Are "gamers" too stupid to understand a story unless it's shoved down their throat and literaly told to them?
I just read an interview of Tobe Hooper (director of famous movies such as the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre) in a magazine. He was bashing modern american movies for often having a part in the movie where they HAVE to explain everything that's going on with words, to explain it to the audiance. He claims that it's better express things with the visual and sound, and let the audiance understand it that way.
Then he says "unless that audiance plays video games all day, they should be able to understand".
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NESfag2010-12-24 11:48
It didn't even take me one second to understand what he meant by that. After talking with many, many, many people on forums (and /v/) about my fav video games (FF8 and SH series), I've come to realize that probably the vast majority of people who have played and finished those games (sometimes several times), have no idea what is going on except for the basic stuff. Oh, and if you start to explain it to them they'll often reject it and say "nah this is just stupid fan theories". That reason is because games like the SH series have a different kind of storytelling, they do not tell everything through words, but rather through visuals, sounds, but also gameplay elements.
So /games/, are gamers really stupid in general and unable to understand a story? is it a generation thing, are people nowadays getting more stupid ? is it really generalizing too much ? is storytelling in video games doomed to having no depth ?
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Anonymous2010-12-24 13:58
>>1-2
Fucking psuedo intellectals can fuck off. I want my stories without liberal bullshit. Palin 2012.
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Anonymous2010-12-25 19:16
I believe it's not an issue with "gamers" per say, but rather that the videogame industry itself is still at a very young stage. Remember when films were first introduced at a mainstream scale in the early 20'th century? You would have these very rudimentary storylines and presentations on an extremely basic scale. Same goes for the animation industry once it began to pick up steam.
I say give it some time. Games are far from the maturity that the other mentioned mediums are at this point. Granted, there will always be a popular generic FPS/action flick/slice of life anime for each medium, but you have to realize that the general public (most gamers) are really just looking for a quick fix. That will always be, but that doesn't mean that there can't be a unique artistic work every now and again that requires some constructive thinking. It's ignorant to assume that these forms of entertainment should stick to one singular format.
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Anonymous2010-12-25 22:34
>>3
the fuck does storytelling in videogames have to do with liberalism. Stop being such a dumbfuck troll.
Anyway, that guy is a cunt. Videogames often have stories that last 5-50 times longer than a movie's story. Because they're interactive, oftentimes the game does a much better job of immersing you in a story than a movie ever can. Fuck that guy.
How the fuck is Toby Hooper? He made one torture porn movie that got a cult following, and hasn't made anything worth even reading about ever since. Fuck you, Toby. Don't take your incompetence and lack of succes out on an entire medium just because kids today prefer playing games instead of watching your Direct-to-VHS movies like in the 80's.
He's completely right, compare FFVII's popularity to FFVIII and FFIX. In the latter two, story elements weren't completely explained in dialogue but were hinted throughout the story and then finally revealed and FF fans were too stupid to realise this and complained and Square didn't bother with foreshadowing again.
I mean even fanboy favorite FFVI explains every little detail, it has as much depth as a puddle.
This is an issue with gamers, it's the low intelligence of the players now. With the advent of 3D graphics there is nothing left to imagine, the story can be fully fleshed out now and is usually force fed. The average gamer is steadily becoming dumber, and the average game is becoming easier. Gaming is dying the more it advances, the only way to save it now is to take a dive in graphics which will remove the shitty kids from games.