While criminal activities are a frequent occurrence in games such as GTA, it’s unusual to have games which could be thought of as specifically crime fiction. Portal 2 is still one of the highest profile comedy games, and that’s seven years old. To clarify, while games are occasionally funny, it’s very unusual to have a game whose primary intent is comedy - at least, not since the days of early 90s LucasArts. It’s still massively underserved when compared to its domination of ebook charts.Ĭomedy is rarer still, perhaps because introducing player agency is directly at odds with traditional concepts of comedy timing and structure. Romance exists only as a tick-box quest-exercise in AAA game design, although there are now sub-genres of adventure and narrative-heavy games which focus on romance. There are notable, historic genre absences in games:Īll of these are huge genres in movies and literature, yet are exceedingly rare in gaming. Though these assumptions have finally started to break down in the last decade, it’s easy to see how it’s shaped the early history of games.
DEAR ESTHER ANALYSIS FULL
Horror games benefit from a visceral level of immersion and can take full advantage of the latest gaming technology, and again naturally lead in to combat or stealth design.Īll of these genres are also assumed to be more male-focused, which chimes with the long-held assumption that gamers are male. Action thrillers and war games have combat and the immediacy of interaction via weapons. Science fiction and cyberpunk makes it easy to introduce gadgets and unusual interfaces for the player to explore. The quest-heavy structure of traditional fantasy lends itself to player motivation and goals.
It’s no coincidence that all of these genres are naturally action-focused - by which I don’t necessarily mean action sequences but more literally scenes in which you can take actions. These all exist in movies, books and comics, though they’re unusually prominent in gaming. Games are no exception and you’ll frequently find the following genres and sub-genres: There’s a shared thematic language between most mediums of storytelling. But we’re still not entirely sure where video games start and end. In other words, we know what movies and books are. There are many surprising and wonderful stories still to be told by movies, but the form and language of cinema itself has now settled, just as prose fiction did in an earlier time.
It’s an immature medium in the best way possible, like cinema in the 20th century. Games excite me because they’re still figuring out their form, pushing at accepted boundaries and experimenting with the art and technology.
The life experiences and opinions of every reader, viewer, listener or player collide with those of the creator, in the process generating a new shard of the story with each telling. That’s true whether the story exists on the page, as an audiobook, on film, around a campfire or in a game. The moment a story is told, it is immediately interpreted by the audience and becomes something new. There’s no such thing as a one-way story. It’s an easy statement but misses the point that all forms of storytelling are interactive. Video games are interactive, which makes them unique. It’s easy to think that interactivity is the key difference between games and literature. I was asked to give a talk comparing storytelling in games and literature by Access Creative College.
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