I think this is brilliant. It's not about text, it's about immediacy. video games are feedback loop between the player and this is a reminder to focus on that.
Less Talk More Rock
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Re: Less Talk More Rock
#12I guess it wouldn't be as much fun if we admitted that this is one good path to take to a good game, but that there are also games that use words to wonderful effect.
Re: Less Talk More Rock
#13What immediately comes to mind when I read this is the original Half-Life, and how it has a complete narrative, told mostly through the environment. There's no pre-mission briefing or cut-scenes, and very little dialogue. You simply experience the word, and that world makes sense. It barely even tells a story; it's more like you see the story that the world came from. Portal, despite having more words and more dialog…
Half Life in particular strikes me as a surprising gap in the hall of fame list. And if you look carefully at what little is exposed, there's a lot of information that's implied, and a lot of mysteries that will (hopefully) be revealed in later games. You can practically play the game on instinct alone, and it's intriguing if you look at it carefully, it's brilliant. Heck, the whole series is like this, though HL2:E1 is a bit gimmicky gameplay-wise.
Portal oozes design-awesome, it probably belongs in the list too. The biggest detractors I can see is that the world is pretty small, and thus the story and characters are pretty narrow (though done very well), and the puzzles take away from that world somewhat (they're just sort of "there", they're only part of the story because you have to go through them).
Re: Less Talk More Rock
#14Still working through the article, but does anyone else think the layout is really, really bad ? I know it's all the rage these days to lay things out blogozine style, but this seems worse than most. When outlining a 3 step process, do you really need a gigantic image of the numbers "1, 2, 3" half the height of my screen? The illustrations don't really complement the text, and interrupt text flow. The font choice is…
> The illustrations don't really complement the text, and interrupt text flow. Especially annoying was that the images were presented before they were mentioned in the text. The reader is interrupted from reading text to see this large image that has nothing to do with the preceding text.
But it's consistent with the article's main idea: to rock before you talk.
That is, while it may be annoying to a reader, it should be preferable to a rocker. :)
Re: Less Talk More Rock
#15I'd like to trash the article for its poor layout and being overly talkative and inadequately rockative, but I think others are doing a fine job of that. Instead, an observation: many of the best video games I've played became "best" because the creators' "talk" was usually in the context of lots of "rock". That is, they built the games and then played the games an awful lot . They didn't just play to find bugs or ma…
You had me at 'inadequately rockative'. I'm going to find a way to work that into a story if it kills me.
Re: Less Talk More Rock
#16I guess it wouldn't be as much fun if we admitted that this is one good path to take to a good game, but that there are also games that use words to wonderful effect.
Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, for example. Also designed and written by Jordan Mechner, in this one the Prince doesn't shut up - to good effect. In fact, the game is presented as a story told orally by the Prince.
Also Mechner's The Last Express: a murder mystery in the Agatha Christie vein. Mechner is also screenwriter for this year's Bruckheimer blockbuster version of Prince of Persia.
I think the key point is that it's not how much talking there is, it's how well it's used that matters.