Justin: Week Something - Story in the First Place

I don't mean to talk abstractly about any one concept, but I suppose that is often the design of the "concept". Story is the one mitigating factor within all forms of media and art. It persists throughout the novel and even the painting. A story can be told in many, many different forms and lengths, be it over the course of almost one hundred hours or in the span of five seconds. Story can be derived after careful scrutinizing and analyzing and all manner of careful self-investment, or it can be grasped and understood in the span of a quick glance.

What makes one story better than the other doesn't always rest on the content; it's often in the delivery. Certainly a troubled soul that you get to know over the course of several days through specific, omniscient insights and spanning events is one that we take to heart because of all the investment, but the most amazing characters are one that are presented simply, and yet not.

Doubling back on everything I say is a common thread amongst my posts, but damn the person who sees the world in binary. A human being is not simple by any means, we are complex, still-not-fully-understood creatures. Presenting us in a two-dimensional fashion does not do our existence justice, and the presentation through a complex string of hundred upon hundreds of pages is accurate, but it's rote and not nearly as dynamic as we humans persist to be.

The answer lies in a painting: a single image encapsulating an entire world in an instant. I do not mean to bloat the import of artwork as a whole to the art community--for certainly not all "art" is art--but story is most compelling when it is taken away from boiled, hard-coded presentation. An image of a person making even the simplest of gestures tells so much about who they are: such is the amazing complexity of the human. What is and is not there tells the story of the world around them, and what the work for and work through. One object placed to the side can unravel their whole world. Nothing stirs the human imagination more than a simple image of the human imagination.

You, the reader (who may very well not exist), may ask yourself, "What the fuck are you getting at?"

It is, like my subject, very simple.

Creative visionists, regardless of medium, need to put more faith in humans. Too often is the word "drama" taken and blown way out of proportions: distorting the human identity and every possible motive along with it. A game like Heavy Rain posits itself as an interactive drama as if video games haven't already done this for years now. It's attempt decidedly removes most elements of what most rational people would consider compose a video game and fashions itself to be one long extraneous cinematic with inconsequential button presses. It has very little actual control over characters and instead presents the player with a series of button presses they may or may not hit to further progress the story, which even when missed, only slightly alter the events until the very end, which could take different paths in the form of "who dies this time?"

The entire focus of Heavy Rain is its supposedly compelling story, which it doesn't even present all that well and actually leaves in a glaring plot-hole that negates the entirety of the story itself, essentially rendering the entirety of the "game" moot. Aside from that, it tries to create compelling characters with the use of motion capture and compelling writing and acting. However, the acting is mostly performed by people who sound as if they have no idea what they're saying, which are then further butchered by horrible, fake accents, and further butchered by writing that is convoluted and never actually suits any of the characters and their positions. No person, ration or not, would consider saying some of the things these automatons spout.

Speaking of lifeless simulations, the motion capture technology seems sub-par compared with what has been presented in other forms of media and even in other games released years earlier. The faces, which are the most dynamic part of a human and are 75% of the way we communicate, fail to animate anything more than the eyes and mouth, and even then just barely. The faces in a multiplayer only shooter, Team Fortress 2, animate better. To top that off, nothing collides appropriately and often objects clip right through one another. Often when things need to interact with one another, the camera pans away, even though that is the direct action of the scene. Something as simple as bandaging shouldn't move the focus of the scene to the ceiling for a whole 10 seconds.

All of this isn't nearly as bad as all the failed promises that this "game" sits upon. It promised that every action the player performed and every button press made a difference, but that is simply not true, and anyone who plays through the game twice would notice that in an instance. The game was built up for years as a some expanding experience and all it really does is present some ridiculous situations that seem like they could have negative outcomes if done incorrectly, which drives the player to perform well, but actually have no really story sequential consequences, other than very rarely altering which ending one recieves, which is always a tattered mess anyhow. The games only driving factor is a lie, a trick, and it fooled so many.

How easy everything could have been if the developer had put more faith in the human complexity. There's no need to present some outlandish human fault and make a character where it as their centerpiece attire. All that does is render them a character. To make a fictional being a human, one need give them something more than a plain fault and let it color them. It can be an affectation, but it is not their world.

Games like Grand Theft Auto IV present the player with a sympathetic character in Nikos that has done horrible things in his past but he does not let that be his defining characteristic. He is still human and seeks friendship and companionship and struggles through day to day life searching for ways to make money whilst trying not fall back on old habits. He only really confronts his past when it is right there in front of him, and only then is it a driving factor in his being. The rest of his world is then shaped by the now, and he changes accordingly, as humans are apt to do.

Where this game falls apart is in the gameplay, which allows the player to run wild with no regard or impact to the actual plot. The player can use the character to murder millions of innocents outside of the storyline and then lament the death of one during a story sequence. The separation of the gameplay and story here are the traps that most video games fall into, which makes them less compelling as a whole.

Video Games are not two divergent products: one a movie and the other a board game. They are single entity and their contents need to reflect that. So of course, that human element needs to also be a part of the gameplay. Whether a character is a superhuman or Joe Everyday, they need to play in a way that reflects who they are as a person.

This is why Uncharted 2 won so many awards. It's presentation touched on everything talked about prior. The characters, story and gameplay were all merged together to drive the whole product forward. The character was an above average adventure seeker, who was driven by love and and companionship and this was reflected in his speech and his regular movements. Simply directing the character with the control stick would illustrate to anyone that this was a person who was capable of great things, but was not perfect. The gameplay often has you being helped by companions, and in turn helping them, either as smaller or greater plot points. The story itself was simple, but banked heavily on the human complexity that it soared forward as a compelling piece. It made the game that much more fun to play.

It is my hope that our work can maybe reflect this merging of story into the overall product of our video game concept, because that is yet another aspect that thrusts video games forward to height of art and media.