why video games are an affective story telling device

That’s not the case with video games-or at least not open-world videos games.įor the nongamers, those are games that don’t follow a strict path. There may be flashbacks, sure, but overall, you’re getting a single story from beginning to end. Open worldsīut in all of these cases, stories are still told in a linear fashion. Directors know that, and will sometimes make things purposefully confusing to create a specific feeling-like showing that the main character is lost or that a city is hectic.

But films play at the same speed no matter what, so a scene with a lot of action or dialogue can be confusing, since it may go too quickly to catch everything. If it’s a confusing paragraph, you can go slower. Take film: you read a book at the speed of your own choosing. It’s also easier to jump around in time with flashbacks and flashforwards for the same reason. You can tell more complicated stories, too, because if you forget who a character is you can flip back a few pages and remind yourself. If you have a book, you can tell longer stories, because you don’t have to remember everything. But once things are written down, you can change how you tell your stories, because reading is a different experience than hearing. Before paper and writing utensils-much less printing presses-were widely available, myths and legends were told aloud. At different points in history, during different artistic movements, they’ve tried to use different media to their advantage.įor example, long ago we told stories orally. The medium and the messageĪrtists have long experimented with the storytelling form. We all learn our lessons and feel some kind of way about them, depending on whether the story is happy or funny or sad.īut video games have the ability to do things differently.

You start at the beginning, you have some kind of conflict, and then you come to a resolution. You have a beginning, a middle, and an end.

The basics of storytelling are pretty familiar. Like, a very long time-so long that some people say it’s what makes us human in the first place. Humans have told stories for a long time.

Why video games are an affective story telling device