I do not agree with you.
To be completely honest, I am not an active video game player. The last time I played a video game was with my younger brother was almost two years ago and we played James Bond GoldenEye 007 Reloaded for the PlayStation 3. Before that, I hadn't played video games since I was in elementary school and playing with my older brothers. Given that information, I may not be the best person to give my opinion on games and what makes them “good”. However, I am still a citizen of the United States and that being said gives me the right to
free speech and the opportunity to share my opinion about video games with stories. So, with that small introduction to my history with video games, lets jump in to my rejection to Ian Bogost’s statement that Video Games are Better Without Stories!
Ian Bogost wrote an article about how video games are better without stories for the Atlantic. Off the bat, I do not agree with him and his claim that stories within video games are misguided. He talks about a one act play that worked as a interactive story that was easy to undermine, but I do not think that that is the point of video games. I believe that games can be used to do as they were created for, to be played. Bogost goes on to say that the whole time he was playing What Remains of Edith Finch, he found himself wondering why he was unable to experience Edith Finch as a traditional time based narrative. To answer that is simply because that was not how the game was developed and designed.
Bogost also states that the game industry has “long dreamed of overtaking Hollywood”. I do not see how this can be the case because games and films and books are all at different levels of media and cater to different groups of people. I do not think that there will ever be a single ‘thing’ that takes the stage in Hollywood. I think that the stage will forever be shared between the different mediums.
I definitely was not the only one who did not agree with Bogost and his blunt article. Patrick Klepek of waypoint wrote an article titled “Video Games Don’t Have a Choice But to Tell Stories” where he takes Bogost point by point and provides a close reading of the article against story lines. Austin Walker is another writer for waypoint and he also wrote something that challenged Bogost and his article. These two bloggers are not the only ones that disagreed with what Bogost had to say, all throughout Twitter, gaming forums, chat rooms, online posts, and blogs all had response to the thought that video games should not have stories. I want to end with a quote from Walker about stories within video games.
“We’re better off spending time unpacking how and why people love stories (and maybe figuring out how we could do better at telling them) than wasting time trying to dismiss the enterprise altogether.” (Walker)
References
Klepek, P. (2017, April 25). Video Games Don’t Have a Choice But to Tell Stories. Retrieved September 20, 2017, from https://waypoint.vice.com/en_us/article/8qpdmv/video-games-dont-have-a-choice-but-to-tell-stories
Walker, A. (2017, April 26). Stories in Games Aren’t Problems, They’re Solutions. Retrieved September 20, 2017, from https://waypoint.vice.com/en_us/article/ez3mkj/stories-in-games-arent-problems-theyre-solutions
