After making a way tol long and OT post about story telling in the Halo 4 thread, I think we should have a thread on the influences, merits, techniques, reasons for, etc of story telling in the gaming medium.
So setting some ideas in motion, what things do you guys enjoy the most about a story? The way it's told in terms of perspective, the characters themselves, the plot? How do you think even the best stories in gaming could be improved to produce better gameplay or just plain better story telling? I think this generation has been very good to us in delivering awesome characters. The field of great enigmatic characters is certainly more flooded than ever, but I'm welcoming of it.
For starters, about two months ago, I first found out about a service called Desura. It's a program that works and looks very similar to Steam, however it's emphasis is on independent games and modding, being a Steam like portal to launch mods for games. I happened on a Far Cry mod that bills itself as an interactive version of Shakespeare's The Tempest. Unfortunately, the mod didn't work correctly with my Steam version of Far Cry, but it set me in motion to read about the original work by Shakespeare as I had never heard of it until that point. While I couldn't experience the mod correctly, I was enamored by the use of a game to tell an old story. More or less, stories are built around gameplay, as it is king of course. But we have gems like Uncharted and Mass Effect, that are built around both.
Fascinatingly the second Far Cry title is heavily grounded in Joseph Conrad's classic Heart of Darkness. While people seem to hate the game, I am quite fond of it, especially for the antagonist only known as the Jackal, who is very much like the antagonist Kurtz in Heart of Darkness. For me, it was his character that really drove me to continue on with the story, not the gameplay (which despite flaws, I think was actually quite decent). It's the characters and stories in so many single player games that drive me to continue playing. As long as the gameplay is "good enough" I continue on, trying to get to that next cutscene or big piece of the plot. Plainly I'm drawn to characters these days more than anything, but it's the plot they are involved with that makes the characters who they are I think as well.
So setting some ideas in motion, what things do you guys enjoy the most about a story? The way it's told in terms of perspective, the characters themselves, the plot? How do you think even the best stories in gaming could be improved to produce better gameplay or just plain better story telling? I think this generation has been very good to us in delivering awesome characters. The field of great enigmatic characters is certainly more flooded than ever, but I'm welcoming of it.
For starters, about two months ago, I first found out about a service called Desura. It's a program that works and looks very similar to Steam, however it's emphasis is on independent games and modding, being a Steam like portal to launch mods for games. I happened on a Far Cry mod that bills itself as an interactive version of Shakespeare's The Tempest. Unfortunately, the mod didn't work correctly with my Steam version of Far Cry, but it set me in motion to read about the original work by Shakespeare as I had never heard of it until that point. While I couldn't experience the mod correctly, I was enamored by the use of a game to tell an old story. More or less, stories are built around gameplay, as it is king of course. But we have gems like Uncharted and Mass Effect, that are built around both.
Fascinatingly the second Far Cry title is heavily grounded in Joseph Conrad's classic Heart of Darkness. While people seem to hate the game, I am quite fond of it, especially for the antagonist only known as the Jackal, who is very much like the antagonist Kurtz in Heart of Darkness. For me, it was his character that really drove me to continue on with the story, not the gameplay (which despite flaws, I think was actually quite decent). It's the characters and stories in so many single player games that drive me to continue playing. As long as the gameplay is "good enough" I continue on, trying to get to that next cutscene or big piece of the plot. Plainly I'm drawn to characters these days more than anything, but it's the plot they are involved with that makes the characters who they are I think as well.
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