Just as in the beginning and as evermore shall be, those who foresee problems will see them a damned long time before anything is done about it. I’ve been slowly getting my feet wet with new media software, both in studying what’s been done and trying to learn it myself. But all along I’ve taken it as a multilayered phenomenon, and it most certainly is that; one of audio, visual, and interactive wordplay through story.
Progression: Following Myself has just posted on the certain lack of writing quality seen so often in these games:
Hotel Dusk is a brand new game by Nintendo which they are describing furiously in their marketing as an “interactive mystery novel”. There’s a whole fuss being made about the fact that you “hold the DS like a book!” whilst playing, and blah blah blah. Here’s my problem with this – and this translates to the games industry, generally, as a whole – it’s not brilliantly written, and the story is less than engrossing. Very few companies – Bioware being the only notable example I can think of – employ writers to work on their stuff, and if they do it’s a huge Gaming press big deal. Why the hell is this not the standard?
Even television understood the need for quality writing; consumers can only be awed for so long by the medium in itself, and constant action is not everyone’s cup of tea. Why then, when this subject has been rolled around for a number of years already, is there still no real push to improve and focus on one problem that has been pointed out by consumers?
There are a number of companies working on authoring improvements for games and such, but the overall method appears to be focused on making the process easier, not necessarily better. Storytron, for example, seems to allow a huge variety of character interaction, but its goal is more to allow better reader/user interaction than to supply a vivid and skilled guide by the writer.
Barthes predicted it and hailed it as progress: Death to the author!
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology