Episode 11 – Writers

I am what I like to call a huge dork. I just wanted to preface this post with that.

I like to believe that our people, the ones who play video games, are pretty similar to the people who read comic books and enjoy some good science fiction. I fit into all of those categories and I know I’m not the only one.

Joss Whedon, is the creator of two of my favorite television shows of all time, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Firefly. The man wrote the Buffy movie and 51 episodes of the TV show. His dialogue is natural, perfect for the characters, and his storytelling techniques are innovative, giving him a unique directing style that few can match. He is currently writing my favorite ongoing comic Astonishing X-men. Whedon is able to use dialogue and lack of dialogue to tell the story, much like something you would see in a movie. It is this visual story telling that sets his book apart from all others.

If Joss Whedon can make the move from television to comic books (something seen as a niche market like videogames) why don’t more people do so? And why stop at comic books? I would love to see more film directors, directing videogames and more screenwriters, writing videogames.

It is true that video games don’t appeal to the masses as much as television and movies. And there is a greater chance that more people will see your story if its on TV than if its only available on the Xbox. But as artists, and storytellers there is so much more you can do when the action isn’t so linear.

The first Legend of Zelda title allowed you to go into any dungeon out of order. I preferred to do number 3 first. Why? Well why not? I didn’t lose any part of the story by doing 3, 1, 2, 5 etc. I sill had to save the princess and defeat the monsters. I still knew that I had to destroy the evil Gannon and collect the TriForce.

Most games are more linear than that anyway. You can’t really play through Splinter Cell out of order. That game keeps me on the edge of my seat more than most movies do… creping through the darkness hoping there isn’t a guard at the end of each hallway. When making a movie the idea is to get the audience to identify with the characters. What better way to identify with the characters than to become them? The writer is still writing. He is creating the world, creating the characters and their back story, and setting everything up to be discovered to culminate in something special at the end. Usually it’s a fight of some sort, maybe it’s a truly epic chase scene.

In a movie we know how it’s going to end. We know the good guys are going to win. That’s how it is in America. The good guys always win. There might be sacrifice or heartbreak, but the good guys will prevail. In a video game, you might not make it. You could die, 10 or 15 times before you actually finish. It makes the finally even more satisfying.

I’ve brought up the idea of making video games more main stream, or giving them more notoriety to the general public, but I generally don’t care what the general public thinks of things of this nature. However, if video games had the credit they deserved I’m sure there would be better writers and an increase in standard among video games, instead of dumbing some of them down for the lowest common denominator. I would love to see what Martian Scorsese would do with a video game (I don’t mean some port of GoodFellas or Casino). Or what Hitchcock could have done with this interactive media. I bet it would have been awesome especially with motion control entering the fray.

I don’t want to say that the people making video games are bad at what they do. No. Some of them are very good, some of them are very bad. Just like movies. And I certainly don’t want to say there is no point in having movies… just wanted to throw it out there.