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/lit/ - Literature

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7463161 No.7463161[DELETED]  [Reply] [Original]

My friend keeps insisting that video games are a legitimate medium for telling stories, on-par with books.

What can I get this guy to read to realize that video games are nowhere close?

He likes this game, VtM:B and Undertale.

>> No.7463173

Game play ruins pacing and the stories have to be built around game play, instead of being the focus

>> No.7463175

>>7463161
Degenerates like you belong on a cross.

>> No.7463240

>>7463173
Gameplay can be immersive and a form of subtle free flowing story telling to fill the gaps.

>> No.7463279

>>7463161
He isn't wrong.

>> No.7463283

>>7463161
you're comparing apples and oranges here

video games allow a player to explore the story themselves via an interactive world, and you can do a lot of things that you simply can't do in books.

it would be unfair on either medium to compare them to one-another

>> No.7463285

>>7463161
>My friend keeps insisting that video games are a legitimate medium for telling stories, on-par with books.

they are, but storytelling is at the bottom of the priority list in works with artistic value. storytelling is just a byproduct of art, not its purpose.

>> No.7463290

>>7463161
PsT is only fun if you're autistic, Undertale is only fun if you mainline new sincerity every half an hour VtM:B is only fun if you need to beat off.

Books aren't fun at all that's what makes them the best form of art.

>>7463283
Oranges taste like shit and apples don't. Oranges smell better than apples. See what I did there?

>> No.7463296

the written word is efficient

images are efficient

task completion isn't. video games waste an immense amount of human time

>> No.7463301

>>7463173
Pretty much this.
If you build a game around story, gameplay tends to get really repetitive and boring.

If you focus on gameplay, either the story goes nowhere or the pacing is all over the place.

I'd say another big issue is how budget limits story so much, there's no way to show a big story when most games are around 4-8 hours long, and those who aren't, have really bad pacing issues in order to stretch gameplay for many hours.

>> No.7463304

I find video games an interesting counterpart to literature, they're both media where the person is actively engaging with the material instead of passively taking it in. Novels set up the action and your imagination fills in the rest, and video games give you the details and you fill in the action.
That said "telling stories" is a load of shit. You read books for the prose and ideas, and you play games for the gameplay. and when all's consider I'd rather video games give us the next chess than the next moby dick.

>> No.7463343

>>7463296
>the written word is efficient
oooohohohoho

>> No.7463467

Videogames are a good medium (as any other) that should be analysed by it's own merits instead of being compared time and time again with Literature, Cinema or others. It's like saying sculpture isn't up to painting, it's kind of obvious when they have different limitations and the effort/technique required is much more distinct. Making a videogame (in most cases) requires people to learn a programing language (technique), which can be considered as a legit way to express oneself.

While videogames have the potential to surpass many other mediums in some regards, specially the one where people get involved in the game, they are constrained by money and technology like no other. Right now videogames are (in most cases) a collaborative work of people that do it as a job instead of some sort of artistic pursue, and while this has been the same case for visual arts in some cases, they never put in line millions of dollars, at most the reputation and life of an artist. Also, if you compare this with a Hollywood movie versus a low-budget Art House film, there shouldn't be an extreme gap in quality, meanwhile an Indie game looks and feels poor against a AAA big-budget game.

Videogames are still young (as a medium) and people haven't explored them enough, maybe our generation (the one that has 20-30 years currently) or the one before is the first one that looks at them as a serious way to portray ideas or feelings (Japanese have been doing some legit contenders for art since the early 2000's). If we compare it with how much it took TV Shows to produce something that could be considered serious and worth of academic analysis (The Sopranos maybe, but I'm pretty sure that it wasn't until the 90's) they should be on par.

It's not fair to go shitting on them, as well as it wouldn't be fair to claim that they are something they aren't. I love Undertale as much as the next guy, but the game isn't art per se. Although, I think that it is a move in the right direction.

Those are my 2 cents.

>> No.7463475

>>7463161
your being silly. games like shadow of the colossus and to a lesser extent metal gear solid 2 have shown that games can be art.

shit mgs2 is closer to a pynchon novel than any movies i can think of including inherent vice.

>> No.7463537

>>7463285
why

>> No.7463551

>>7463537
why what

>> No.7463556

Planescape Torment is a pretty engrossing story.


Dark Souls and Bloodborne are two games with pretty good storytelling that don't interfere with the game too much and let the player fill in the gaps.

>> No.7463559

>>7463551
>storytelling is at the bottom of the priority list in works with artistic value. storytelling is just a byproduct of art, not its purpose

>> No.7463562

>>7463559
i know what you quoted. what's the question? why what?

>> No.7463646
File: 455 KB, 500x500, 1325402205095.gif [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
7463646

>>7463161
>My friend keeps insisting that video games are a legitimate medium for telling stories
Yes they are.
>on-par with books.
Not at all, they are not similar and should not be compared.

>> No.7463669

>>7463283
>and you can do a lot of things that you simply can't do in books
like?

>> No.7464081

>>7463669
There is an actual act of doing in video games which makes it unique among the arts. Games like Journey, Ico, and Shadow of the Colossus are three games whose experience is intrinsic tied to its participation. On the whole I don't like video games but I think these games do I great job at showcasing the kind of integrity that the medium can possess.

>> No.7464089

>>7463161
Your friend is retarded. I think you should stop talking to him before he makes you into a complete idiot.

>> No.7464140
File: 3.48 MB, 512x288, 024954dd7f328369ae5d935cdd2e3e55.gif [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
7464140

>mgs2
>ico
>shadow of the colossus
>undertale

everytime, fucking reddit taste nerds.

>> No.7464287

>>7464140
This makes my peepee feel funny.

>> No.7464484

I stopped devoting much time to video games a couple years ago. There were only a handful that ever really struck me as having good storytelling.

Dark Souls was by far the best because it revealed details in ways I'd never seen. It intentionally hid plot points from the player or used characters that would lie to and take advantage of the player. A novel can achieve something similar with an unreliable narrator, but in Dark Souls, what the player chooses to believe has a significant outcome on how the story unfolds.

It had characters with interesting motivations, settings with unclear pasts you had to slowly piece together, multiplayer that had plot significance, and some damn good gameplay. I would argue that it's art. Not on the same level as something like The Iliad, but certainly above something like The Hunger Games.

>> No.7464536

>>7463279
Back to fucking leddit m8

>> No.7464544

>>7463161
There's multiple places to discuss this garbage.

>>>/v/
>>>/trash/

>> No.7464552

>>7463161
games are a legitimate form of expression, however they need to focus on interactivity as that's what the medium is about

playing a game for the story would be like listening to a song for the lyrics. it's about the sound not the words.

no medium is better than any other, they're merely different forms of expression.

>> No.7464590

>>7463161
>video games are a legitimate medium for telling stories
Yes

>on-par with books
No

Where, I feel, Videogames really shine is in the ability to create a wordless, interactive, visual storytelling experience which is quite unfortunately something that pretty much only Journey has touched on

They're still decent as pseudo-books, but there is an entire style of story telling that video games are capable of which none are really tapping in to

If they aren't doing the entirely visual style of storytelling I'm talking about, or if they aren't focusing entirely on gameplay like a Dark Souls or Fighting Game does, then there is a lot of squandered potential and an experience that is probably more suited as either a movie or a book

Games should focus on the strengths it has over other mediums rather than trying to compete with them

>> No.7464677

>>7463343
In relation to task completion, yes, it is

>> No.7464699

>>7463290
>books aren't fun at all
now i don't know about that

>> No.7465635

>>7464140
>Ico
I almost never hear this used.

>> No.7465682

>>7463161
You're friend sounds like a fag but he's not totally wrong either. How about both of you play NieR and then read something by Gene Wolfe. Then you can compare how both works used the strengths of their mediums to convey the subjectivity of the human experience and then decide if one or the other either didn't work or worked better.

>> No.7465690

>>7465682
Tbh none of the games I've played were even close to Gene Wolfe in terms of "subjectivity of human experience" or any other worthwhile element. That's not to say I didn't like certain games, but so far there are too many restrictions on them as a medium to shine.

>> No.7465702

>>7465690
Have you played NieR? As far as I know it's the only game that's gone for something comparable and I'd say it did a good job. It's also a very compelling though maybe heavy handed look at how conflicts develop.

>> No.7465713

>>7465702
Nier is filled with plotholes though. And you need to play drakengard to make sense of the plot. Still liked it.

>> No.7465723

>>7465713
Plot is for plebs. Not that I saw any problems with the plot though. I think that the game's atmosphere and the way it handled were enough to keep me going. No element of Nier lets it down, I think it's probably one of the best games to come out of the last generation, which also probably means that it was one of the last good video games.

This generation is shit and the next one won't be recognizable as video games.

>> No.7465806

>>7463290
>Books aren't fun at all that's what makes them the best form of art.
Everyone who disagrees with this should kill themselves.

>> No.7465817

>>7463467
>Videogames are a good medium
Top pleb.

>> No.7466076

>>7464552
I'm sorry but I just do not agree with words not meaning anything in sons but the sound. If there were a language out there that if you were to translate a song by Schubert into it it would say something like penis man is pretty fun yea but phonetically sounded very similar to the German, and you spoke this hypothetical language, would you really think that it was as good. I mean one is about a guy called penis man and the other is about a crow that follows you overhead.

>> No.7466217

video games are about as shitty as books. It's just books have been around long enough to establish a large amount of not-shit, whereas video games are like a fucking toddler that can't tell the difference between the bath and the toilet, shitting in the bath more often than in the toilet.

>> No.7466260

Gameplay and text in a constant war when you make a video game. You can't construct a game like a rich novel, it's probably going to be a shitty game. I find the most memorable and emotional video games are the ones with minimal text, like Shadow of the Colossus.