game writer Mark Barrett: "Games resist progress"

RedSocialKnight

There's a slow dialog going on over at Andrew Sullivan's blog about the possibilities for art in video games. The most recent entry is a pessimistic one, from Mark Barrett, who worked as a writer for games for ten years. He says:

After a solid ten years of trying to raise the level of discourse about the integration of narrative and interactivity I simply stopped trying. Why?

[...]

Serious work has been done on this issue inside the industry for close to fifteen years. It is not for lack of great writers that the medium resists progress, it is the medium itself that resists.

Okay, he still didn't really say why he thinks that. But he kind of does in this article:

Where stories require suspension of disbelief before emotional involvement can take hold, games conversely require active belief that each participant is trying as hard as they can to achieve victory.

So not only are story and game achieving their emotional power through uncertainty of outcome in exactly opposite fashions, but the power derived from one method destroys the power of the other.

If what's desired is emotional effect on par with the best that stories and games can present to an audience, then story and game must not be made interdependent and thus allowed to cancel each other out. For those products where game play is primarily important, story must at the very least be segregated.

Lots more detail, and links to other entries in the debate at the blog post:

Elki

From the rules thread, I copy and paste. You might want to read it.

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