Decius wrote:
] Jeremy wrote:
] ] I'll try the straightforward approach: forget "Elf" and go
] see
] ] "21 Grams." yeah, this movie sounds really really good... ] This is really where video games can fit right in if they had
] the guts. I don't have the attention span to play something
] that takes a month, and I don't like silly puzzles... We're
] still in the "book" stage of video game media maturity, where
] attention spans are long and its all about the artistry. The
] graphics.... We obviously want two hours of escapism, and we
] want to do it with friends... Can't you tell a compeling story
] that we can work together to move through that completes in an
] couple hours? I think someone can... Its all about what the
] experience makes the audience feel... i've certainly been on the record as anxious, at least, of too much distillation and concentration of experience, especially the experience of art. That being said, i certainly believe that entertainment, and even artistic expression, can come in many sizes. There was a VW commercial some years ago called Big Day (may have mentioned it here before) which proves that you can fit a great deal into a 30 second story with hardly a spoken word.
video games can get there -- Neverwinter Nights, the most accurate DnD style game ever made, has multiplayer modes which operate in much the same way as the pen-and-paper game does. The DM creates a world and a story and then leads their party through it piece by piece. These pieces can be small or large depending on the wishes of the group, and i've done some that took only an hour or so to play through, in the virtual company of two or three friends. These can be one shot stories or chapters in a larger epic... This may not be your specific cup of tea, but it's proof of concept at least.
Also, things like XBOX Live will tend to lower the barriers to cooperative play, and games will evolve to take an amount of time which is most favored. So far, a lot of multiplayer games are short, or repetitive (quake, wolfenstein, SOCOM) and get boring fast. I think this is a holdover from days when memory space for textures and map detail was much more limited -- technology will overcome this eventually. Some games seem to be evolving towards more complex "levels" or "missions" which take an hour or something. If this trend continues, and things like random weather, random enemy/entity/object placement, adaptive AI, partial persistence (i.e. permenant effects on the virtual world construct), etc. get put into the games, i think we'll see games that are broadly competitive with movies for immersion and emotive strength. RE: How to Spread the Word When the Word Is 'Grim' |
