh please

[oodaloop]

If I wanted artful stories, I'd read a book. All I want to do is chainsaw zombies, preferably on a Wii.

Re:How about artfully Gameplay-entwined stories?

[KillerBob]

Loved the King's Quest and Space Quest games. Liked Police quest as well... but those games were very linear. More recently, there's games like The Longest Journey and its sequel, Dreamfall: The Longest Journey, and also Advent Rising. There's also the NWN games, and the KOTOR series, just to name a few.

But all of those games have exactly the same problem with them: they're linear. Stories are, by definition, linear (unless you count Choose Your Own Adventure). If you're going to tell a great story through a game, you either limit yourself to one or two possible plotlines/endings, making for a *very* linear game, or you take on the enormous task of plotting out every option in the multiverse that gets determined by every choice you can make in game.