[Intentionally Wrong]

Hey Broco! That's one hell of a post. I like this trend of industry-critical observations on the way games are failing to improve the status quo. I tried to approach something similar in the moe thread and elsewhere.

I doubt that a single game will be enough to change the industry. I doubt that any game designed with the intention to do so will have any positive effect at all.

Sam Delany quoted another author as saying "Nothing survives in the end, except for brilliant execution." I think this is relevant.

I've got more to say: later.
_________________
JSNLV is frequently and intentionally wrong.

[Intentionally Wrong]

[Intentionally Wrong]

Joe had a very good point, earlier, and it's a point that needs to be reiterated. I'm going to try to expand on it:

Dissatisfaction with the industry is inevitable.

Game creators have different ambitions and different levels of success at achieving those ambitions. Toss a handful of ad hoc scales out--"entertainment value", "artistry", "technical prowess", "absence of flaws", "novelty"... anyone who thinks about games can come up with plenty more. Games can rate high and low on different scales at once; their position on these scales can change as people come to a new understanding of them. By assigning weights to each scale, you can approximate an overall hierarchy.

This seems like a cumbersome process, but we do this subconsciously all the time. The push to establish a pecking order (or canon, if you prefer) is universal. Look at the GameFAQs "Best of" polls or any list thread around here.

You've heard the old phrase, "90% of anything is crap"? That's because people are capable of comparison. When you find a game as focused on evoking an emotional response as Shadow of the Colossus, most games you've played up until now immediately become a little bit worse. For every way a game can be measured, some game does it best. Quality is a social phenomenon.

The quickest way games can improve is for game-makers to focus on doing things better than they have before. For your game, find something no one has done well; then make sure your game does that better than anyone else ever has.
_________________
JSNLV is frequently and intentionally wrong.

[Intentionally Wrong]

Regarding the perceived rift between narrative and immersion.

My first instinct was to go find similar discussions in the communities for interactive fiction and tabletop roleplaying games and to mine them for quotes which might be relevant. It strikes me now, two hours later, that this is a poor use of time. I would have linked and/or quoted from here, here, and probably here if I didn't found something more interesting in the process.

Responding to Glitch's three approaches:

Immersion is not inherently valuable. To a certain portion of the audience, it is an absolute necessity; other people can do without it. This is true across a variety of media. Some people say never break the fourth wall; others say it's inevitable and must be embraced.

Narrative--that is to say, 'authorial' narrative, of the sort glitch is talking about--is kind of a phantom, anyway. Samuel Delany points out that "story" is not something authors create; they can create a structure and write description and narration and all of the other stuff in books, but the story is what happens in the reader's mind. It only works because of all the associations and resonances the reader has picked up. I say it's the same for games, except with an extra layer of complexity added.

If you decide your game needs immersion, then, you still have some options for controlling the narrative that the player experiences. I think the "assumption" route's probably the best, here--with an understanding of what causes emotions, you can constrain parts of the game to bring those emotions about.

As glitch pointed out, there's always a possibility of failure; this is no less true for less interactive media, though. Interactivity can compound the issue, but that's the whole point: the power of an event is magnified when it's something that might have been avoidable.




Something else: if you want to use videogames to tell compelling stories, this may limit the kinds of stories you can tell. Consider the circumstances of interactive fiction:

An IF game usually starts off with a period of self-examination and reorientation. The player's thrust into a new situation with no idea of who he is supposed to be, nor what he is capable of. Many players, then, start off by examining themselves, checking out everything they're carrying or wearing, looking around the room and generally behaving as if they have no idea who they are or where they came from. It's no coincidence, then, that many works of IF center on unreliable narrators, amnesia, and people who are thrust into an alien environment.

Something similar may be necessary for videogames. Right now, the only real vocabulary for interaction that we've explored is violence. Until we refine the mechanics for more complicated interactions, the only stories games will be good at telling are violent ones.
_________________
JSNLV is frequently and intentionally wrong.

[Intentionally Wrong]

I think those things would help, yes. But I don't think that's the only way, nor do I think that's necessarily the best way forward.

The player's avatar is a unique actor in the gameworld in that it is controlled by something with goals that often conflict with the game's internal goals. Unless a game can find find a way to resolve that conflict, it will need to at least acknowledge the conflict or otherwise explore it.
_________________
JSNLV is frequently and intentionally wrong.

[Intentionally Wrong]