[News] Writer's Guild of America announces nominations for new "Best Video Game Story" award

Originally Posted by Lukage

And anyway, aren't these people on strike?

Exactly - they have nothing to do but play games all day. Plus, it's the one award show they could do that wouldn't step over the TV/Movie boundary they're at odds with. If Mo0's right about the union thing, they're pretty clever, too. I wonder... If they were drafted into WGA, would that include translators and localizers too, or just writers of English scripts?

Originally Posted by Rotorblade

Again, games are a versatile medium, so we get our "stories" in various ways. A lot of games choose to focus solely on the game and leave their stories in the background, usually with guides or manual excerpts. Tiamat's Street Fighter story FAQ is a good example of how a decent story with really good character relationships will remain untold over the course of several games... or more accurately, for the entirety of a series.

Yes, games are first and foremost entertainment, but not necessarily written entertainment. Aside from game design, a game doesn't have to offer any sort of creativity or artistic merit to be enjoyed. Tetris is still a classic because of how it played, and how it looked wasn't a result of the programmer being "artsy", that was just how well the graphics could be at the time. Sure, pixel art is starting to be seen as an art form, but older games are only retroactively included at best.

Good story helps, though, that's for sure, and plenty of games make for really awesome stories, but I don't think we'll be seeing a novelization of FFVII taught in English lit twenty years from now. It's not even that the writing's bad or the plot's convoluted, but the big difference between stuff like Moby Dick and Final Fantasy is that with Moby you can get a sense of the writer's intention to make a story that gives an outline of the human condition, complete with metaphore, fanciful line structure, and mental imagery open to the individual's intrperetation, while FF uses plot comprised of a half-dozen lines of text proportionate to the text box size to segue together a series of minigames. Do we still enjoy it anyway? You betcha! We may not be learning much aside from what elements hurt Tonberries more, but it accomplished it's goal of making the game fun. Game writing is fine as long as you never hold it to the standard of anything outside the genre, which just has another goal in mind for the story.

..And I totally haven't played any of the games on this list. If Crash of the Titans is anything like the last few Crash games, it's probably kinda funny at least, but what kind of writing could it have given all we know about the whole Crash mythos? They must've made up a whole lot of backstory or re-wrote the thing from scratch or something.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Originally Posted by Rotorblade

I should specify I meant "Why kind of games/genres?" I guess I wanted it to be a rhetorical question but I messed up. I believe that anything can sound good on paper, especially when we just mention titles that have established stories. Pong is a game, would that make a good story? That's what I'm getting at. Not everything is an RPG, moreover RPGs don't necessarily need to have the content of a book in order to meet the genre criteria. I think people seem to be missing the point that story is still supplemental to a game being fun or even having a decent set of surrounding events. Even though it's been implicitly stated otherwise, story is supplementary, the posts I see elsewhere are quite the contrary.

Okay, I see what you're saying. I didn't mean that a game *should* exist without a story, I'm just saying that not all games require a plot to be enjoyable. Music games for instances, or puzzlers. The ones that do have a story (as in, a fully written narrative complete with dialogue, direction, and plot structure) are all the better for it, since it gives the player a directive for what they're doing, and better involves them in the events going on on-screen.

"Why am I lining up these Tetris blocks again?"

"Because if you don't, the dark TetLord will use them to forge the great TetFortress, which will lead to the great Tet... Offensive that will surely destroy the whole of Blocktopia."

"Oh that guy is going down!"

And no, not all games could necessarily make good stories, at least not without some embellishment. Some, though, with pre-established characters and setting could make for exciting or interesting fairy tales if nothing else. That's why we enjoy them as game stories, they accomplish the same goal of the games themselves by giving us feelings of excitement and get our adrenaline and emotions pumping as they both build toward a mutual climax. They could absolutely work as genuine stories, and be considered just as prolific of a medium of expression, RPGs or any text-based game especially, but I'm just saying that the standards have to be different given the way they're portrayed on-screen. Are the games listed here considered good stories game-wise or universally? Or even both? I can't really say because I haven't played them, but they have to at least be entertaining to have been considered, and that's the heart of storytelling anyway.

Originally Posted by Colonel Skills

It's dirty politics.

Maybe, but could this turn out to be a good thing later on? Would more public recognition for games and especially game writers hurt or help gaming as a whole? I'm just asking because I'm not sure myself.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

Originally Posted by Rotorblade

What more do you need to know? A story can turn all that into an escape, but why would one need a story to give you the basic rules of the game? I imagine we'd want our instructions to be as clear and concise as possible.

I'm completely on board with you, a game doesn't need a story. I didn't mean to say they absolutely needed them to be enjoyable, that's just silly. Sorry if my post came off like that, I just meant that stories (good ones, anyway) can help games the same way innovative or solid gameplay can, or the way good music can liven up even a dull moment during a particular scene. It's another factor, certainly, and a game is only ever going to be as strong as its weakest component, story or otherwise.

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Exposition can be long forgotten in certain titles. I can't tell you how many times I would like to skip the cinema scenes in Gradius V. There are times where a game outshines its story. Yes, I like Street Fighter's story... but it certainly gets in the way when I just want to hammer someone in Alpha 3.

Beating on someone is just what Street Fighter is all about, and the series certainly didn't get popular because of its lore or writing, but the story is there for people who want it. If you want to skip cutscenes, that's fine, I do to after I've played through it about fifty times, and I think we can both totally agree that un-skipabe cutscenes and movies are just a bad feature all around. In Street Fighter's case, the story is never forced on you, so good or bad it's still very negligable either way. It's a prime example of a game that doesn't need any story whatsoever. I doubt many people could tell you Cammy's connection to Bison or Rose off the top of their head anyway. Come tournament time, it's just not a factor.

Quote:

I'm curious, how do you feel this kind of recognition would help "games?" What exactly do games need help with in this regard?

I was just wondering whether the increased public awareness of game writing as a celebrated medium would affect game design in the future. The game industry isn't in any sort of danger at all, I just wanted to know how, if in any way, these sort of accolades would improve it. Would more writers be attracted to work with games instead of, say, movies or books? Would this equate to larger funds for game developers with larger writing divisions? Stuff like that.

Originally Posted by Colonel Skills

While I have nothing against unions as a whole, but the reasoning for this whole thing is extremely transparent. The WGA is doing nothing but looking out for themselves here, it has nothing to do with bettering anything. If, by some fluke, game writing gains a tad bit more respect from other fields, then great. But this certainly isn't the point, and it's more than likely not going to accomplish a God damn thing.

Yeah, you're right, recognition isn't really the point, but If there is an upside to this, I'm just trying to find it, even if it's an indirect result.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

First of all, thanks for propping my post, Rotor, that was very mature of you.

Originally Posted by Rotorblade

A really good comparison came up when I watched Bioshock and Halo 3's respective making of features. A lot of writing is done via contribution, I don't think I've seen anyone solely contribute writing to the creation of a game. Because, again, story is supplemental and is often times built around a game. Thief 2's scenarios were crafted first and then its story was developed based off it. I really don't think writing awards are going to net much of anything for the game overall, at least if a game isn't pushed for its writing.

There probably won't be any major changes, I know Spike TV's awards show did very little on the state of the game industry, and are usually lauded by the very community they're supposed to appeal to, so we might not see any effects from this at all, aside from maybe a very small boost in sales for the games nominated. At any rate, a few more people in the general public were reminded that some games do in fact go through a writing process, so that's something at least. It just always seems to be news when games are treated the same as other media like TV and movies, even though their presence has only grown in the past several years.

I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?