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Comment by wodenokoto | Hacker News Reader

I think the author is right that games generally have poor, or poorly executed stories, and even great stories need to be squeezed into the game play box (e.g. his "ends with bang"-trope.)

But I also feel like the author misunderstands how the medium can elevate a story:

"Old mans Journey" was critized for having too simple puzzles, but it is not a puzzle game. It's a story, where a few simple puzzles gives you time to interact with the landscape and soak up the atmosphere, which enhances the impact of the worldless storytelling between levels.

It's a simple, nothing new story, made extremely impactful through the medium.

I also felt the story in Celeste was very impactful, even though it probably would make for a boring movie. But I struggled as Madelein as she conquered the mountain and her fears, and that struggle primed me to feel her struggle through the sparse dialogue.

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Another game in the "I can't imagine this working well in other media"-category is Senua's Sacrifice. Like, sure, the story could be critically subsumized as "generic identity struggle", but the way it's written and and delivered only works in a game. Perhaps that's a decent first cut for a story in a videogame: If you made this a movie instead, would it still work? If you make a movie out of e.g. any of the Call of Duty games, you'd mostly end up with a generic action movie without having to change the script.

This question hints at how well gameplay and story interact which each other. In most action games, they barely interact at all.

(Also, as interactive experiences, games just are not necessarily dependent on having a story, as the article points out. If the experience is good enough, a story isn't really necessary. Alien Isolation doesn't have much of a story, but visceral, devastating gameplay. Bethesda games generally have poor stories, but it doesn't really matter because the gameplay is open ended enough that everyone can just make their own story inside the game. Online games don't have a story, or some thin veneer to put on a loading screen; they don't need that, because the people are here solely for the gameplay experience.)

> If you make a movie out of e.g. any of the Call of Duty games, you'd mostly end up with a generic action movie without having to change the script.

This is kind of a funny comparison, because the first Call of Duty game was practically a string of set-piece action scenes, and sometimes plot lines, that were very obviously lifted from popular WWII war movies from the prior few years. IMO—and I doubt this is an uncommon sentiment among people who played it—those were also easily the best parts of the game.

Exactly. Sure, Last of Us has the story of a generic zombie movie. But in a way, that was my twelve year old daughter I watched die. I don't think it's fair to criticize games for not having as good a story as a novel when you'd never imagine criticizing a music album for not having as good a story as a novel.

Yes. It's like saying stories in opera are worse than in novels because dialogues in opera aren't realistic and the story is too short :)

You have to play to the strengths of the medium. The less defined the story is the more freedom players have. It's a design tradeoff that makes stories in games different, and they should be judged based on these different media constraints.

Stories in opera are worse than in novels. Good opera is usually paired with woefully poor story. The whole point of the story is to provide basic context to the songs.

Consider Turandot. The story is bad to the point of being objectionable, and whatever is left verges on gibber. And yet, without it, a song like Ho una casa nell'Honan is lessened because there has to be at least some reason to care about why this guy has a house in what sounds like a badly corrupted pronunciation of Yunnan.

But that's the point. What makes a story good for one medium makes it bad for other. So it's not fair to compare them abstracting from the medium.

You can still have better and worse stories withing given medium, and you can compare them between media if you insist, but you have to separate the inherent trade-offs from real quality differences.

> how the medium can elevate a story

I agree that it can, but many (especially AAA) video games try to imitate film, rather than using the strengths of the medium.

This is why I hate cutscenes. I'm sitting here with a controller in my hands, ready to do something fun, and you're going to make me sit and watch some expository dialog instead? Where the voice acting, animation and writing are all below movie standards?

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