What 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 dialogue, still comes from a very similar vein of narrative. The dialogue doesn't tell you the story, it gets you acquainted with the (complex) character of Glados. The story is still told by experiencing the environment, and realizing the world that environment is a part of. The bulk of the story is implied between the lines.
Yahtzee recently railed against the whole audio-log gimmick[1] you often see nowadays as ways of advancing the narrative. I think it overlaps a lot with this essay. I don't mind a story being told explicitly, but (some?) games don't need such explicit methods to tell their stories. As an aside, I feel that Bioshock, despite having audio logs, is a true successor to Half Life in using the environment to tell a story and set a scene, because its environment is so detailed and an integral part of the story its telling. 90% of the audio logs could be removed and the story would stand on its own. Nonetheless, the audio logs added to the game by providing characters that could not easily fit into the game environment during gameplay, and those characters helped characterize the world the game was set in.
I don't feel that words are inherently wrong in a video game. However, I do think that relying on overly verbose methods of storytelling isn't taking the fullest advantage of video games' unique qualities as a medium. It's like a design smell: it's not inherently wrong and there are good reasons for doing so on occassion, it just means you should step back and take a critical eye of whether you really need it or if you're better off not doing including that content, or doing it in another way.
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).
I'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 make sure the game was stable; they played for the joy of the game. Then they talked about how to tweak the game as well as how to monetize it, advertise it, etc. from the perspective of people who loved playing the game.
Some recent games have added detailed player stats to that mix. Developers love playing the games, and they track what their players are doing to see what the broader community seems to love about the game. When they end up talking about game tweaks, they have large amounts of data to help guide their understanding.
1) Video game developers should just go ahead and make games instead of going through a lengthy planning process.
I agree with this in the context of indie games, and I guess in the context of most games pre-1990 or so. I can't see this working with modern big-name games. (Some day it will, but at that point the modern big-name games will have moved on.)
2) Video games should have less text and go with other ways of conveying stuff.
This would be better written as "games which don't use much text can be lots of fun". I don't think a stronger thesis can easily be supported.
Zelda games since Link to the Past have used more text than the original, but they've also told stories that wouldn't have been possible without it.
Metroid Prime doesn't have much text unless you go around scanning things. But that's also where the plot comes from. The world is atmospheric by itself, but atmosphere doesn't tell us how the world came to be like it is.
I would love to see a story and characters as intricate as (say) Final Fantasy VI conveyed without much text, but I just don't see it happening.
There are games which can be communicated well without using text and there are those which can't. The author seems to be saying that the latter category either don't exist or are somehow less pure. I think a more reasonable argument would be that the former category deserves more exploration.
I 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.
Still 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 also questionable for screen readability...
> 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.
Yes, I completely agree. I couldn't read beyond the first couple of paragraphs because it was so difficult to read. If I'm having to work to read an article and it's not something that's completely amazing, I'm going to stop reading :)
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.
Portal, despite having more words and more dialogue, still comes from a very similar vein of narrative. The dialogue doesn't tell you the story, it gets you acquainted with the (complex) character of Glados. The story is still told by experiencing the environment, and realizing the world that environment is a part of. The bulk of the story is implied between the lines.
Yahtzee recently railed against the whole audio-log gimmick[1] you often see nowadays as ways of advancing the narrative. I think it overlaps a lot with this essay. I don't mind a story being told explicitly, but (some?) games don't need such explicit methods to tell their stories. As an aside, I feel that Bioshock, despite having audio logs, is a true successor to Half Life in using the environment to tell a story and set a scene, because its environment is so detailed and an integral part of the story its telling. 90% of the audio logs could be removed and the story would stand on its own. Nonetheless, the audio logs added to the game by providing characters that could not easily fit into the game environment during gameplay, and those characters helped characterize the world the game was set in.
I don't feel that words are inherently wrong in a video game. However, I do think that relying on overly verbose methods of storytelling isn't taking the fullest advantage of video games' unique qualities as a medium. It's like a design smell: it's not inherently wrong and there are good reasons for doing so on occassion, it just means you should step back and take a critical eye of whether you really need it or if you're better off not doing including that content, or doing it in another way.
[1] http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/columns/extra-...