Electronic Tales

Fundamentally games are meant to be fun. The idea is inherent in the name, 'Games.'
Are books, meant to be fun?
Are films meant to be fun?

Without debating semantics i would say that they aren't. Books and films are entertaining. They are immersing and they are to be experienced. If they fail to entertain or immerse you then they fail to do their job. In which case said film or book would probably get bad reviews.

I think that it's somewhat easier to watch a bad film, than it is to read a bad book. A film has eye candy to sugar coat bad storytelling. This can be seen in films such as Transformers 2. The visual mind barrage going on in the film was the only thing keeping me watching because the story wasn't particularly special.

A book however has only one arm with which to grab you. It's story and with that the quality of the writing.

If either are off, chances are you are not going to read much further. It may be a factual book, without a story, but there still needs to be a certain flair and style to the writing to entertain the reader.

So what of games.

Take pong. No story, words, script. It was fun though. Games with similar goals still exist today. Take the Burnout series for example. No story, it doesn't need it, it's crazy fun to just whizz around the city in your car. The important thing here is that it presumably was never pitched as having a story.

So what my focus here then is, that whilst a game, can still be purely a game and have no other intentions, if it must include a story then it must be judged amongst it's peers - films and books.

It's like when a singer branches out and gets a part in a film. You don't say, oh we'll excuse their bad acting because they're not an actor at heart, they are a singer.

No

We say, their acting is shit, get back to singing.

Unfortunately many game designers fail to realise this. A game doesn't have to have a story, but if it does have one, and it's rubbish, it will kill that game more than any other element.

Thankfully some games exist with brilliant stories. Bioshock being a good example. It's a great concept from the start, but has been fleshed out well too. I've noticed that games with good stories tend to be quite cinematic and too right. Personally i like that.

I think the main problem, is the question of how to immerse the player in a game. This isn't really a question though. A game might have shit game play but a good story. For instance if a good writer has come up with a decent story, planned the characters and the setting well etc, then the player will be that much more immersed.

How do you make a player care about the main character and NPC's? A GOOD STORY AND WRITING. Game designers seem to think in being a game it has some magic pass as the player has that extra dimension of input to a game. They wonder why the player doesn't care about the main character, is it because he doesn't control well? Is it because the animation is bad? Is the pace of the game bad?

No

It's because he speaks like damn robot and is about as 3-dimensional in character as brick.

Ar, this rant could go on. But to sum up, films and books, don't have direct input from the consumer, you could go as far as to say that they are at a disadvantage in comparison to games.

However in general they do it a darn sight better.