Saturday
10Oct2009
Van Hemlock Episode 72
Jon Shute | Saturday, October 10, 2009 at 1:48PM 
This week's show sees the return of the topics, and we kick off with a discussion on story in games.
We also review four new XBox Indie games and find out that when you remake a good game multiple times you might as well just play the original even if the games are quite good in their own right.
You can follow us on twitter as @vanhemlock and @jonshute, read our blogs at www.vanhemlock.com and www.chimpsinspace.com or leave us a comment at www.virginworlds.com or on iTunes. Or you can just enjoy the show. You can subscribe to the show through RSS or iTunes to receive the show as soon as it's published each week.
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Reader Comments (3)
I really enjoyed your discussion about story in videogames on this week's podcast. You brought up many good examples although I was a bit surprised that COD4 was not mentioned. The single-player experience tends to be overlooked because the multi-player is so great but it's quite remarkable in its own right. COD4 successfully does the movie/book thing where it puts you in the shoes of several characters in turns as the story progresses or even sometimes as a comic book style "meanwhile in...". But beyond just the story, COD4 strive to elicit emotional reactions from the players beyond the basic "feel like a badass".
And personally that's what interest me the most about videogames these days: how can the medium be used to make the person playing the game experience a particular emotion? Story becomes just one of the tools available to the game creator then. The story must work together with music, gameplay, graphic art style, environments, mise en scene, etc. A good example of what I'm trying to say would be Shadow of the Colossus. This game successfully make players feel sad, nostalgic, awe, doubtful (that nagging feeling you get that maybe you're not doing the right thing afterall), struggling against overwhelming odd (the opposite of badass I guess, the David against Goliath thing). It's all the more interesting since this game does so much with so little. In many ways I feel it can be regarded as an attempt in minimalist game design, it seems that everything superfluous has been eliminated until only the elements that contribute to generate the desired emotional reaction remain.
There are so many emotional reactions yet to be elicited in videogames, probably because so few games have tried to go beyond the basic fun/bored/frustrated and badass, that the potential for improvements in that area seems almost limitless at this point.
Interesting point; now I think about it, the big old list of titles I routinely trot out when talking about 'good story' are precisely the ones that make me feel or care about the people and events taking place. I'll generally regard mindless rampages as bad games as a whole, even if they are technically well-executed. Almost certainly not a coincidence!
Hey guys.
That was a particularly interesting podcast.
I didn't think of a response to the Twitter question in time, but having now had a while to reflect on it, how about Deus Ex?
It's one of my all time favourite games, and there was a strong story running all the way through it - not to mention 3 different endings.
Also, as part of the continuing debate on linear vs sandbox, it had sandbox-type areas strung together in a linear sequence. Best of both worlds?
FotL