I just started my first semester of my senior year in college and let me say, I have had an awesome experience thus far. Personally, I think college is something everyone should experience because of all the new people there are and the atmosphere of being on a large campus, it's great. I have always been one of those "close to home" type of people and my family is really close knit, so I've never been away from them for an extended period of time. Going away to school, though, has changed me in that and I am so much more open and not as timid as I used to be. Anyway, enough about me, onto the blog topic!
Just this last spring semester I was taking a class on interactive entertainment, essentially, a class about video games. It somewhat covered the history of games, the first video games made, all the way to the present. The class got really dense with information at one point when covering philosophies of "play" and got really interesting when topics of video games being used to educate and games as art were covered. One of the sections within the class, however, had a profound impact on me and that was: could video games tell stories? I never realized that this was even a question because I thought it was obvious that virtually any game had some kind of story. One exception would be sports games, where they do have some storytelling elements that I will get into in the future, but the games themselves lack narrative structure. Anyhow, there are critics who think that video games do not tell stories, Roger Ebert, a notable critic and a famous opponent of video games not being art, is one of them.
My goal over the course of this blog is to hopefully shed some light on this subject of video games being able to tell stories. I will provide evidence and examples from actual video games themselves, especially ones that best-fit the narrative structure such as, Mass Effect and Grand Theft Auto. On a personal note, I felt I should blog on this topic because my goal in life is to work at a post-production film studio doing visual effects work. I understand the hardship and the amount of time that goes in to making one polished shot and in essence, a whole film. For me to see one of the most intensive and collaborative efforts, creating video games, be scrutinized and considered inferior to cinema and literature when some of the best games could potentially be on the same level, is disheartening. Sometimes I feel that these works should have better merits than just a game, but I am worried that because it is the nature of video games “to play” this may never happen. I hope you, the reader, enjoy this blog and get something out of it, even if you think that I may be completely “full of it” or you see the credibility in my thoughts.
Enjoy!
Just this last spring semester I was taking a class on interactive entertainment, essentially, a class about video games. It somewhat covered the history of games, the first video games made, all the way to the present. The class got really dense with information at one point when covering philosophies of "play" and got really interesting when topics of video games being used to educate and games as art were covered. One of the sections within the class, however, had a profound impact on me and that was: could video games tell stories? I never realized that this was even a question because I thought it was obvious that virtually any game had some kind of story. One exception would be sports games, where they do have some storytelling elements that I will get into in the future, but the games themselves lack narrative structure. Anyhow, there are critics who think that video games do not tell stories, Roger Ebert, a notable critic and a famous opponent of video games not being art, is one of them.
My goal over the course of this blog is to hopefully shed some light on this subject of video games being able to tell stories. I will provide evidence and examples from actual video games themselves, especially ones that best-fit the narrative structure such as, Mass Effect and Grand Theft Auto. On a personal note, I felt I should blog on this topic because my goal in life is to work at a post-production film studio doing visual effects work. I understand the hardship and the amount of time that goes in to making one polished shot and in essence, a whole film. For me to see one of the most intensive and collaborative efforts, creating video games, be scrutinized and considered inferior to cinema and literature when some of the best games could potentially be on the same level, is disheartening. Sometimes I feel that these works should have better merits than just a game, but I am worried that because it is the nature of video games “to play” this may never happen. I hope you, the reader, enjoy this blog and get something out of it, even if you think that I may be completely “full of it” or you see the credibility in my thoughts.
Enjoy!
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