alec said:
I support this 100%.
Thinking that gaming is defined by its ability to form a pastiche of other mediums is undercutting gaming itself. Gaming isn't supposed to be cinematic, philosophical, deep, or artistic, gaming is supposed to be a game, it's supposed to be gameplay, yet it seems so very much that there's this underlying desire in the industry for gaming to touch upon the same level of artistry as film or written work in their cultural relevance. That's just not going to happen. You can't make someone think about important existentialist issues while they play a game without sacrificing gameplay, this medium calls for interactivity and attempting to smother that most important aspect with the intricacies of other mediums leads to subpar products.
I could use several examples, Call of Duty 4 obsesses itself with being "cinematic" and providing the player with the feeling of being in a movie but ultimately it sacrifices the things that are most treasured in gaming, it sacrifices variety because the developers decide what will happen, and I don't just mean the storyline, I mean the constant respawning enemies that force the player into advancing in a stoic manner decided by the developers, I mean the incredibly rigid linearity which is even worse than that in Half-Life 2, I mean the incredibly short time it takes to finish the singleplayer campaign, thus limiting the breadth of content available.
And all this was done consciously and willingly. Eventually you get and extremely limited product, that while polished and well done, is so soulless in its execution because it lacks the breadth of interactivity desired in gaming.
Games eventually become lesser things by their obsessions with the goals of other mediums.
There needs to be a shift on focus, games need to be less like movies and more like games. This is primarily why I believe immersion to be an utterly bullshit PR term, immersion is inherent to gaming, back in the early 90's and late 80's immersion meant only one thing, being caught up in the game.
By that definition, Tetris was more immersing than Oblivion or Fallout 3 because it kept people up through the night and had them obsessing over the game. It drew people in, and kept them under.
Now it refers to the realism and the game's ability to suspend disbelief, it's become something annoying and causes developers to focus on an impossible goal. No game provides true immersion, no game removes the disassociation of the player from the controller. While this doesn't have much to do with writing, it has to do with the shifting of focus.
The biggest problem is that most of these development teams are incredibly talented, but they focus on bullshit goals and spend so much time on things that are utterly meaningless to the medium itself, so much that each new AAA release is just like a summer Hollywood blockbuster. People play these games for a month or two and forget about them. No one is going to give a shit about Fallout 3 in the next few years, just like Morrowind has gone under and doesn't really register on people's radar as a popular classic any longer. There are very few games that reach that plateau, stuff like Donkey Kong, Half-Life, Starcraft, Super Metroid, those games are timeless and known by nearly every single gamer, simply because they focused on the right things. They all had incredibly tight gameplay, they all advanced progress in the industry, but most importantly they were all damn good games with tight mechanics and an ability to immerse a player with pure quality of gameplay and not arbitrary techniques that immediately lose their effect after a half-hour of play.
And this is the most controversial point I'll make, the biggest issue here is the prominence of story. If story wasn't masturbated over like it was the most god damn important part of every video game, we really wouldn't have this problem. We wouldn't have developers shoveling money into voice acting, into expensive cut scenes and ridiculous amounts of time ironing out the intricacies of scripted gameplay. These things get in the way, ultimately it's the developer's attempt to create an interactive story that cuts them off at the knees.
I have news for these imbeciles, all the games that managed to create the best interactive stories barely had any plot at all. I'm talking about Ultima IV and its thick dynamic virtue system, its story? Find a book and become the Avatar, simple shit, but everything had some kind of result to an action, your character changed depending on how he interacted with the world. That should be the focus of gaming, dynamics, a changing environment that produces a personal story, events and accomplishments that alter the player's experience.
The thing people remember most about Fallout is not the Master, it isn't Lou or that bitch Lynette, ultimately it's the stories that came from the game itself, because of the variety and depth that was available. People remember getting holes in their back from Ian, they remember Dogmeat getting zapped in the Military Base, they remember laughing as they watched Sulik slam a raider with a Super Sledge and send him sliding across the dirt.
You don't get that anymore, simply because there's less variety, developers sacrifice depth in order to streamline their stories, in order to focus on scripted events and big "epic" bullshit.
You're not going to see that anymore because it gets in the way of their rigid structured "interactive experiences".
Kiss the dream of dynamic interactive gaming goodbye, you can practically kiss the idea of gaming itself goodbye, since everyone seems so obsessed with the idea of storytelling.
But you can blame the gamers for that, the developers, everyone, not just the "gaming journalists."
Every time some thick-headed numbskull calls Final Fantasy VII the best game ever because some shallow two dimensional character died and happened to reduce their twelve year old selves into a sobbing shitpile despite the fact that the whole ordeal was less effective than the Pearl Harbor movie, that's who you can blame really, because they'd much rather shell out their money on a mediocre piece of shit with a "compelling storyline" than a thick indepth complex piece of gaming that will keep them busy for months and have them remember their own accomplishments, not their pathetic alter ego.
