It’s time to talk about story telling in video games. Personality this is the hardest part of designing for me, I can spend all day thinking up game mechanics and levels, but ask me to craft an intricate story and I stumble. Which is one of the arguments on if games need stories. I believe that not every game needs an award winning story, take a look at God Hand for the Ps2. The gameplay was top notch, but the story was pretty nonsensical.
Another part of this , is the famous “are games considered art?” issue I’ve seen over the last few years. I think some games can be considered art, but not all games are art. There are some games that I think hit that line for art, such as ICO , Shadow of the Colossus, and Killer 7. There are two others that come to mind , but that plays into my big discussion coming up.
To me one of the staples of a game that crosses that line into art, is the world the game takes place in. Not just the story of ” guy saves princess” but the actual setting itself. This is where I think a lot of developers stumble abit, there is more to creating a world then just having a save the world angle to the story.
In order to have a world there needs to be a back story, something that defines the setting and the creatures and buildings I’m going to witness. This is where the argument that not all games are art apply, as some games quite frankly don’t need a story to be good. The Mario franchise thrives on it’s amazing platforming not on its story. An argument could be said that the excellence of the platforming could be an art, but that is beyond the scope of this entry.
Stepping back abit I want to talk about movies that are art to me. As I mentioned in another entry I love the works of Miyazaki, and I’m going to explain why . In his movies he doesn’t just create a story, he creates this setting that just feels like it could exist. It doesn’t seem that the story came first, but that he created a world and then started to think about what he could tell in this place. In each movies of his that I’ve seen, it always feels that you could explore this world outside of the story and still find amazing people and places.
Another reason are the characters he creates, there is allot of mystery around them and in most cases we never learn everything about them. In Spirited Away, my favorite character is the black shadow like creature as it has an air of mystery around it and we learn alot about it’s emotions even though it never speaks. It’s his types of movies that I would love to see adventure game makers follow, as I really want to explore those worlds. I almost forgot how he creatures characters who are emotionally strong, not steroid pumped angst filled EMO people.
Getting back to games, while the games I already listed are fine examples these next two are the cream of the crop in my opinion. First is World of Warcraft, Blizzard is one of the few companies that really develop their stories and it’s evident in the history. In StarCraft we have 3 unique origin stories for each side, as well as units that fit into that history. How ever in Warcraft the history of the world provides gamers with a huge backdrop for World of Warcraft. I really can’t go into any further detail as I don’t currently play World of Warcraft, which could be explained in a future entry 🙂
Now for #1 on my list of games that are considered art, the OddWorld Franchise. For those not familiar with it. The series comes from OddWorld Inhabitants, a game company created that attempted to bridge the medium of movie telling and gaming. The series has a strong anti capitalism message and is environmentally friendly. Like the works of Miyazaki, we are treated to a wide array of creatures and locales, each teeming with it’s own background. The world of Oddworld has been transformed from it’s original setting due to the bad guys that are polluting it. If you haven’t, I strongly urge you to find a copy of the Art of Oddworld and just see all the images created for this franchise. Just looking thru the pages you can see that they just didn’t slap together a bunch of art, but actually created a world.
I know from looking at these examples I have a long way to go before I could even be mentioned in the same breath as the creators of these games, or as a storyteller on the same scale as Miyazaki. This would be an excellent time to end with some excellent quote from one of his movies, but nothing is coming to mind. All I’ll say is that I really want to have my own moving castle 🙂
Josh
