How literary are games?, Help with a thesis idea

Hey all, I'm coming up on my creative writing thesis soon, and my idea is to write about the evolution of video games as a valid narrative medium. What I was wondering was if you guys had some suggestions as to the games I should touch on in the paper, be they your favorite games, ones with exemplirary stories, or ones that furthered the medium. Please also write briefly why you feel that way, and feel free to discuss amoungst yourselves, you may earn a spot in my paper! There's no rush, I have more than a year to do it, but I'd thought I'd get the ball rolling now to have plenty of time to try out any games you suggest that I haven't played. Thanks!

Storylines that instantly pop up to me

.Hack

Kingdom Hearts

XIII

Final Fantasy Tactics

Dragon Quest VII.
Its like about eighteen smaller stories, each independent and deep for their length, inside a larger one. It unfolds like a mystery novel, and the popularity despite the appearance and dated game play attest to the quality and attractiveness of the story.

I guess I should also mention console/era doesn't matter. And if you know of any interesting articles / literature on the subject please let me know.

Suikoden started off in the first game as a loose adaptation of the Chinese novel The Water Margin that expands upon its world and characters in each game bit by bit. Depending on the time-frame and location of the game, characters from previous games can make a return.

I think G4 had a special about this years ago...

One thing you might want to discuss/take note of/whatever is the potential divide in storytelling in the game between the game itself and seperate cutscenes. You have a range of games from (better examples currently elude me, but these work) Starfox 64, where the majority of the dialogue and such takes place as you're going around blowing stuff up and, on the other end, Disgaea, where all plot happens in its own little box of cutscenes and there's another box full of gameplay that's tangentally related to the plot.

Another thing you could compare is games where you basically have a plot set in stone and you just follow it while possibly cracking open nameless goon's heads to games where your choices can affect the plot, like, again, Starfox 64 ("This game, I'm going to have Fox meet Bill! yay slash").

It sounds as cliched as anything to bring it up, but ICO and Shadow of the Colossus really should be touched upon.
I know this is the serious business board, but when did Jogurt get back to, er, unlife?
While dialog does exist in both games, it is clear that exposition is beaten down as much as possible, while pushing the story and message to emerge through the gameplay itself.

Well, I think if you're going to look at storytelling in games, you got two different angles to approach it from. On one hand, you've got the Console Games, starting with, in my mind, the NES and the Sega Master System. You could make some arguments about the atari having some story, but without any games with text that i could think of, they were largely just games. This tradition, in my opinion, finds most of its best and most influential games originating in Japan. Dragon Warrior, Final Fantasy I and IIj (despite being somewhat poorly executed, it was the first RPG I can think of that tackled characters as individuals rather than just being iconic heroes, and innovative in a lot of other ways), and games like Ninja Gaiden, with their in game cutscenes to move their story along. Even Bionic Commando managed to tell a story of sorts, using a primative system of texting incorporated into the game. Sega's Phantasy Star seems to have elements of both series, and while I haven't beaten it, it seems to take a different approach than other game company's storytelling. THere are a ton of other early games that influenced the early scene as well.

Because of the limited memory size of the medium, storytelling tended to be minimalistic, and rely heavily on the player's imagination. I think this is part of the reason that the silent protagonist became popular in a lot of video games (the other reason I suspect the silent protagonist is popular is because it allows the player to identify much more easily with the hero).

On the flipside, you've PC video games (and by pc I think i mean all non-console video games). I was never a big PC player myself, but they are definately the big American contribution to video game storytelling. In my mind though, the adventure games represent one of the biggest contributions to the field of video game storytelling. Some of the first non-shoot-em up games I played on my friend's Atari 135XE (yeah, atari made a personal computer) were text adventures, where the text that the game writers gave you WAS the interface. The next logical step was the graphical text adventure, which included games like King's Quest, Space Quest, Leisure Suit Larry, and then games like Escape from Monkey Island (I think that's the first one). You've also got the Wizardry series, and the Might and Magic series, but I don't feel too confident talking about those games, as I've never actually beaten any of them. The general impression that I've gotten from most american games is that it's less about the characters and more about the mission. For the most part, the only time I really saw character development in american video games was for comedy, which is why I never really played them.

If you're going to talk about video games as a medium, I think you'll want to play, for at least a few minutes, some of the early games on both sides of the issue. You may want to decide you just want to focus on console games, but I've found that there has been at least some pollination. If you look at Starcraft and Warcraft III for example, they use between level cut scenes, just like Ninja Gaiden did back in the day. You're definately going to want to talk about the effect of technology on storytelling. The depth and quality of storytelling in games that came out for the 16 bit consoles was MUCH better than their 8-bit ancestors, and as a console ages, you'll generally find that the quality increases as game studioes figure out how to get the most out of each system. There's also the fact of course that a lot of the executives for current japanese game companies had their beginnings as low level programmers on NES or SNES games, which means that you have people not only with much more experience in the field, you also have people who might have their own quirks and personal feelings about the field.

There's more that I could think of, I'm sure, but I don't want to spend too much time on this tonight. One other thing that you'll want to think about is that video games, unlike almost any other medium, involves the consumer, the viewer in the process of the art form in an active, rather than a passive way. I mean, how many of us felt some personal satisfaction when we beat the piss out of Kefka at the end of FF VI (and it certainly feels like we're the ones doing it).

If there's anything you want me to expand on, or justify, let me know. I think about this a fair amount.

I think about this sort of thing as well. It's rather fun to watch the development of games and how they have evolved with the available technology and market.

I mean, most of the plot for the NES era would be found in the instruction manual, which describes events that occured before the game starts. Or at the very end of the game. Like, revealing the identity of the real bad guy or something.

You know my dissertation is about dynamic storytelling in a game? The system practically removes gameplay with surgical precision, so that focus can be shifted towards the story. Balance between stories and gameplay is a necessity. Hell, the two should co-operate hand in freaking hand, not outright try to compete for attention.


Oh, right...

Well, I like to look at the LoZ series and how it evolved. I mean, look at the first one. Virtually no stories, a small cast of characters... And now look at the depth we expect, nay demand of each game in the series.

This post has been edited by Drekal on Feb 16 2007, 02:22 AM

Games get even more and more story driven as technology expands. Remember back in the days of Atari when a story was written in the instruction manual? Then with the nes we would get maybe a 3 image cutschene before starting a stage. Then with the SNES cutscenes got longer and more intricate. Nexst the 32 bit generation made the cutscenes actual videos or game engine renderings. However PC games have evolved past the cutscene. It started in the game Half-Life, where things would happen around you while playing. It's now very common. In CoV the NPCs will talk to each other while I am slowly sneaking up on them. I am eagerly awaiting this to happen in the new console generation.

((Also, Good to see you Jogurt))

MMO's do generally have great storylines behind them, if not for the characters themselves, but the different factions that make up the world's conflicing powers.

Take a look at the ones in CO*, Even the minor ones that have almost no missions in them.

I think you should also include how mistranslations of some games can make for funny dialong.

After all, whom can forget the line, "All your base belong to us."?

Thanks for the suggestions / ideas guys, keep 'em coming! I'll probably ask you more about them soon, just kinda short on time at the momment. I guess the next question I have for you is how would you define what is literary? By that, I mean it's easy to justify games as entertainment and even art, but as contributing to literature? I think I need a commonly held definition before I can take the next step, so lemme know your thoughts!

Just a follow-up and bump ('cause you guys have alot of good thoughts), in preparation of writing this paper I've been asking Game-Stop employees what games they felt were literary. Those that didn't give me a blank stare or said merely "Final Fantasy" or tried to sell me a subsciption to Game Informer had no clue what "literary" meant. One actually said, "Pokemon, because it helps teach kids how to read". While it is an interesting point to put in my paper, literary does not mean educational as most people I asked thought. It just made me sad is all.

Hey all, I'm about to head into my final semester and am about to finish the critical part of the thesis. Just wanted bump the topic to see if you had any more thoughts or ideas, and wanted to ask if any of you out there would like to read a draft or two and give me your thoughts?

I think Metroid Prime 1 is fascinating from a story perspective. There's absolutely no dialogue, just various communiques, ancient hieroglyphs, and action cutscenes to drive the story. I found this to be the least invasive way to tell a story in a game. On the other hand, my brother didn't even know there was a plot because "Who scans stuff?" However, I found it a very interesting way to tell the story without making someone sit through mounds of expository cutscenes about the Chozo colony, the Phazon meteor, and the arrival of the Pirates.

I scan everything in Metroid Prime. In fact, there are points in the game where you can't go on if you don't do any scaning.

I think that's been a strength of the series since Super Metriod, purely visual, action-oriented story telling (save Fusion, which had narrated elevator scenes). It might be an interesting point to raise; eliminative storytelling / the unessesity of dialog. Maybe I can tie it in to the Woolsey dilemma with SNES era Square games; lack of cartridge space to fully translate the game... (goes off to ponder).

I know what I've always felt is that the interactive nature of the medium allows for more storytelling techniques than a simple book might.

The problem with that is, for the most part the most it's been used is like a choose your own adventure book, but one of the two options is always "you die".

There is reason that videogames can't pull together the same artistic nature as literature; they have the basic component of books: text.


Of course, it occurs to me that I might be a bit thrown off by your title. Is this simply about a literary nature, or about a narrative medium?

I know my brother has always hated most story driven games, because he felt it was simply a movie, but with the neccessity to "press a button to continue" at certain points.


So all in all, I'd argue that games can be used just as well as film or books for the cliche narrative process, but that it also has the ability for a more intricate, interactive way to go. However, I wouldn't say that that capability has at all been capitalised on as of yet.