Stories are making a strong come back these days. The Walking Dead, Double FIne’s projects, Dreamfall, Kentucky Route Zero, Twine games, Valve and JJ there’s a lot going on.
I think it reinsures the industry. It’s been a good business in the past, stories are as old as humans and if we can dig more games around them, it should stick on the wall, right? In some extent, yes.
But I have a hard time believing it simply because stories demand you to be passive. That’s when they strike the strongest, your entire self is absorbing it, situations characters what’s going on and what is going to happen. Maybe it’s just me but I feel like the best delivery possible is through a passive mode. Interactivity doesn’t bring anything but breaks the flow.
On the game side, games are about decisions, interactions. Stories never really add anything. I’m always a bit sad at all the work I skipped in games because honestly, fuck your stupid story I’m playing Angry Birds there’s no story come on now.
The most complex game stories are all diminished by power fantasy phantasms that I can’t connect to: there’s nothing captivating for people who saw/read a lot of classics, except with games like Dys4ia, personal, talking about an unspoken side of human life. Coen brothers just kill me with their movies, all their stories hooked me up in seconds, all so simple and dumb on the paper. But the delivery, man. The sound design. The depth.
Kentucky Route Zero seems to be the closest to that maturity and honesty, as well as Ron Gilbert’s work so special for growing up in the 90s kids like me. But it just creates some kind of dull games with great stories. Or great stories with tedious delivery. Twine games make me feel it this way too. If your story is great, I don’t care about choosing I want to listen. Write it, direct it with multiple angles if you want to get away from the single lonely, traditional story path. Me inputting? Unnecessary.
So I kind of want to buy KRZ and at the same time, I don’t.