| > 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 interactivity makes is bigger than the different constrains between novels and opera. The more detailed and intricate a story of a game is - the less freedom of choice the player has. In the extreme case you have so called "visual novels" which let you make 10-20 choices the whole game at predefined places. They barely qualify as games and they are very niche genre in gaming because they don't play to the strengths of the medium. At that point you might as well read a "choose your own adventure" book. The most common emotion they cause in players is frustration because they wanted the protagonist to do something else, but they can't influence the story in any way at the moment. On another end of the spectrum you have games like minecraft - where the story is your struggle vs the mechanics of the game, and there's no need for any pre-defined plot because you create the plot with every keyboard input you do every second. Freedom of choice = 100%, plot = 0%. Most gamers prefer these kinds of games because they can only be realized as games. The plot in minecraft can be "night was coming and I forgot the close the doors to the mines, then a creeper came and blew up my bed and pushed me into a chasm near a river of lava - I had 5% hitpoints left and if I died then I would get respawned in random place on the map cause no bed - I would maybe have to spend hours trying to find my base again so I had to think hard how to get out of there alive". It's a great story that forces the player to feel strong emotions. And it won't happen to any other player the exact same way which makes it even better. If you add traditional plot to Minecraft you make it worse. No matter if a story in art is detailed and intricate, or barely there - what matters is how it makes people feel. Novels have 100s of pages, poems might have 4 lines, but you won't say "stories in poetry suck". In Opera the main point is music, so the story is designed around that (and the time and place constraints). In games the tradeoffs are different, but it doesn't mean that it's somehow "low standards". Most games tend to prefer less plot and more freedom because it plays to the strengths of the medium. It's a trade-off. > 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 almost every book is Hero's Journey if we look from high enough. Details matter. You can take the same central conflict and write 1000 books that make you feel 1000 different emotions. |
That's merely an economic decision by the industry. You can make a game with detailed and intricate stories while simultaneously allowing full player freedom. It's just difficult and expensive to do so!
Consider something like Dwarf Fortress. It's detailed down to the alcohol content of the dirt under the cat's third left front paw nail. And the cat has its own will and you are permitted to do pretty much anything to the cat. But it's taken two people years to make it without much/any profit.
The state of affairs is simply that we are limited only by our imaginations and our economic utilities. We carry supercomputers in our pockets. Few have any idea what to do with them.