Nielsen’s reading emphasizes on storytelling, reception, and a brief history of literary theory and video games. In storytelling chapter, he mentions “clearly, stories are everywhere. And we will use the general term “narrative video games” to refer to any games in which stories play a significant role”. Storytelling has become an essential part in video games, where video games have stories and setting in order to help the players to create strong connections with games. Therefore, storytelling increases values to games.
When Starcraft first came out, I became obsessed with it because of its stories and settings. Starcraft has very interesting and fascinating stories about three different races, Zerg, Terran, and Protoss, similar to Starwars and other very successful scientific movies. If I were to simply describe the storyline, Starcraft features three races: the renegade human terrans, the noble psionic protoss, and the horrific insectoid zerg. The storyline covers the fortunes of these three races and their leaders, fighting for dominance in a remote region of the galaxy. Typically, the player's race makes gains during an episode, but never completely conquers the other races. I believe Starcraft would not have become as popular as it is now in Korea if it did not have narratives and storylines. Moreover, Korean people love Stacraft because of its intense story level. Going back to the reading, storytelling really plays an important role in grabbing players’ attentions and allowing them to engage into the game.
One of the storytelling features is cut-scene. According to the reading, cut-scene is a narrative of pre-telling, paving the way for the mimetic event, making it a part of a narrative act, which does not take place after, but before the event. The cut-scene casts its meanings forward, strengthening the dietetic, rhetorical dimensions of the event to come. (178) Cut-scene is almost everywhere in video games. It is simply a “film” where the game characters interact or something happens that is out of control. One great example is a historical fantasy third person action-adventure video game “assassin's creed 2”. In the game, main character, Ezio Auditore da Firenze, explore game renditions of Italian cities, regions and landmarks in open world gameplay. During the game, storytelling and cut-scene play very important role. Whenever the main character receives a new mission or a quest, the game shows a small clip, film, or cut-scene to provide the storyline. I specifically talk about this game because it engages many cut-scenes.
In short, this reading provides important facts about narrative in video games. I would ask myself, is video games stories? I would answer yes. Every game is stories and narratives. Stories play very important role in video games, which allow players to fully understand and engage the game. I think storytelling is one of important features that helped to improve video games and gaming industries.
By Seung Lim
As Nielsen mentions in the reading, the strategy/simulation genre is less associated with narrative of story in videogames. However, Starcraft can be looked as a hybrid game because in the campaign mode, story is actually more important than gameplaying. I have recently started playing Starcraft II and how the game is structured is similar to watching a really long movie (including cut-scenes).
ReplyDeleteHowever, it is also interesting to see that many Starcraft users wish the film version of starcraft to be prodcued (Warcraft film is in production). Videogames do have story element, but still is very different from "classic" media (film, novel). And in a way, people are still more comfortable with film/novel way of story telling compared to videogame narrative.