olekms.com

Recently I’ve been thinking about how different mediums can be used to tell stories, and the consequences associated with using a particular medium to tell a story.

Music can tell stories. Lyrics obviously can be used to convey ideas and meaning. However, music without lyrics can convey emotion, and less explicitly elements of plot (Peer Gynt for example). Songs are typically short so a song will often deal with just a specific idea. Concept albums (like Scenes from a Memory by Dream Theater) and classical pieces can tell whole stories.

Films are typically around two hours long, two hours in which to tell a story/convey an idea to an audience. You tend to be able to fit quite alot of story into a film of two hours since you can convey ideas visually and aurally. Films often contain music but the music in films is usually more to augment the story or mood rather than to explicitly tell a story. Films don’t ask much from the viewer. You can sit and watch and listen and have experienced a lot of story telling in just two or so hours. So films are information dense and require little effort to absorb.

Books (novels) are much more demanding of a reader. The visuals and sound are not provided directly to the reader, they must be interpreted from words on a page. Since some of the words in a book must be used to describe what is seen and heard, books are less information dense than films. So books take many times longer to tell a story than films. However, the process of interpreting the words on a page, linking the words on a page with their meaning in your head… this can result in a richer experience.

Computer games incorporate visuals and audio so they’re as information dense as films. However, games which tell stories take much longer to play through than it takes to watch a film and in some cases approaching the time it takes to read a novel. Why is this? Is it because games have to also involve the player in something fun? Does making compelling gameplay compromise story telling? Or does the added time it takes to finish a game over a film the result of gameplay which compliments the story and thus creating a richer experience for the player? In my experience gameplay interferes with story telling. Setting goals to achieve (beat this boss, get to point X on the other side of hundreds of enemies) for a level makes me focus on achieving those goals and forgetting why I want to achieve them. Success for the sake of success. I can’t even remember the plot behind Half-Life 2. Most of it seemed to be “get to the other side of town through zombie and combine infested areas to shutdown a reactor thingy”. Perhaps I’m alone in this. I certainly haven’t experienced any particularly strong emotional response from a (story-oriented) game, the same way I might from reading an engrossing book, listening to my favourite music, or watching a good film. Are games a bad medium for meaningful story telling? Are compelling gameplay and emotive story telling mutually exclusive, or have we just not achieved it yet?

Sometimes playing games makes me feel like I’m a lemming and someone is playing me. Unless I jump through the hoops just right I’ll die and have to start again.