141–150 of 337 posts
If I was, I'd be writing books nobody buys because nobody buys books anymore Sales of printed books have been increasing every year since 2012. Last year alone saw a jump of over eight percent.
It looks to me like the author was making a joke.
If I was, I'd be writing books nobody buys because nobody buys books anymore Sales of printed books have been increasing every year since 2012. Last year alone saw a jump of over eight percent.
It looks to me like the author was making a joke.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm one of those weirdos who thinks 28 Weeks Later was artistic genius, and that's a hill I'm willing to die on - all those people dying to save an asymptomatic carrier because he's a kid? Entirely plausible and tragic.
Weeks or days?
I remember all the press praising the original Half Life for its story. I was really surprised - it was the same story as all first person shooters going back to Doom: Bad guys spawn across an inter-dimensional portal and start wreaking havoc. Protagonist has to kill them all, crossing the portal in the process to go destroy the alien leader. There were some cool extra details - the G Man, the marines entering as a t…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> our standards for story telling in video games are really low. Nah, the standards are just different because of the medium. Just like you wouldn't write a book where people sing for 10 minutes every time they talk, and you wouldn't write opera that lasts for 40 hours and has realistic acting and dialogs - you can't compare stories between different media ignoring the differences. And the difference that interactivi…
I think there’s a bit where stories can be extremely complex but still have interactivity from the player. Bioware produces games like this where decisions made from previous games can be inherited to affect future games, and the overall storylines are complex and nuanced, albeit mostly in what BioWare can control (world building, npcs making decisions and having their own agendas, etc.)
- visual novel mode for dialogues and plot choices where player freedom is very restricted by story can be detailed
- game mode for mechanics and combat that have barely any influence on the story (besides "survive this challenge to continue") but players have freedom to express themselves
It is very formulaic in structure, I'd argue more formulaic than ancient theater, and it limits the possible plots a lot (for example you won't find any RPG where the hero gets weaker with time). But all these conventions are accepted as necessary evil by the intended audience, so that's fine.
I remember all the press praising the original Half Life for its story. I was really surprised - it was the same story as all first person shooters going back to Doom: Bad guys spawn across an inter-dimensional portal and start wreaking havoc. Protagonist has to kill them all, crossing the portal in the process to go destroy the alien leader. There were some cool extra details - the G Man, the marines entering as a t…
Even then, I tend to gravitate towards open world games without stories since it is easier to imagine your own than dealing with expository interjections. The Long Dark is a good example of this. The developers are trying to make a narrative driven game with their Wintermute story mode, yet the reality is that survival mode is far more fun. Rather than dealing with criminals in an otherwise inexplicable desolate wasteland[1] while trying to find my ex (their story), I am trying to figure out what happened to the once sleepy community that I last visited in my childhood while trying to survive long enough to be rescued (my story).
(1) Technically, there is an explanation, but it is weak and not always consistent.
If I was, I'd be writing books nobody buys because nobody buys books anymore Sales of printed books have been increasing every year since 2012. Last year alone saw a jump of over eight percent.
Overall sales might be up but are those sales making the head fatter, the tail fatter, or the tail longer ? For any individual writer without sales in the head, increased sales only matter if the tail gets fatter. They don't individually make any more money if it gets longer (more books by more writers).
How exactly are Raiders of the Lost Ark or Breaking Bad storylines better than those of the first Mafia, The Witcher 3, Uncharted 4, Metro Exodus, Kingdom Come: Deliverance or Half-Life 2 + episodes? And I'm not even mentioning artistic pieces like What Remains of Edith Finch or Life is Strange. There are quests in The Witcher 3 you could make a movie from (Bloody Baron).
Video games will never do drama as well as theatre or film, because we can't see into the actors souls - video game stories are puppet theatre
Edit: thinking about this some more, I think I might be wrong - there are many animated films that I've found emotionally moving and involving that don't have human actors (Ratatouille for example!)
We've had theatre and literature as narrative art for centuries. Film has been around for a tiny bit over 100 years, and it took them decades to find their own voices distinct from their predecessors. By comparison, video games are in their infancy. We've been at it for only a few short decades, and having the audience directly involved with the narrative is a radical shift from what we had before. We're looking at a…
Video games have existed for over 50 years now. Video games have had as much time to mature as film had had by the early 1940s. And by the early 1940s film had produced numerous mature works of art displaying mastery of the medium that are still avidly watched and viewed as masterpieces today. The excuse that video games are a young medium may have held 20 years ago in the PS2 era, but it does not hold any longer.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It was a good story at the time; it created a genre and is indirectly responsible for many, many great works. If it was created today, it’d be a generic high fantasy work.
It would be generic high fantasy work maybe because it literally defined all the codes of this genre. Blame everyone else who came after Tolkien.
There's a borges fake essay on exactly this topic: Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote