I've played many games with good stories, but I've played few with good writing.
The Last of Us is such an odd one to me, because I don't understand the player's standards if they were blown away by it. To me, it felt quite generic. Seems like a lot of people don't read many books.
The like for Last of Us' story has little to do with not reading many books, and everything to do with the protagonists and their relationship, the personal cross-country journey plot (compared to the typical plot in a lot of zombie fiction), and the grounded brutal tone and atmosphere.
As well as how the game told its story not just through cutscenes but also through gameplay
There a lot of well-written games lately and yes I am literate enough to recognize how good they actually are. People just don't bother looking past AAA games or beyond certain genres. (But even then they are some real written AAA games like Witcher or Wolfenstein: TNO) The adventure game genre has been going through a resurgence in the last several years with a lot of well-written games, even some that I would consider having literary spirits to them, i.e. Kentucky Route Zero, What Remains of Edith Finch, Firewatch.
Honestly games have been making some really good strides in recent years.
Video games have bad stories because people are just learning how to tell a story with a video game.
Naughty Dog games don't have good stories. They have alright stories - if you strip away the run-and-gun gameplay, you're left with serviceable knockoff Hollywood plots strung over gameplay sequences. It's two separate concepts awkwardly shoved together, because the people writing them aren't trying to write for the medium. This is true of pretty much any big, AAA game - essentially, if a game tells its story through cutscenes, it's going to be a pretty bad story. It's a movie chopped up into awkward three minute clips.
"Walking simulators" and point-and-click narrative games are starting to play with the medium and that's where we're getting into interesting stuff. Gone Home is a story that is built to fit the medium - the story itself is a bit trite and cliche, but the manner in which it's being told is integral. It couldn't be a movie. Maybe it could be a book. But the game and the story are well meshed. Are these stories "good" yet? I don't know. Maybe not. But they're definitely closer than the derivative AAA space.
Thinking back to Bioshock (which, as a whole, doesn't have a great story, but DOES have a story well-tailored to the medium), there's one moment that stands out to me as great storytelling. After you meet Andrew Ryan:
The whole "Would you kindly?" thing is revealed, that you've been following orders this whole time. IT's a meta-commentary on video games, where you've been subliminally funneled down certain paths because... well, the video game told you to. You're told to walk down a hallway and exit the stage. You can try to resist, you can try to do something else, but there's only one path, because the game only allows one path.
That's smart. The protagonist struggles with the fact his free will is compromised,
just as you, the player, have the curtain pulled down around you. The game has built up an illusion of player freedom (as all games do) and intentionally destroyed it. THAT is something that could never be done with the same resonance in any other medium.
As age goes by, I've learn to not care about videogame stories anymore. At this point, I don't trust the process enough. Writers are, at the end of the day, just an afterthought to game developers.
For me personally, Silent Hill 2 is one of the best told stories in video games. Or at the least, it's always been up there. Overall though, I do agree that most game stories are shit...but I think most movie stories that come out these days are shit too. I'm not really convinced it's a medium problem.
If you think blockbuster hollywood movies like Marvel movies, Transformers, Fast and furious, Twilight or The Hunger games are leagues better narratively than something like Nier or The lat of us perhaps you are the one who know nothing about storytelling.
Proving my point, yea I would recommend watching more films as Hollywood doesn't just produce blockbusters. The Last of Us isn't even as good as a narrative than the film it's directly inspired by,
Proving my point, yea I would recommend watching more films as Hollywood doesn't just produce blockbusters. The Last of Us isn't even as good as a narrative than the film it's directly inspired by,
The things you read in this board. You've got to see it to believe it.
Of course most games have better stories than lets say for example the following modern hollywood films.
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
There Will be Blood
No Country for Old Men
Memento
Mulholland Dr.
The Tree of Life
Adaptation
The Children of Men
Sideways
Added a couple of more
Manchester by the Sea
Arrival
Zodiac
Black Swan
The Master
Also you chose as an example a movie that most definitely is not modern nor badly written.
You think No Country For Old Men is well written? One of the most contrived plots i've seen. Manchester By The Sea has a really basic story. Arrival is also pretty over the top considering how 'realistic' it portrays itself as given it's genre. It also cheats to make it's plot twist non obvious. From the others i've seen on your list, I agree with TWBB, Memento and Mulholland Drive, although none of those types of stories would work in a video game (or in Memento and MD's case in anything other than a movie/tv show.)
I feel that good video game stories are told in a "natural" fashion: during and through gameplay. That means they're not intrusive, but incorporated in the game's mechanics and logic, to convey their ideas in a way only this medium can do. There are not too many games like this, and their stories are often minimalist, but I think it's the way that has worked best.
I don't care much about most cinematic cutscenes these days. I loved them in the Playstation and N64 generation, even the crappy ones, because they were so new and felt like a rare reward. But now I think they get in the way of the gameplay and vice-versa.
I think there's more decent writing to be found in the medium than people give it credit for, but yeah, the overwhelming majority is awful. Though it's often hard to judge it as being awful when most games don't even try for more than that (for various and often valid reasons).
You think No Country For Old Men is well written? One of the most contrived plots i've seen. Manchester By The Sea has a really basic story. Arrival is also pretty over the top considering how 'realistic' it portrays itself as given it's genre. It also cheats to make it's plot twist non obvious. From the others i've seen on your list, I agree with TWBB, Memento and Mulholland Drive, although none of those types of stories would work in a video game (or in Memento and MD's case in anything other than a movie/tv show.)
Did Cormack McCarthy say he hates video games? Or are people really taking negative comparisons between TLoU and The Road to heart? Only on GAF Gaming side do I see so many people trashing his work.
You think No Country For Old Men is well written? One of the most contrived plots i've seen. Manchester By The Sea has a really basic story. Arrival is also pretty over the top considering how 'realistic' it portrays itself as given it's genre.
A basic story can be well-written and effective. Being complex doesn't make something better and being simple and/basic doesn't mean a narrative is lacking
Not sure what to say about No Country. Perhaps you should watch it again? Arrival not being completely realistic isn't a mark against the plot.
Edit: and if anything, Memento could work just as well, if not better, as a game than a film.
I mean, most video games have straight up garbage writing e.g. paper-thin characters with incredibly flimsy motivations, convenient plot contrivances, etc.
You can generalize things like that for basically the entire industry. Even the games that have universally acclaimed writing like TLOU don't hold up at all to things like The Godfather. It's a completely different league.
Lol at people namedropping Naughty Dog in here. They're one of the worst. All their modern games scream "I wish I could be making a film, but I clearly lack the talent to do so."
I remember watching a cheap DVD version of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (silent, black and white, 4:3 movie from the 1920s) for the first time around the same time I played Uncharted 3 (a game as close to cutting-edge as you could ask for a console game at the time: HD, widescreen, surround sound, etc.)
Despite being outdated in many ways (it was made 90+ years ago!), Caligari simply blew me away with its narrative and atmosphere. I will forever remember it as a masterpiece of visual storytelling. Meanwhile, all I remember from Uncharted 3 (aside from the subpar climbing and combat) is wanting Nathan "Witty-Banter" Drake to just shut the hell up for a minute already.
I dont think anyone is saying that Uncharted is the epitome of game stories. It's Indiana Jones with nicely-written character relationships, but the overarching stories are all pretty boilerplate action-adventure. The chemistry between characters is the only aspect that elevates their narratives; that's not exclusive to Uncharted though. A ton of buddy and team movies have lived and died by the chemistry of the cast, over stuff like plot.
For me, those games don't even get that stuff right most of the time. I don't think the dialogue is very good, especially in the first three games. I'm totally with you that buddy movies live and die by those relationships most of the timeand I think most buddy action movies are pretty badbut I just don't think Uncharted executes on that very well. But again, I also think 4 is a substantial improvement over the first three.
I mean, most video games have straight up garbage writing e.g. paper-thin characters with incredibly flimsy motivations, convenient plot contrivances, etc.
You can generalize things like that for basically the entire industry. Even the games that have universally acclaimed writing like TLOU don't hold up at all to things like The Godfather. It's a completely different league.
You also have to think about the MASSIVE disparity in acting talent between gaming's most notable actors and film actors who put their all into their work and quite literally harm themselves to get into their role. Huge difference.
Games rarely compete with movies, let alone books and such in this regard. While a few games do interesting stuff with story, it's rarely executed entirely well. I find the best ones in games tend to be the ones that keep it simple but compelling, but most try to overdo it and end up fucking it up (Metal Gear being considered a good story series is a joke, like saying Anime in general has great story telling)
I find that NeoGAF heavily skews towards AAA games, so they encounter a lot of the ludological problems that games encounter, e.g. pushing the player towards the next big encounter time after time. In indies, you'll find a lot more innovation in writing, and many more games that don't feel like they have to justify big action sequences in their games. So, just glancing through my library, you have games like Kentucky Route Zero, Night in the Woods, and Her Story as examples of games that I think tell stories that are as good and thought out as other forms of media.
It's also worth keeping in mind that videogames are still relatively young as a medium, and we're just now starting to see the barrier for entry in making videogames come down with engines such as Unity. Sites like itch.io show how game makers experiment with the form to tell stories and give players experiences that they might not otherwise see.
Games rarely compete with movies, let alone books and such in this regard. While a few games do interesting stuff with story, it's rarely executed entirely well. I find the best ones in games tend to be the ones that keep it simple but compelling, but most try to overdo it and end up fucking it up (Metal Gear being considered a good story series is a joke, like saying Anime in general has great story telling)
I remember watching a cheap DVD version of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (silent, black and white, 4:3 movie from the 1920s) for the first time around the same time I played Uncharted 3 (a game as close to cutting-edge as you could ask for a console game at the time: HD, widescreen, surround sound, etc.)
Despite being outdated in many ways (it was made 90+ years ago!), Caligari simply blew me away with its narrative and atmosphere. I will forever remember it as a masterpiece of visual storytelling. Meanwhile, all I remember from Uncharted 3 (aside from the subpar climbing and combat) is wanting Nathan "Witty-Banter" Drake to just shut the hell up for a minute already.
D'you really think it's fair (to either) to compare a legendary 74 minute German silent horror film from the 20s to a 10 hour action-adventure third-person shooter videogame from 2011? They're utterly, utterly different; literally the only thing they have in common is that they're both fiction that requires the use of a monitor.
I doubt Uncharted 3 would get much more than 50% on Rotten Tomatoes were it a film rather than a game, but it seems ludicrous to say that Naughty Dog are no good because you found "the quintessential work of German Expressionist cinema" to be more engaging than the gaming equivalent of a decent popcorn action film.
We including manga in that category as well? Because Bokurano is like my favorite thing I read this year after King's IT. Up there with Stray Bullets as one of the best comics/mangas I've ever read and one of the few to get me emotionally invested. Dark, disturbing, mature, compelling, tragic, and never shies away from the gut-wrenching consequences of its premise and story
We including manga in that category as well? Because Bokurano is like my favorite thing I read this year after King's IT. Up there with Stray Bullets as one of the best comics/mangas I've ever read and one of the few to get me emotionally invested. Dark, disturbing, mature, compelling, tragic, and never shies away from the gut-wrenching consequences of its premise and story
A basic story can be well-written and effective. Being complex doesn't make something better and being simple and/basic doesn't mean a narrative is lacking
Not sure what to say about No Country. Perhaps you should watch it again? Arrival not being completely realistic isn't a mark against the plot.
Edit: and if anything, Memento could work just as well, if not better, as a game than a film.
So, Moss knows his money bag is tagged and has a ruthless killer (who btw would have been caught and jailed a long time ago if this was real life and not contrived fiction) hunting him and the money, but he doesn't think to either remove the tag or just switch bags because....reasons!
I get what you say in regards to MBTS, but what makes that movie engaging is the drama between the main two characters, not the story by itself.
Arrival not being realistic isn't the problem, it's that it portrays itself as so highly intelligent in it's structure, which makes what it's going for fall flat.
Don't think Memento could really work as a game unless it was 90% cutscenes or something in a game no longer than 4 hours.
Games rarely compete with movies, let alone books and such in this regard. While a few games do interesting stuff with story, it's rarely executed entirely well. I find the best ones in games tend to be the ones that keep it simple but compelling, but most try to overdo it and end up fucking it up (Metal Gear being considered a good story series is a joke, like saying Anime in general has great story telling)
The problem with this statement is what do you mean by "in general"? There are many anime series with good or at least interesting and thought-provoking stories. This is also true of games. Does the average anime or game fit into this category? No. Does the average film or book fit into this category? No. Do you know how many books are written every year that don't hold up to the best literature as a medium has to offer? Practically all of them. Do you know how many films are made every year that don't hold up compared to the best films ever made? The vast majority. All media is that way. I'm not sure why people want to continue to make these ridiculous, lazy comparisons and then act as if they've delivered some kind of knowledge regarding the quality of video game storytelling.
To The Moon was barely a game, more like an interactive narrative thing, but its the only media I have ever experienced that made me bawl my eyes out, and again when my wife got home that night. It shook me in a way that no movie or book ever has.
Xenoblade was an actual game, and told a really great story with great characters that has stuck with me in the the same way that my favourite stories from movies have.
The Last Of Us was very well written in terms of dialogue, and while I found the overall story lacking, the dialogue and character interaction were on par with some movies.
There are some very generic game stories, but if you think games have shitty stories in general, I think you just need to play different games.
Lots of people come on these boards to "get away" from RL, so it's a form of relaxation for them. As a result drive-by posts or lazy one-sentence replies are common because formulating a complex description of why they feel the way they do about something is too much effort. I am guilty of this too, but I would like to change that.
Hi! Go fetch please. Oh, you again stranger, I see you got this thing I needed soo much to create this amazing weapon! Thanks but something else broke and in order to repair it you need to win... The annual race!! It's the only way to get the special battery F306-iK7. But first, you'll need a car; there's only one dealer on THE PLANET so we have to repair this ship in order to get a job and earn enough money to buy a plane ticket and meet with Jacob who owns the key to the secret dungeon in the sandless desert where you'll have to fight the evil army and be accepted as a defender of the sun.
So, Moss knows his money bag is tagged and has a ruthless killer (who btw would have been caught and jailed a long time ago if this was real life and not contrived fiction) hunting him and the money, but he doesn't think to either remove the tag or just switch bags because....reasons!
He doesn't discover the tracker until the shootout with Chigurh. The tracker is hidden in the money itself, not the bag. He dumps the money once he discovers the tracker.
I agree that the movie is contrived if you just read the synopsis on Wikipedia.
He doesn't discover the tracker until the shootout with Chigurh. The tracker is hidden in the money itself, not the bag. He dumps the money once he discovers the tracker.
I agree that the movie is contrived if you just read the synopsis on Wikipedia.
This just tells me you don't watch a lot of anime, or haven't seen many of the great anime out there. Plenty of fantastic character driven anime. Not saying many games try to emulate those series, but they exist.
Please point me to some, er, "detector stores" that were around in rural 1980s Texas.
He didn't know there was a tracker in it, once he figures out that there is one he searches through the entire stash of money and finds it. Then he dumps the money out of desperation so he can't be found. There's nothing "contrived".
The like for Last of Us' story has little to do with not reading many books, and everything to do with the protagonists and their relationship, the personal cross-country journey plot (compared to the typical plot in a lot of zombie fiction), and the grounded brutal tone and atmosphere.
As well as how the game told its story not just through cutscenes but also through gameplay
The people I know who were very impressed by it are not familiar with many well written works of fiction. All they do is play video games. They went on and on about all the things it does, that no other stories do, and I was confused by how they believed it was so original. I think it's a solid story, and the atmosphere and tone are good. I do not think the writing or characters are all that impressive.
I of course recognize that my original statement is a hot take, and that different mediums should be judged on their own merits, but when speaking about the writing in particular, I think my criticisms are fair.
Please point me to some, er, "detector stores" that were around in rural 1980s Texas.
He didn't know there was a tracker in it, once he figures out that there is one he searches through the entire stash of money and finds it. Then he dumps the money out of desperation so he can't be found. There's nothing "contrived".
He doesn't speak with Harrelson's character until after he's already found the tracker and dumped the money. He doesn't even encounter Anton until after he's discovered the tracker.
Your memory of the movie is hilariously faulty, and I don't quite grasp why you're criticizing it when you clearly have only a vague understanding of the story.
There aren't many games with good stories, and even fewer have good writing.
I'm seeing a lot of criticism of The Last of Us in the thread, but I think it's definitely one of the best in the medium. I agree that the story itself is fairly generic, but the characters and the writing really elevates the material. Definitely a standout in terms of dialogue in particular, which most games utterly fail at.
