[evnvnv]

Wow. I'm pretty impressed by this thread... feels like selectbutton is kind of... getting its sea legs, or something.

Anyway, I pretty much agree with almost everything being said in this thread. For a long time I wanted to believe that videogames and movies could be thought of as completely independent things. For awhile they were, but as videogame technology improves a lot of designers have taken maybe a few too many cues from the film industry, and perhaps this is a bad time to be looking to the film industry for creative inspiration.

Someone said that the sky won't fall in 2007, but in a lot of ways I think this is a crucial year for videogames as a business, platform for social interaction, and (dare I say it) artform.

There are a lot of interesting ideas in videogames, most of which have been around since almost the beginning, that I think have finally been implemented somewhat seamlessly. The question now is how people (audiences) respond to this, and how developers utilize these tools.

To be really convenient and shoehorn these ideas into nice categories, I'm going to make some really broad generalizations that I know are flawed, but... bear with me for the sake of this argument! Here are three things:

1: Network-based interactivity on a broad scale

2: Single-player narrative experience--interactivity/choice, theatricality, etc.

3. Small-scale social interaction--Maybe call it "digital social lubricant" or "pure games" if you want to be kind of pretentious about it.

So, we also have three competing systems--all of which I know incorporate all of these ideas, but again for simplicity's sake... in specific order.

1: xbox360

2: ps3

3: wii.

I think what most people have been talking about in this thread is the second category. A storytelling experience that is independent from other narrative media in that it involves choice. I picked the PS3 to represent this category basically revolving around my concept of what MGS4 is going to be like--standard Kojima hollywood worship/satire/analysis combined with the ability to "choose your own adventure." Also my perhaps misguided impression that it seems to have the most powerful hardware out of the three, but I might be wrong about this. Anyway, it's not that I think there is anything wrong with this style of videogame, and there is definitely a lot of progress that can and will be made in this area this generation, but at the moment it's not really what I'm interested in when I think about videogames.

The other two areas are really exciting though, because they really throw a wrench into the "videogames as art" debate. In a really good way. Providing a way for people to interact with each other over great distances to compete or just do something together. This is pretty much unique to videogames, and xbox live seems to really be doing this well. I don't think it's really anything that hasn't been happening in PC games for ever, but something about it seems more personal, more exciting. I guess its also just a lot of 14 year olds racially slurring each other over broadband connections, but just from reading people's posts about various multiplayer experiences on this forum you can tell that it can also be something a lot cooler than that.

On the other hand you have the Wii, which seems to be all about a ... single room multiplayer experience. It is reuniting videogames with other kinds of games, both by bringing physical movement back into it and by focusing on games that lots of people can play together. It seems like Wii sports is as much about the other people you are playing with as it is about the mechanics and aesthetics of the game itself. Obviously if a game plays like shit it's not going to be popular, but with the right people a deck of cards or a checkerboard can provide hours of entertainment--why can't videogames be the same thing? It becomes a tool or an object, something you use to have even more fun with people you already have fun with. This too has been around in videogames for a long time, but like PC online gaming, in the past it has required more of a commitment to "figuring it out." There had to be some impulse to begin with before you were able to see the benefits of it.

I'm not trying to divert the attention from storytelling in games, in fact my biggest "?" about videogames at this point is how storytelling is going to be incorporated into both varieties of multiplayer game. I think storytelling in multiplayer games is going to be a really big deal sooner or later, and pretty much every ludicrous imaginary videogame I think of involves this concept in some way or another. I figure these ideas are coming not from my own brilliant mind but from some sense of the direction this wave is going in. There is plenty of untapped potential for single-player linear games, and every year there are more games that go further and further into this concept. Of course there is a lot of crap too, but that is the case with everything.

But as much as you want to avoid the 'videogames as art' debate, as long as you keep focusing solely on narrative or drama or storytelling, or hell even aesthetics, you're going to keep falling into the same traps. Interactivity is what makes videogames special, and cooperation/competition in multiplayer games makes this quality exponentially more complicated. Especially considering the current importance of these trends, it's crucial to consider them even when you are just thinking about story and narrative.

Worrying about the "Citizen Kane" of videogames is important. I'm also worried about the Chess of videogames or the Go Fish of videogames. I'm also pretty certain all three of these things exist already. But the use of the term "messiah" is really interesting to me, because when I hear that term it reminds me of another problem single player videogames have that limits them in terms of narrative experience. It's really hard for this kind of game not to focus on the incredible quest of one person. That's a pretty limiting narrative arc. You're telling the story of one person and one person's decisions--no matter how many characters you throw into the mix it's impossible not to identify most closely with the character you are controlling. And because it is the character you're controlling, the whole game world has to revolve around you, and yea, generally you save the world. Often times ("LONELY GAMES") your character is the ONLY "person" in the entire game world. So that is what I thought when the term "messiah game" was used. Because these games are really just messiah simulators, and already puts some pretty big narrative restraints on a game.

Citizen Kane is a perfect example: That's a movie pretty obviously about one person's life. But the story isn't told just by following Kane through every moment of his life the way a videogame would. The whole movie is a series of other people's opinions and stories--proving that no matter how important, "larger than life," or even messianic a person is, the other people in his life end up being the ones who define him, who try to unravel the mystery of who he really is. And this is what makes Citizen Kane such an important movie. Sure, there are tons of books with multiple narrators--its a pretty well-worn device. But one limitation of mainstream film is an approximately 2 hour time limit; another is the complicated art of editing--both content-wise and montage-wise (a product of time limit, in some ways).

Within a relatively brief period of "real" time, the film accomplishes the task of not only summarizing the events of the life of one man, but also the perspectives of the people close to him--both how they looked at Kane and how Kane looked at them, as well as a pretty good picture of how he impacted society at large. And on top of all this it wraps everything up nicely with some pretty good dramatic irony that undercuts all of the complexity of the film itself--they key to Kane's mysterious personality is something so trivial that it is completely overlooked by all of the investigation and analysis (and cinematic temporal trickery). So Citizen Kane "is" Citizen Kane because it not only utilizes the particular quirks of film storytelling, but it also does it extremely well.

For a videogame to do this, it's important to first take inventory of what makes a videogame a videogame, and I think it's becoming increasingly hard to ignore the importance and uniqueness of multiplayer interactivity, especially if you want to make a story that is REALLY about more than one person in a way that has not been done before in other media.