I play fighting games for the story.
I say, “I play fighting games for the story,” and then, I usually follow up with the joke, “which is like saying that I read Playboy for the articles.”
But it’s true… or, it’s at least, partially true. I could say, rather, that I play fighting games for the characters. After all, colorful characters are the core of fighting games, and central to their appeal. But that’s not quite it, either.
Man I’ve been behind these past couple weeks. I’ve barely had a chance to stop by and say hello. I suppose I could say I need more leisure time and fewer responsibilities, really I just need to manage my time better. Anyway, the IGDA is running my Culture Clash columns according to a different schedule, to accommodate the other writers (and the fact that I haven’t exactly been great with deadlines recently). So last month’s, which ridiculed Microsoft for the Xbox One launch, didn’t come out on that site until after they’d reversed their worst blunders. Now I can’t claim that it was my writing, and mine alone, that drove this decision. This one, meanwhile, I wrote and rewrote about a thousand times. Today. The first draft was probably fine, but then I thought I’d do something new with it, then I changed that idea, then I realized my thesis didn’t make sense, then I wound up with this version, which nobody will be happy with. But there’s always next month. Enjoy!
Ben Hoyt is an old friend and longtime industry veteran – he did a Celebrity Guest Editorial for us a while back, and has appeared as a guest star in some of my posts over the years. We’ve been meaning to do a sort of sweeping discussion of the Mass Effect series for some time now, and it’s ready at last!
So Uncharted 3 releases next week. I’ve been eagerly awaiting this game since…well, since about 18 hours after Uncharted 2 released. And the early reviews are great. But it seems like every time a lauded, high-profile release comes along with a linear story, we get into this crazy conversation about…well, about how inferior linear stories are. For that matter, Arkham City kind of leads into this conversation, since its story is absolutely linear in the …
Since our tiny fists first clutched the Atari 2600 controller, we’ve been taught that story-driven games need to have stories – stories with beginnings, middles, and ends. Maybe that was wrong all this time.
Video games are about imagination. They’re about going to places you might not otherwise go and doing things you might not otherwise do; they’re about meeting people and entities you might not otherwise meet and having experiences you might not otherwise have. The medium allows us, essentially, to take a life for a test drive. And the more advanced the technology gets, the less hard imagination work is required to “be” there. I don’t know whether this is good or bad, it’s just the way things are. But one thing’s remained the same since day one: there is always you, on the other end of the mouse or controller, always you separated from the other world by a screen. Video games can be about anything, but they always have you in common.