A month or so ago I got in contact with someone who has worked in the comic book industry and got some advice from him. One little tidbit was to get a Twitter account and follow a whole bunch of writers and artists. For comedy reasons alone, this was a great idea. Artists and writers have a tendency to be really creative, witty people. Or complete d-bags. But every now and then, quite frequently really, I get a tidbit from some writer or some artist about what they do that makes my day.
I've been in a thoughtful kind of mood today. Thinking about storytelling and the various differences between genres, mostly because a certain musician whose work I hate got me going on what I dislike (I hesitate to say "what's wrong") about that particular industry. What it boils down to is that I enjoy the art of storytelling, oftentimes more than I enjoy the story itself. Due to this thought I've been jumping around blogs and tweets and quotes all morning, getting into the mind of the storytellers and artists.
One such search brought up a little musing from Gail Simone, the current writer of Batgirl, about how video games are changing the three act structure (http://gailsimone.tumblr.com/post/30447440749/the-video-game-as-game-changer). It's an interesting musing, and I like seeing how her mind mulls it over and adapts it, but I'm pretty sure she's making a mistake.
First, nobody plays Skyrim or World of Warcraft for their story, they play those games so they can play. Neither game changes it's mechanics during the play time, but the mechanics are broad enough that you've always got new things to do. Second, the three act structure is apparent in every side quest, if dulled down a bit. The first act, meeting the characters, is the main quest line. The second act is finding the quest giver and accepting the quest, and the third act is the actual quest itself.
The most prominent point she made though was how the second act is the entire game. And that's not entirely true. I'm going to take some notes off of Extra Creditz here and their opinion of the three act structure in Bioshock. Almost the entirety of the play is in act 2, but act 1 is littered around the environment. Every bit of Rapture is the first act. You see it scattered along the walls, propaganda from when Rapture was first made to when it fell. The ideas that first built this incredible city down to the abuse that fell it and started the second act.
Here's the thing. Every genre tells its stories differently. Books tell you everything up front, leaving it to your imagination for the visuals but giving you every nook and cranny to build off of. Movies show you everything. It's very easy to consciously miss what they're doing, but everything down to the cinematography to the acting is nuanced to give you this general feeling that the director wants to give you. Comic books have this in between, where they direct your imagination. Everything's shown to you except the movement. You get various snapshots in time that are supposed to work along with the dialogue to give you an idea of what happened that your subconscious pieces together. Even music has it's own form of storytelling, without much of a story. The very specific choice of words mingled with the tone of voice and the music to project emotion and meaning, usually directed at what the musician wanted but defined by the listeners subconscious, an art that I feel is lost in today's "make 'em dance" top tracks that mimic each other.
All of these, though, are based off of one thing. The directed story. You have a protagonist who goes through this world to learn the ideas that the writer/director/actor/artist wanted you to learn. Video games are, quoting Extra Creditz again, the worlds first truly interactive medium, and it's new. Video games, at the moment, are nearing the end of their attempts to ape movies and moving into their own as an art form, we've seen a few pieces like Bioshock, Mass Effect, and Spec Ops: The Line try and move past that stigma of "we must be movies where you're doing the fight scenes" and become what games will do best.
Video Games make you a world. They make you the supporting cast for that world and send you into their story. But the story that a video game can tell better than any other medium is the story of the player. The storytelling in a video game should make the player do something that teaches them about themselves. It should be able to subtly direct the player, to the point where the player feels like he's in complete control, and then yank the rug out from under them. The effectiveness of this, and what no other medium can do, is that the player is the one that did it. He pulled that trigger, he spared that life, he made the call that killed hundreds.
Without the directed story the acts change. With an interactive story you want people in act 2 immediately because that's where things happen. Act 1 is always happening, because you are the character and the game is introducing you to yourself. Or the world is the character and you're being introduced to that. The third act does take a blow, but it's still there. The three act structure in video games is simply altered, almost unrecognizable, because video games are still so new.
This is all idealized video game storytelling, not every game is like this but it seems like the logical place they'll end up. The reason I play Video Games is for the gameplay. The people who play video games "for the story" wade through a lot of sandbox playgrounds, multiplayer, and poorly written but fun mechanics games to get to the well written ones, and they'll play and love the horribly written games for nothing more than gameplay. Modern Warfare, for example. But when a great game gets a great story we get to see what gaming could be, and will be.
