Video games are not films. They are not literature - nor are they theater. Until designers realize this, games will continue to suffocate inside the current vacuum of innovation. Games are a medium all their own, and while they certainly aspects from the visual and performing arts - a concept that cannot be ignored - games contain one central, absolutely CRITICAL difference: Gameplay is king.
In the early 1900s, it became common for many silent films to contain title cards to help tell their stories. The filmmakers inserted parts of a completely different medium, literature, to help tell the story when they were unable to do so filmically. This is incredibly fascinating, because it is exactly what game makers are doing with games today: when they are unable to tell the story using gameplay, they insert a completely different medium. This medium, ironically, is film - or at least, something filmic: the cutscene.
The pattern seems almost uncanny - it suggests that, like the filmmakers of the early 20th century, game designers still don't know what we have. We are still in the "Silent" era of games; we have yet to come out from under the shadows of preceding media.
When it does emerge, it will be unlike anything the world has seen.
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1 comment:
I concur, David. Without a language to call their own, games rely on the filmic medium for storytelling, which is typically a hamfisted and poor attempt in this foreign medium.
If we can leverage a way to tell stories with the language of gameplay, we may have hope of finding the holy grail of storytelling: the audience as participant.
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