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| Re: On a panel for PAX in Seattle, September 3rd by Mischief Maker 08/19/2010, 12:47pm PDT | ||||
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Ice Cream Jonsey wrote: This is also a response to that Bluebeard post of Jerry's. I'm rather annoyed by this argument that many types of stories cannot a game make. Lemme take a moment to spoil the story of Knights in the Nightmare, the best game on the Nintendo DS. I finished it a while ago and was absolutely blown away, not just by the fun original gameplay, awesome soundtrack, and gorgeous visuals, but also by the story. Not only was this a japanese game with no child protagonist, odious comic relief, 1-dimensional characters who follow their single character trait past the point of insanity, falling-anvil-subtle morality message, secret villains motivated by pure nihilism, or any of the other calling cards of anime, but it turned out to be a video game inspired by King Lear! I don't just mean a game with a bunch of King Lear-themed cutscenes attached; King Lear informs the gameplay. You're a deposed King wandering your former kingdom coming face to face with the ghosts of your past and your own sins and failing. In KitN this is literal, you're the ghost of a murdered king wandering your now-monster-infested kingdom, when you are attacked by monsters you defend yourself by reanimating the ghosts of dead knights and warriors to fight for you. After a battle, you see a snippet of memories from the knights who fought for you. At first you're fighting with young low-ranking knights who worship you from afar as the good king who is arranging a marriage of his son to their bitterest rivals ending a long and costly war. The mechanics of the game give individual ghosts un-refillable vitality so eventually they wear out and get replaced by newer, higher level ghosts you come across in your journey. So you move from low-ranking recruits to close friends and confidants, but then the game starts having you dredge up other ghosts, ghosts of people who were oppressed by your kingdom, ghosts of your enemies, you start to hear your King's story from different and unflattering angles. Eventually you learn that your supposedly great King was in many ways a fool and a failure, his lover a spy sent by his enemies to manipulate you into marrying your son to the princess of your enemies because your enemies were losing. I'd call this game the japanese planescape. And would you ever in a million years think of King Lear as a great starting point for a video game? It not only makes for a refreshingly original backstory for the game, it takes the gameplay in completely new directions that leave the professional reviewers baffled. I'm going to make the argument that the Ebert-parroting notion that only a limited supply of story archetypes make for good games is fundamentally flawed. I will make the argument that the handful of dominant video game genres fit certain stories better than others. Of course every First Person Shooter is going to be Aliens, that's the perfect story for those games. Of course every Dungeons and Dragons game is going to be samurai Tolkien. It's the market's reluctance to experiment and branch out into new game types that's keeping their stories moribund. |
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