Topic: Depth in gaming.

Shudder. What demon would make something THAT hideous? I have NEVER seen animation of such low quality!

You dare make fun of our animation quality?! YOU MUST DIE!

wow... my topic declined quickly... but in a rather hilarity-inducing fashion!

these things are definitely the prime example of what games need to be avoiding.

by the way, where can i get one of these cd-i whatsits?

@PhoenixSage: Yeah...sure...whatever.

@bro2dragons: Why do you even bother asking? They have them on eBay. Not worth your money though, IMO.

In terms of plot, American McGee's Alice remains the strongest as far as I'm concerned.

What it does is takes the original Alice in Wonderland, and reworks it. It doesn't get bogged down in excessive cut scenes to tell the story - it allows the player's knowledge of the book to inform the thematic elements of the game.

In that way it's a stand out. Final Fantasy games are excessive in plot, and about as complex as a Conan novel. Enjoyable, but hardly the depth of a Lord of the Rings.

Resident Evil is incredibly pulpy. Again, enjoyable, but the plot is as thin as a Lovecraft short story (which I also love). It's not a piece of literature, like Dracula, The Monk, or House of Leaves - ergo, it's not deep in the sense that you guys are talking about.

Throughout my university degree I was constantly looking at videogame stories, and comparing them to literature and film. I found nothing in a game that could compare in density to literature - TV shows, pulp fiction, or anything otherwise fun, sure, but not literature.

That said - can games be art? Absolutely, yes. There's games that are inspired by ballet and opera - there's games that really take the idea of interactive media and work it in original ways, and there are games that I could quite genuinely see in an art installation.

What games cannot do is control the audience like a film or book can to deliver a message. The developer simply cannot ensure the player will work through the game in a systematic enough way to have the jigsaw of small messages put together to form the larger message.

@Waltzelf: very well put. i respect your opinion on that, but still hold, that when true WRITERS learn to tackle an interactive media (just as they decades long ago learned how to handle a motion picture, or more recently a comic with Alan Moore's emergence) it can become just as, and then more engaging than a book. i'd love to say i'll be the one to change your opinion, but for one, it's so competitive, i HIGHLY doubt i'll be able to make it into the game writing business, and second, i'm not NEARLY talented enough to write a story of such depth anyway, not even in an established literary format. i do hope i live to see it happen, however.

While it did not have a deep story I reckon Hotel Dusk for the DS (Or Sprung I guess was pretty well done if you,look at it as a comedy) is pretty much a guide on how to do it perfectly.

Hotel Dusk did suffer from points where you'd get completely stuck and removed from the story, though. I guess almost all games of the genre have that problem, though. Sigh.

Films and comics are, however, completely linear experiences. It's not to do with the quality of writing - there are quality novelists out there who have already contributed stories to videogames.

It's to do with the nature of the medium. Videogames cannot be linear enough for a writer to get across a "deep" enough perspective or theme. The writer cannot assume the audience will experience part xxxx of the story in a game, whereas an author can assume that the audience has seen/ read paragraph 33 (for example) before paragraph 88 in a film or book. This means that in a book or film, the author can build up, over time, themes and ideas that are not available to a game writer. That's where the depth comes from.

Where games will become deeper and more "artistic" is in the visual, audio and interactive elements. Story will always be a "choose your own adventure" quality when compared to literature.

As a side note - there's a very fascinating book called "Final Fantasy and Philosophy" - I highly recommend it. It's a lot of fun, and a good introduction to deeper philisophical theories, if you're interested in that kind of thing.

The animation in that Zelda game that cheetahman showed us was fluid and low-quality. Also, I can't stand the fact that Link has lipstick.

Those cutscenes are in fact so horrible that people make YTP's out of them all the time. Thank you Phillips for making those horrible cutscenes so we can have something to laugh at and screw up.

on said side note, i am currently reading "The Legend of Zelda and Philosophy", and i have been impressed thus far.

on the main note, i recognise that solid writers have scripted games before, but what i meant by that was writers who (like Alan Moore) take ownership of their craft and strive to PERFECT it. i say writers, to refer to William Faulkner, and not J.K. Rowling. J.K. is a solid writer and the Potter books (while i'm not a fan) are well written, if nothing else. But Willy... he did things with his work no one else had ever dreamed of and carried them through to glory. that is why he will live forever in literature, and in a few generations no one will remember the Harry Potter series. i want the Alan Moores and Frank Millers not the Geoff Johns's (sorry, but i thought Infinite Crisis was "meh", though if you're not a comics fan, you'd have no idea what i'm talking about) who just write the same old same old. i want boundaries pushed and new methods created and utilized. there is certainly the possibility to create a game experience linear enough to weave in all the details and make sure the player sees them. consider a sidescrolling classic mario game. now tack on unskippable cut-scenes. you have now ensured that the player sees all you want them to by the time the player reaches the end. now, i'm not saying that should ever be done (at the very least make the cut-scenes skippable... if they want to experience your fine literature, they can, if not, they don't, leave it up to them), but it's just an example of a perfectly linear left-to-right experience. there are numerous other (read:better) ways to do that, as well. but i made my main point already, that video games, being an interactive medium, give the player options. that is the nature of them. they should therefore have the ability to get every detail of info to create the ultimate experience, but should not be forced to, if they just want gameplay. this is better, in my opinion, as well, as it provides an experience like that of an incredibly intricate novel in which each successive time you read it, you notice some little tidbit you happened to pass over the previous times. anyway, i'm strongly in support of writers claiming games as their turf and creating something truly special. something that rivals that of literature, and cannot be matched by it, but is distinct enough to create respect for itself rather than be tagged as "copycat".

I just, this very moment, got back home after buying that book tonight, to find you mentioning it here. Weeeeird.

well done good sir. a worthy read. i was sold by the first chapter. why DO i care?

i want boundaries pushed and new methods created and utilized. there is certainly the possibility to create a game experience linear enough to weave in all the details and make sure the player sees them. consider a sidescrolling classic mario game. now tack on unskippable cut-scenes. you have now ensured that the player sees all you want them to by the time the player reaches the end. now, i'm not saying that should ever be done (at the very least make the cut-scenes skippable... if they want to experience your fine literature, they can, if not, they don't, leave it up to them)

That's my point though. For a writer to be able to write quality literature, he/ she needs to make sure the audience won't miss anything. Which means 1) forced non-linear cutscenes (which are not productive in building gaming as an artform distinct from film, and is one of the biggest complaints fairly levelled at Final Fantasy-style games), or 2) reduce the quality of text to assume that the audience will not necessarily experience everything.

Do this. Go get a copy of Wuthering Heights, open randomly to a page, and read three paragraphs. Flick to the end and read the last page. See if you can then interperate the book in the depth it deserves. That is why a game can never, while remaining even slightly non-linear, have a art-quality plot behind it.

Games have different strengths as artistic mediums to books and films, they should not be trying to compete with books and films at what books and films do well. They'll never win.

I really must read that Zelda book - but first Battlestar Galactica

Zelda one is quite well done. the Star Wars one, as well. the Watchmen one (the last of the 3 i own) is... meh.

Nobody said anything about quality reduction. when done superbly, the player may be a little lost on things hinted upon at the end, or even the ending itself, but that will lend only more incentive for them to go back and replay it. i praised Faulkner quite highly earlier, but in my readings of his works, i have had several "huh?" moments in which i've had to go back and re-read and figure out what happened. could that not be done in a game? especially a freeroaming one? for instance, a character says something, and you go, "what the crap?!" so you then retrace your steps and examine things more closely.

and yes, i think games should focus on what makes them different and should create an impact on players through the interactivity itself. but most genres still require some form of story while you're at it, or there is no incentive to play through it. virtually every form of media revolves around telling a story in some form or another. you can't make storyless videogames for very long before people begin wanting more. that places them solely in the category of "activity", like basketball, and not into "art", like a film, book, painting, song, etc.

there was once a time when people believed that a movie would not come to a station that is "separate but equal" to books, as they (even more than a play would) rob you of your imagination, by feeding you EVERYTHING you need to know. we now see that though they tell stories in a similar fashion, they have used the advantages of their unique medium to rival that of literature, though it is too different to BE literature. games have yet to reach that point. but just because it HASN'T been done, doesn't ever mean in and of itself that it CAN'T be done.