Storytelling in video games (previously: Video games, media, storytelling, and Planescape: Torment)

Edit: this started at as a note to myself to write some meta about storytelling in general and Planescape: Torment in particular. It turned into an actual meta post. Crap. Old ramble part above the divider, new actual meta below.

( Preliminaries in which I natter about media, video games as art, and Planescape: Torment )

Anyway. Like I said, this is more a note-to-self than anything else, but for now I want to do an entirely unscientific and (since I'm a cheapskate free user) non-shiny poll:

Have you played either of the following games? Tell me anything that comes to mind about them.

• Planescape: Torment
• Psychonauts

---

Then I realize that I will never be done talking and basically that I want to natter on about storytelling in games for real for a little bit.

Much of this sudden deluge of BLAH BLAH BLAH came about from this innocuous-looking post ostensibly concerned with Squall's fabulous buttocks. While I dutifully put in my five billion comments two cents about Squall there, there was actually a tangential discussion of storytelling and videogames. It started out discussing romance and bildungsromane but then I went on thinking about storytelling in games more generally and now I won't shut up.

Incidentally, I made a tremendously long comment incoherently lauding Planescape: Torment in that thread. Just in case I'm still not pimping the game hard enough.

Now.

Storytelling and Video Games: The Short Version, har har

After much research and many sessions of deep thought (lawl) on storytelling in video games in particular I've come to some interesting... not conclusions. More like observations.

Let's look at some quick case studies. My subjects are: Planescape: Torment (henceforth P:T or Torment), Final Fantasy VIII, Psychonauts, and Half-Life 2.

Planescape: Torment: Textual Storytelling
( Read more... )

Final Fantasy VIII: Visual Storytelling
( Read more... )

Psychonauts and Half-Life 2: Exploratory Storytelling
( Read more... )

In Sum...

So hopefully I've outlined some of the kinds of storytelling I've found in games, and hopefully I have picked interesting kinds -- we all know about the usual kind with cutscenes and lots of static text.

What interests me here, what I was worried about when I considered the topic, was how interactivity works with or against storytelling. I've been worrying at the problem, wondering how authorial fiat can possibly combine with the necessary interactivity (I mean, what else is a video game?) to make for something that is both good storytelling and good gameplay. Maybe the examples I've picked aren't necessarily either, but I DO think they uncover a range of possibilities for answering this question, some left-handed approaches, something besides the click-through movie approach.

Not that there's anything inherently wrong or bad about "click-through movies" (a criticism I've heard tossed out against Squaresoft/Square-Enix games a lot). This doesn't necessarily make them bad or badly told stories, though it possibly makes them less original and probably not very good as games.

So, like I said. Not many conclusions. Just some observations.

EDITS: I've gone through and made some minor corrections and adjustments. The only ones really wroth noting are a little elaboration in the Torment section, after I sum my three points about it; and I accidentally said "Squall" instead of "Zell" -- you're supposed to watch Quistis and Zell for body language, not Quistis and Squall.