[MUD-Dev] narrative

[Amanda Walker]

On 8/21/02 5:17 AM, Brandon J. Van Every <vanevery at 3DProgrammer.com> wrote:

> Statistically speaking, you're absolutely correct.  The vast
> majority of game designers see themselves as programmers, far more
> than any other hat they might wear.  Very few see themselves
> primarily as fine artists, filmmakers, or writers.

Indeed.  And, I would argue, rightly so.  Game engineers are
implementors--the set carpenters, painters, lighting riggers,
steadicam operators, etc.  A game company is primarily a production
company.

Using the movie analogy (which I think is pretty rough at best),
remember that writing a good screenplay is not the bulk of the
effort in moviemaking, and that what turns an idea into a movie is a
lot of very non-authorial stuff.  Same for theatre, musical
performance, or in fact any other artistic endeavor.  Most of being
a painter is watching paint dry, scraping paint slime off of a
palette, struggling to mix just the right color without it turning
into mud, and so on.  Most of being a potter is dealing with the
mechanics of forming and working with clay, and so on.

Online gaming is, so far, concerned about accumulating
tradecraft--learning about the characteristics of the medium itself,
well before any grand works can be created with it.  I think that
great works can be created, but that a lot more experimentation will
probably come first.  The first few decades of photography imitated
painting, because that was the prevailing model--and, as it
happened, early photographic imitations of painting were pretty poor
artistically.  It wasn't until after photographers had produced a
lot of crap that they started to learn how the camera differed
significantly from the paintbrush, and the camera came into its own
as an artist's tool.

> There's a tremendous apathy to the craft of writing in the game
> industry, because the vast majority of game developers are
> non-writers.

There may be other reasons as well.  There is a tremendous apathy to
the craft of writing in many fields, for the simple reason that
their principal activities are not writing.

> What will ever change that circumstance?  I think it will take a
> game that finally shows what interactive story can be, that makes
> a lot of money, that blows all this amateurish player-driven
> emergent "narrative" stuff out of the water.

Only one problem: no one actually knows "what interactive story can
be".  There are a lot of analogies, predictions, and ideas people
have come up with (storytelling, amusement parks, improv theatre,
etc.), but no one actually knows--we're all making this up as we go
along and stumble over possibilities.  Whatever "game as art" turns
out to be, I feel safe in asserting that it won't be like anyone's
predictions.  It will be significantly different by its very nature.

Games make poor books, or movies, or plays--and vice versa.  I don't
think this is a bug, I think it's a feature.

Amanda Walker


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