Are video games better without stories? (Gaming)

by General Battuta, Thursday, April 27, 2017, 13:39 (2776 days ago) @ cheapLEY
edited by General Battuta, Thursday, April 27, 2017, 13:42

Spec Ops: The Line (the player's 'coerced complicity' requires them to be a player, not a reader: the game forces them to make a terrible choice because they are present in a terrible situation, and the situation overrides personal agency: the only Right act is to never enter the situation)

Both this game and Bioshock (the first) never worked for me the way it did for others. I can appreciate what the game is doing, but I just don't like it. The game forces you do terrible things and then goes "Look how awful you were for doing those things" at the end. The white phosphorous scene looses all impact and credibility when the game literally gives you no other alternative. Spec Ops is an example of bad video game story telling in my opinion--it removes players agency to the point that you might as well just be watching a movie of the same story.

Reread what I said about it. You have no agency because you have chosen to enter a devastated wartorn city and involve yourself in the local conflicts (i.e. you have chosen to play a war game). Some situations - like war - cannot be resolved with your moral agency intact. The only purely Right choice is to never enter the situation.

This story can only be told as a video game because only in a video game is the player the one who experiences the crushing absence of moral alternatives, rather than the story's protagonist.