Erzherzog said:
Shemar said:
Erzherzog said:
Or rather, Shemar cannot into thematic qualities.
Or maybe I find "the dichotomy of good and evil, or of order and chaos" not only horribly simplistic but also a cop out from delving into actual behavior resulting from believable motivation.
It has also been done to death.
Seriously man? Even some of the most critically acclaimed movies and books can be boiled down to having a theme of two opposing...ideologies.
Hell, for example, The Great Gatsby features heavily on a theme of new rich vs. old rich, and I'd love to see you bash it as a 'simplistic cop out'
Just because games have so far failed to be written well does not mean we shouldn't strive to.
The best thing that could happen to game writing isn't to say that games CAN'T have good/evil dichotomies, but to drop all the genre-trappings that choke the writing to death. I mean story-genres, not gameplay genres.
Right now, it seems that when making a game, developers start off with the assumption that the story has to fit a particular patten. A fantasy rpg must be 'epic', where epic simply means that you are some sort of 'chosen one', whether that means a Jedi/Spectre/bhaalspawn - just someone who is 'marked' for greatness but starts as a small wandering warrior, with a known villain to defeat, where you must go and collect the mcguffins and use them to venture to the big-bad-place and defeat the foozle. Ok, we all give Bioware crap for that, but it's much wider than them.
The impression I get is that writers think firstly, what genre they're writing: fantasy, space-opera, horror, scifi-horror, adventure and then lay a story out within a confine that's already defined pretty strictly. That doesn't HAVE to be a bad way of writing stories, but it usually does. Think this way - why is it that literary critics divide works into 'literature' and 'genre-fiction'. They aren't saying that 'genre' is bad, but it's a good sign that it won't be of the heights they expect for 'literature'. Film critics do the same thing - they'll take a film seriously if it looks like something that has been written as a story first and foremost, rather than a studio having picked out a market segment and then commissioning a story to fit it.
And that's the problem. With games, the developer desides first what kind of game they want to make, and THEN they write the story. Cliche becomes inevitable. You have a developer thinking 'the game is going to have X look, and there'll be Y set-pieces and Z action' and because there isn't a script yet X,Y and Z will be plucked from cliche, and only then do the writers get to work and create something that fits those cliches. Problem: deciding the genre first, designing in the trappings and restrictions of the genre, and then getting the story to match it.
Add to this that game development uses the writing model shared only by low-grade soap operas, i.e. commissioning inhouse writers to produce a script AFTER the developer has committed to that story. Can you imagine a film studio saying 'ok writer, just write something along these lines and we'll make a film around it, you don't need to compete with anyone, just tell us when it's done?' No way. Even with market-package films where the studio shops around for a prepacked film idea aimed at a market segment, say shopping for a Spiderman script or for 'next year's blockbuster', they don't just rely on their inhouse writers. They call for scripts and maybe commission a few from writers that have proven themselves as independent contractors. They get to look at a whole bunch of scripts by different writers and choose which one they like. And that's with their mass-market writing-isn't-so-important mass production films!
When it comes to GOOD films and literature, the writer writes a story. Not a genre, a story. And then they send it off to a studio or a publisher and it might get picked up. But if it does get picked up, someone has liked it as a script and then gets to make the film around the script. The equivalent in gaming would be for the studio to buy a script fully-made with all the C+C and dialogue in there, to then build a game around.
Imagine that. Instead of even thinking 'I'm going to make a rpg', let alone 'a fantasy rpg', they get a story that might not even fall into a neat genre (and hopefully won't). THEN they decide how to make a game that will bring that story to life, what kind of mechanics will work with the themes, etc.
I'm not saying that all games should be made that way. But we won't get art-quality game writing until we take it as seriously as they do in artforms. And unfortunately, taking writing more seriously might mean less guaranteed work for writers, because they can't just sit inhouse regardless of whether their next script is good. Not less work overall, just less guaranteed work. And writer-selection based on how good that particular script is. Not because the writer just happened to be the guy that studio has inhouse, and is told to write something to meet a particular genre and a particular game. Sure they'd lose job security. But they'd get an artistic freedom equivalent to that of authors. They'd be REAL authors. Some wouldn't make the grade, some new ones would appear who haven't been able to get work in the current system. So yes, some would lose their jobs, but others would get to make real art. If they're serious about writing, they'd have to see the value in that.