Gameplay and narrative shouldn't simply inform each other. See also: GTA4, in which a touching, sensitively written character in cut-scenes can be transformed into a mass-murdering asshole as soon as the player regains control. Even the best writers won't be capable of making a game deep, believable, complex or realistic if the gameplay is fighting against that narrative at every turn. But if you start from the premise that your game is about hyperviolent destruction of mythical monsters, you've made a lot of decisions about the story and the characterisation already. There's an assumption here about the place of writing, story and characterisation in games – that it's not an inherent part of the context of games, but rather something added on top. The core of his argument seems to be that most current video games are inherently silly, therefore it's impossible to put anything on top of the silliness to produce something that's less silly. He argues that "it is extremely difficult – maybe impossible – to come up with a story and characters that, when placed within the context of most current video games, don't feel inherently silly." Matthew Burns, who has worked on big-budget games for Bungie among others, says he doubts that such a thing is possible given the current climate. Narrative and gameplay should be the same thing. But video games can, and should, aspire to greatness, both mechanically and narratively – and ideally, both at once. All those things impact the kinds of games that are produced and the processes by which they're made. Video gaming has been around for a much shorter time and has much farther to go before it reaches maturity – technology is still not stable, barriers to entry are still falling rapidly, business models are still fluctuating wildly. In the 18th century there was a widely held perception that novels could only be dumb, until classics began to emerge and a canon formed.
A lot of dumb things are fun.īut Clark's right that by saying video games can only be dumb, we're doing the medium a great disservice. There shouldn't be any shame for gamers in saying: yes, a lot of games are dumb. It's not just video games, it's also everything else – television, film, literature, art. Sturgeon's Law (90% of everything is crap) applies not just to things being bad, but also to things being dumb, crude and silly. In video gaming, it is the mindless that has proven to sell well – so mindless most games remain.
Truly standout works in any field are rare. We're limited historically, because it's a young medium, but we're also limited by the time and budget constraints of game production, which mean only a few big-ticket releases each year – which have to sell in order to recoup costs. Our examples of brilliance and of dreck come from a very limited pool of options, especially when we examine big-budget titles. All media have these problems.īut video gaming is a small field at present. Video games are not unique in being collaborative creations in which many elements are brought together to form a whole nor are they alone in being often poorly integrated, with areas of brilliance marred by areas of dreck (or indeed whole areas of dreck occasionally elevated by moments of brilliance).
Change a few words and it's just as applicable to readers who love Dan Brown's fiction in spite of the writing, or viewers who overlook the hour-long goodbye scenes at the end of The Lord of the Rings films because the battles are awesome. And that's fine – a bit of fun is a fantastic thing after all – so long as we don't start to believe that's the only thing games are capable of.Ĭlark writes: "To accept childish dreck without protest – or worse, to defend the dreck's obvious dreckiness just because the other parts of a game are cool – is to allow the form to languish forever." That's a grandiose statement, and one that applies not just to Skyrim and Gears of War, but to films, books and other media too. That's the central thesis of Taylor Clark's Kotaku article, and it's a fine, well-argued point: most mainstream games have poor characterisation, dodgy dialogue and laughable storylines, seemingly inserted as an afterthought to the gameplay itself. M ost popular video games are dumb, and gamers shouldn't settle for it.
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