In this sequel to my first blog, "Video Games, the new white meat?" I would like to talk about why I personally think that video games are one of the better methods of telling a story. Without further ado, that reason is immersion.
What immersion is in terms of narratology and story-telling is how into the story the recipient becomes, such that they really get sucked into the story. At least, that's the way I see it. To show how video games are more immersive than other mediums, I'll talk about how they do it first. A book shows the reader words on a page, leaving the reader to imagine what happens themselves on their own levels of personal detail. Movies show exactly what happens in the story (or happened/will happen given the usage of ana-/prolepsis) as it happens and leaves nothing to the imagination. Comics have a similar take on it as movies, albiet there is no sound and the method is somewhat different given the seriality of most comics. In video games, the player literally controls what happens, and most things aren't set in stone.
Take for example, a video game with one of my favorite stories: Silent Hill 2. You play as James Sunderland on his search for his dead wife in the town of Silent Hill after you receive a letter from your deceased wife. There is no one set ending to be attained at the end of the game, they range from the generic happy ending (as cheerful as the silent hill series can be, at any rate) to a cult-related morbid ending. Even while still playing the game, there are many levels of variation. If James runs out of bullets, which he will, he will have to either run from the monsters or ward them off with a hand held weapon like a steel pipe, which can affect his odds of survival. If James encounters a puzzle, which he does, he will have to figure the puzzle out. If James gets lost among the various dark corners of Silent Hill, which he will, he will use a map to try and figure out alternate routes to get to his destination.
The key idea here is that everything depends on the player. If the player rushes through the game without being cautious, he/she will most likely have a very different experience than someone who knows what they're doing. Because literally every action depends on the player, with the exception of AI and cutscenes, the players generally have a greater sense of immersion than in other methods of story telling. With books and comics they read, with movies and television they watch. With video games, they DO the actions.
Narrative
If anyone has doubts as to the ability of video games to form narrative, look at
this new preview
for Halo 3:ODST. However unrealistic the subject matter may seem, and this is true for usually any video game, there's always some relateable characteristics, struggles, or concepts. It emits or suggests something about the universal human experience.
You are exactly right.
You are exactly right, Video Games are the BEST way to tell a story, especially the new one with the maxed out graphics. A great graphical view and control scheme added into a story makes it feel like you're actually going through the story yourself as if you really are in it. The Final Fantasy portrays this very well.
Storytelling
I really disagree. I don't think videogames are the best way to tell stories. In fact, there are far better ways to tell stories like, say, books. Moreover, the storytelling affordances that videogames do have are only indirectly related to graphics and control, and the idea that being in a story as if we are "really" in it isn't what we're actually getting. That is, we don't read and enjoy Moby Dick (or fail to enjoy it) because we want to be Ishmael (or because we fail to get to be Ishmael).
It's not a question of videogames' cultural value or their relevance to narrative analysis -- they just work differently.
Doing
Actually, don't they manipulate James into doing the actions? As a player, I have no contact with the story world, so I can't really DO anything other than push some buttons.
The way I see it anyway:
Granted, unless you're playing a virtual reality game, you don't have "direct" contact with the game per se. And yeah, you aren't literally put into the shoes of James Sunderland/insert character name here, but you certainly have more control over them than in any other medium. With a book you're turning the pages, there isn't much variety in that unless you literally write a different story into the book or read the pages in a convoluted order... which I imagine would be actually pretty funny. So, yes, you're pushing buttons (or in the case of the Wii/VR games flailing wildly), but that gives the recipient more choices of what to do, which allows them some form of control.
And at the first point, it's true that a plot for a video game will start out on paper in either a script or a slightly novelized form (depending how verbose it is.) What they do with that in turning it into a video game makes it more enjoyable when taking the story in, at least in my opinion.
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