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I disagree. Well, slightly.
You can have a great game without a great plot. Pacman. Paradroid. Donkey Kong. Spycatcher. These are true _games_: the pleasure is in the playability, the challenge, the fun.
You can have great games with lousy plots, you just skip through the plot parts and play it as a "game" game.
But in some fields of game, such as the adventure, the RPG, the plot is vital. These games are ABOUT plot, they're about discovery, they're about maintaining interest. There's no physical difficulty in controlling Guybrush Threepwood, just cerebral difficulty in solving the problems in the game. But the problems are held TOGETHER by the plot. Without, it may as well be a loose collection of lateral thinking problems with no theme.
So whilst it's not essential, it's a field that is important in some genres. And some people are expanding its importance into other genres. The Salon article on Max Payne fails to point out the flaw in the game: the plot and game seem to be seperate devices. Whilst the plot is reasonable, if a little-tounge-in-cheek, the moment you cut back to the game, you solve all your problems by putting 10 million bullets in things. That doesn't work. In fact, it only works towards the end, when you realise quite what you're up against, and Max essentially goes nuts: THEN, when you're legging it trhough (spoiler) the forgery, the labs, and that skyscraper finale, Max knows he's damned, and the only way out is to shoot every last motherfucker in the room. Why? Because when it comes to it, it's one death that counts. And to get to her, he has to kill anything in his way. Earlier, I felt a more sedate, less violent path would have been effective - but that would be the path of an adventure, and Max is clearly a shooter at its heart. Still, once you hit the Russians in the docks in Chapter II, everything takes off. The run through the burning building, whilst essentially a maze, is a fantastic piece of tension lifted from cinema - around every corner, there's a new surprise. It's surprisingly good towards the end, but I played the first half with my heart in my hands. And the fact that an artform/whatever refers to itself is a sign of its maturity, not being "clever" and "meta".
Back to the point: people want to extend the importance of plot because we're so used to it everywhere else. Our novels, our movies, in general, the intelligent public like a plot that motivates them, throws up unexpected twists, and generally carries them along. Games are beginning to ape cinema, because cinema is popular and works. When you do that, you lift cinematic plot devices.
Planescape:Torment doesn't ape cinema, it apes literature. The mainly text-based dialogue is superbly written, and characters are well-rounded. And on the way you have to question the nature of mortality, your own immortality, and the nature of memories. That's the reason to play: it is interesting, it is compelling. Many people will not, because they'll say "if I want that, I'll read a book". And they have a point: we already have delivery systems for this kind of information, why do we need to interact with it? Many, many people play games for _fun_. Many people don't have time for acres of plot, they want a short, exciting, replayable game, and hence the vast popularity of sports games and the like.
Games are progressing, though: developers want to attract the "general public/popular gamers" to play games that deliver what cinema and novels do. They want to make games more like life. See Deus Ex: it looks like a first person shooter, but it plays like an RPG... but the overall experience is more than that. There's this vast plot, full of conspiracy theories, you're at the bottom of it, there's information overload, and cultural reference. That's all sneaked in behind the first-person RPG cover... but in fact it's the crux of it. As we give people more interaction with the game, we have to satisfy them on more fronts - and so we have to make the _reasons_ for playing more advanced and more complex.
By contrast: I've just begun Resident Evil 2 for a laugh. And it's great, but it's great in the way any good explotiation movie, such as Assault on Precinct 13 is: plot is hokey, acting is dreadful, but _what tension_. This is the easiest emotion for videogames to generate: going for the balls. Scaring you witless. That's the whole premise of the game, and it works fantastically. The plot is very hokey, just like any good horror movie, but the scares are genuine.
I've rambled a lot, the post isn't very structured, and this little window is hard to formulate thought in. To finish: when the guy from Gamespot says "When I'm playing a computer game, what I'm really doing is pretending that there is no anatomy skills exam on Monday and that it is just as important to infiltrate the gnoll stronghold as it is to know whether or not neuroligin-1 induces synaptic differentiation. In fact, I'm not even thinking about that complicated stuff because games exist to make me forget that it even exists. I don't need some literary device to distract me from the fact that I haven't studied neuroanatomy in two weeks. Clicking on the blood hawk things every two seconds will do just fine.", he's not someone who wishes to further _what_ games do, he's someone who enjoys them _because they are fun and a diversion_, like all games, not because he wishes to be stimulated and challenged. And that's fine.
You've just got to remember that people are always trying new things. And you should encourage this, not condemn it because it's not to your taste.
I feel a zine article coming on. |
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