{"id":7709,"date":"2010-04-06T08:30:56","date_gmt":"2010-04-06T13:30:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=7709"},"modified":"2010-04-06T08:37:24","modified_gmt":"2010-04-06T13:37:24","slug":"stolen-pixels-183-hello-handsome","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=7709","title":{"rendered":"Stolen Pixels #183: Hello, Handsome"},"content":{"rendered":"

Why do we have to keep liking games in spite of<\/em> their stories? I know the conventional wisdom is that the industry doesn’t tend to financially reward good storytellers, but that’s no reason to hold the story in obvious contempt<\/em>. There’s a difference between, “we’re not going to go out of our way to make an incredible story” and “we won’t even make the slight effort to devise a story which is worth seeing and makes some kind of sense”. The cutscenes in Red Faction: Guerrilla are a waste of time. Unless they were designed to be mocked in comics<\/a>. In which case I guess they’re a middling success. <\/p>\n

I will point out that the final two<\/a> developers in the March Mayhem contest are both companies with strong writing: BioWare and Valve. (And yes, Valve has strong writing. Not a lot<\/strong> of writing. Their games are mostly action. But if characters are talking you can bet they’re saying something worth hearing.) I still maintain the writing is more important than developers think it is, and that Red Faction: Monkeytown<\/em> could have been a much bigger hit with the exact same budget and setting, but with a writer who knew what they were doing. (In fact, you could probably improve the game just by doing a reverse-Mystery Science Theater<\/em> and dub over their ridiculous dialog with something smart and genuine.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Why do we have to keep liking games in spite of their stories? I know the conventional wisdom is that the industry doesn’t tend to financially reward good storytellers, but that’s no reason to hold the story in obvious contempt. There’s a difference between, “we’re not going to go out of our way to make […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[102],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7709","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-weekly-column"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7709","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7709"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7709\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7709"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7709"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7709"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}