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The Gamer's Quarter
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Lackey
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Joined: 11 Jul 2005
Posts: 1107
Location: Canada
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 Posted: Tue Jul 25, 2006 1:11 pm Post subject: |
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Those are insightful observations. It reminds me of how wrong it is to consider videogames as analagous to films and books, even outside the feature of interaction. You spoke of this earlier and I didn't absorb it at all.
Also, the idea of a "good ending" is a pretty terrible life lesson, when you think of it. I'm a firm believer in the "play it as it lands" scenario.
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Alc
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Joined: 22 Feb 2006
Posts: 109
Location: UK
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| Posted: Tue Jul 25, 2006 6:28 pm Post subject: |
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| rf wrote: | | In a novel, you can always flip to the final pages, but gameplay creates at least the illusion that to you, the route to understanding everything is as uncertain and intimidating as it is to the characters. |
You could also use a level select cheat (or download a savegame onto a suitable memory card) to skip to the end of a game, but you'd be lacking the prior knowledge to get anything out of it, much like you would if you skipped to the end of a book. In both cases it's the getting there that counts, and that's kind of your point I think, that the getting there is a very different experience in a game vs a film/book. I don't know how a book is going to end any better than a game, but despite this the characters and situations are prescriptively set in both cases, if we're talking an average jRPG (and an average novel). I know I can fail at the videogame but the "real" ending itself won't change (again, talking purely of jRPGs, although it's largely true of other genres that have any kind of plot progression). I could also fail at a novel by not continuing to read. You can experience the surroundings in a game, but that doesn't mean that you're not aware of your inexorable progression toward a single end. At least, that's how I play jRPGs - I'm ticking a long vertical line of boxes toward one really big box at the end. Sometimes there's more than one box horizontally, but there's almost always one main thread. I don't think there's a much greater mystery there than in a book.
I should probably clarify that I don't think it's generally worthwhile analysing videogames alongside books or films, because they're fundamentally different experiences. When we're talking about progression of story though, there's definitely a link, especially when we're talking jRPGs, since they're typically stories with a game tacked on. |
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