Week Ten - A Few Buttons Along The Way

Story lines are in every game, from the first to the last, granted the detail and depth of a story varies, but essentially a game tells you a story. If you look back of games like space invaders, or even pong to slightly lesser extent, they had a story line, aliens coming to invade the earth, you must stop them and save the day, and from that story line it gives the game more purpose, I’ve spoke about this in a previous blog so wont go into the details.

But as games are becoming ever so more technically evolved, more detail, realism, weather effects etc, people are wanting more and more intricate story lines (this does depends on the game though, as I’ve said maybe times before I like arcade games and big epic games, arcade don’t require the depth and language as a full blown epic saga). Which leads onto to film design, I’ve said before a game is essentially a film but instead of just watching it, you press a few buttons along the way (or ‘waggle’ as it now is) and set of trigger points to get your further in the story.

Now that’s a bad way to look at games, and what makes a good game a really great game, is when you forget that your playing the game, which for example with realism games comes down a lot to the graphics, if something is out of place or not as it would be here in the real world, then you take a step back and think, oh yeah I’m playing a game, but also the story lines a key part of this. An immersive storyline will make you forget about the real world, encapsulate your mind as you tread carefully through and dark ominous courtyard, just like any good book or film.

One of the points in the task was “voice acting”, which predominantly in games is awful and give away more than anything that your playing a game, which is more reason why games are getting like films, games companies employ professional [voice] actors, the storyline is written by someone who understands creative writing, all these things are what are needed by games now, and this is slowly bringing back to my previous blog post, it’s costing too much to makes games and apart from the big guns who don’t bother to make a great game, no one can afford it.

Is the games world falling into a horrible spiral and inevitable heading for another big crash, I guess only time will tell, but I hope not and would like to see the little people in the games world pull some miracles out there bags, because lets face it the bigger corporate types aren’t going to.