Idris Elba: Actors in video games like Phantom Liberty is 'sign of the times'
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bbc.com
Idris Elba, who stars in Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty, sees a future where films and games converge.
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Games aren't supposed to be films. Set up a setting where your game is taking place and a reason for you to do what you're doing and then shut the fuck up. Original Doom. Old Mario games. So many classic, real games only care about the gameplay and not all this damn story that is a diversion these days from the actual gameplay. No wonder modern gaming is trash.
You want a game that's a movie? Just make a damn movie. Problem solved. Get overblown, intrusive story trash out of videogames. Do you want to stop playing chess after every other move and be forced to watch part of some medieval war drama unfold before continuing? No? Then why the fuck do you want story in videogames?
This is such a weirdo position to take it really is. "Real games" bullshit. Gatekeeping crap has no place here.
I swear, people use "gatekeeping" as a weasel word to mean "THIS KIND OF RATIONAL THOUGHT GOES AGAINST MY PROGRAMMED VIEW OF THE WORLD BOOOHOOO!" You don't "gatekeep" videogames by saying gaming is about actual gaming and not some horrible amalgamation of a poorly done game and some failed writer's self-insert fantasy power trip forced on people every five steps you make in a "game".
Take a deep breath and re-think your position. Games aren't meant to have overblown, intrusive stories. They suffer from them.
legitimately funny, thank you
I mean, games can be more than one thing. It's not like putting actors in AAA games is gonna delete Factorio or something.
It has negatively affected games for years by creating a world where "games" are style over substance trash that care more about gimmicks and story and other trash than the game itself. There is a very tiny pool of actual gaming left, but when you compare that to games back when games were, you know, actually games, when nearly every single game that came out was an actual game and not 5000 hours of boring, who the fuck cares story, gaming was better. That's right, it was. And maybe, just maybe, if you go back in your gaming history and play actual games with actual effort made into making the game part fun and next to zero effort put on stupid, worthless, pointless, waste of time story, you'd understand this.
Yes, that sounds amazing actually
Didn't we get little scenes like that in the old Lego Chess game on PC or am I not remembering correctly?
We absolutely did and it was amazing
In all fairness it makes more sense for a film, same kind of setup as the animation films we've been having of late about what's going on inside people's minds and such.
…role playing games - y’know, the ones where you play a character and a story happens around them - are older than video games and, in fact, are some of the oldest video games. Saying story doesn’t belong in games is a disservice to the medium of games, both video and tabletop.
A "story" can happen around a character as long as it's contained within the context of the game itself (show, don't tell). But when you bring the game to a screeching halt and have a bunch of flapping mouths spouting exposition for hours on end, THAT DOES NOT BELONG IN A VIDEOGAME.
Don't yuck my yum
Video games are a combination of all other traditional artistic mediums. As such, they can express their different mediums in different amounts and are the most flexible in their execution.
You like the kind that are heavier on the gameplay side, individual personalities or even mood will dictate what game you might enjoy most at any given time. You may one day find a more story driven game that connects with you on a personal level more than Mario could, unless you're counting nostalgia.
Why couldn't they just make that story driven game into a book, or movie, or TV show? THREE TYPES OF MEDIA exists for story and people want to push that into videogames. How does that make any fucking sense?
I play games to PLAY A GAME, not have something "connect with [me] on a personal level". Maybe you should re-think why you play videogames in the first place.
As a video game you control it, you can explore the world, you can increase or decrease the pace, you can blow through for a surface level casual experience, or you could find collectibles or logs that may expand on world lore, the type of stuff that is either wholesale more thoroughly expected from a book, or cut from a movie for pacing, these things can now be in a player's control on a case by case and player by player basis.
Parts of a story can be affected by choice, even when heavily scripted. Spoilers for The Last of Us, but near the end Joel is required by by the story to get Ellie back from the Fireflies, and you can justify his motivations for what he has to do to yourself or not, but at the peak moment where he actually finds her, after killing endless soldiers that fired upon him, he encounters surgeons who were about to work on Ellie. The player can decide for themselves whether they kill the surgeons or let them live, and not in a dialogue option way, but just based on whether you actually shoot them or not, and that choice can say things about both the player or possibly the player's mental image of Joel.
That's a relatively small example, but only video games can provide these sorts of small divergences in experience affected by player choice, and of course that experience is altered in the tv show version of that game, because its not possible to deliver it in the same way.
You play games to experience a mechanical challenge or expression of your intent and skill, but that doesn't mean other people don't go to games to experience story, whether that's a mostly pre-written experience like The Last of Us, or a story told by the player's statiscal build and gameplay choices, like Mount & Blade.
Even something you'd expect to be heavily pre-written, like a visual novel, can break the normal flow of time and events to allow or even require you to revisit previous sections and allow new choices that change the path and ending of the game, like 999.
What you consider the ideal video game just isn't what everybody does, and that's awesome because video games are such a massive and malleable medium that they can accommodate for all of that. You can enjoy Doom and Super Meat Boy, and other people can enjoy Phoenix Wright and Dear Esther. There's no art police that said three types of mediums are enough or ideal to express everything, the market and humanity decide that, and we decided collectively that video games can do story in new and interesting ways, too.
I find that I can connect with characters more in a video game than a movie. It's interaction on a different level.
I agree that some games want you to overlook poor game play for their story, but many people enjoy games with stories so I don't see that going away any time soon.