Jonathan Blow, One man creator of the oh-so-pretty Braid platformer, as amazing for its interesting gameplay as its surreal visuals, says, essentially, that videogame stories are bad and probably wouldn’t get much better with better writers since trying to tell a story in a game is a bad idea. One might wonder whether he’s paraphrasing film director John Huston, who famously remarked, when asked about the “message” in one of his movies, that if one wanted to send a message, one should use Western Union.

One similarly might imagine that if you were to ask Blow about the story in his games, he’d say that if you want to tell a story, you should make a film. Or, perhaps, write a book. Seeing at what some triple-A titles have become– long cutscenes with repetitive gameplay inserted instertitially– one can’t help but admit to at least some truth in the idea that there’s something suboptimal about the way narration and gameplay are currently being combined. The flaws of the method get a pass when the separate elements are well executed in otherwise popular products. When either or both is weak, the combination itself makes the whole enterprise seem foul. In some games, one so dominates over the other that it is a wonder that anyone bothers; I tried the demos of a couple of JRPGs over the holiday break, the first ones I’ve ever played, and was amazed to find that the first hour or so of each of them consisted of scripted, in-engine cutscenes with no choices and player interaction limited to pressing the green button to advance to the next scene. Where’s the game, I wondered.

Blow’s answer falls clearly on the side of ludology: stories in games are for windowdressing, and the play’s the thing. However I can’t help feeling that this is not a bold statement about what can or cannot, or what should or should not be done in games, but rather just beating a retreat back into the nature of gaming before current audio visual technology made it possible to blend filmmaking and game design to the degree that is now possible. Compared to what may eventually be possible, I find it hard to imagine that even expensive and complicated games like Halo 3 are little more than a few static frames strung together to create the illusion of the movement of a galloping horse or a flickering candle flame. It’s sixteen-year-old gameplay grafted onto 70-year-old filmmaking. That the combination should seem, despite its gloss, something more primitive than either of its component parts should be neither surprising nor disheartening.

Most of the ludologists focus on challenge, which they say is essentially diametrically opposed to the experience you get from storytelling. For the storytelling to work, the story must be finished. If finishing the story requires completing the challenge, then either the challenge must be so easy that everyone can complete it, or else not everyone will finish the story. Blow suggests keep the challenge, since that is what games are about, and cut the story down to the bare minimum: to a setting.

Games like that are fine, and I would certainly not say that a game that does this, as Braid does, is bad, or that it is somehow a ‘primitive’ type of game that needs to evolve into something else.

However, the feeling of accomplishment after completing a puzzle or challenge is, to me, only one of the multifarious emotions one can have after a multimedia experience. Certainly books, films, and games have different inputs, different outputs, and different results. I consistently am amazed when people describe activities like book-reading and moviegoing as completely passive, compared to games. It’s laughable. Only the most simplistic forms of these media are as base as the storytelling in most games. The best require interpretation, and these interpretations are, at best, nearly much a part of your experience of viewing them as the vision the artists had when they made it. That interpretation is colored by things you’ve viewed before, thoughts you’ve had before, your personal life experience. What is pressing a few colored bits of plastic to that, in terms of input?

I’m being a bit facetious here, but I do think it’s unfair that these activities are termed entirely passive compared to games, which are seen as active and “interactive”, even though the best of them don’t aspire to nonlinearity. I posit there is no interactivity in a game with a story, where the story matters, if the game itself is not nonlinear. If you can’t affect it, you don’t have input. It’s a trick. You only think you do.

For lots of games, that’s enough. For the cleverest, they make your lack of choice in the fictional world itself the subject of the game’s story (kudos, Bioshock). I think you can only pull that trick so many times, though, and I think these kinds of tricks are temporary fixes. I think there’s more potential in trying to figure out how to make an engaging story out of the guided interactions of customer-players and employee-players of MMORPGS then there is in trying to graft the choose-your-own-adventure model of nonlinear story-play into FPS games. Maybe that’s only me, though.

Blow seems to be saying that if you can’t firmly grasp the brass ring, you shouldn’t try. I don’t agree, and I hope there are still game developers out there who don’t hold that viewpoint.

Last time, in response to Braid designer Jonathan Blow‘s statement that games shouldn’t really try to tell stories, I pleaded for designers who felt that games could do more than just be puzzles with a backdrop, and do more than just emulate films.

Along comes Dan Houser, founder of Rockstar, developer of Grand Theft Auto!

And while he agreed the game is a “sprawling criminal journey,” he said he no longer believes that the ultimate goal of videogames is to emulate movies. “There was a sense that in some ways movies were a higher art form and video games could aspire to be like them,” he said. “I think now, because we and a few other companies are making products, that this isn’t the case. They’re just different and video games are capable of things that movies aren’t.”

Reluctantly, I agree. Now, is anybody else going to try to make games more than what they are, and different from films? Because I hope the only ones that think so aren’t the ones making GTA. Really.

The gaming and tech press are all aflutter with the news that videogames beat DVDs… except they don’t, at least, not in all the areas that matter.

The data that lead to the “games beats movies” conclusion, much like the one-day comparisons of game blockbusters like Halo 3 to the one-day takes of top films like Dark Knight, are revenue, rather than unit sales figures. They’ve taken the 2008 revenue for “packaged media” that includes games and DVD movies (including HD on Blu-Ray) and divided it into “games” and “DVD/Blu-Ray”.

While the total increased, the share of DVD/Blu-Ray declined and the figure for games increased.

The problem is that the average price of a game is significantly higher than the price of an average DVD. This means higher revenues but lower unit sales. Far more people bought Dark Knight on DVD, but they paid less, so in the revenue model they don’t count as many as all the people who bought GTA IV, for instance.

The problem with this measure is that it exaggerates the cultural importance of games and gaming. The gaming press is painting this as gaming moving into the mainstream and becoming more important. Whether that is really happening is debatable; what’s happening is that game budgets are up, game prices are up, and the people that are still paying are proving slower (so far) to reduce their spending compared to DVD purchasers– probably because they buy fewer units at larger intervals. There aren’t enough AAA console releases to buy one every week, but you could easily buy a DVD a week without necessarily dipping into the bargain basement. As such, a DVD purchaser can more easily regulate their spending without sacrificing a significant number of title purchasers. Because DVD prices vary more than game prices, they can spend less without necessarily making significantly fewer purchases, or feeling that they are making a sacrifice.

However, a gamer who has put several hundred dollars into a console, peripherals, and related items, and is looking at 4-5 AAA console titles to purchase in a year might be hard-pressed, even in the face of financial hardship, to eliminate even one of them. They might be more apt to go ahead and get those games, and worry about taking austerity measures later when things are really bad. As such, one might imagine that the impact of the current financial crisis on the gaming portion of the entertainment market may take place within 2009 (and forward) rather than 2008.

UPDATE: Another post on CNet, this one by Don Reisinger, explains why he prefers to spend his entertainment dollar on games, rather than movies. The upshot is, better value for money.

After all, think about it: even assuming that it’s only worth purchasing (rather than renting) movies that you really like and will watch repeatedly, there are limits. There are movies I like to watch once a year, but that’s pretty much the limit. So assuming a reasonable price, like $30, and a long, 3-hour movie, and ten-year time period (Sony says that’s how long console generations should last, so we’ll take that) that means 30 hours of entertainment for $30, or $1 per hour.

Halo 3 cost twice that– but how many people play for 30 hours or less? If you take your time the campaign can easily last 6-8 or even ten, and I tend to play through more than once. Then there’s multiplayer. And co-op. And Forge. And films. I don’t play Halo games nearly as much as other people, if you include multiplayer, and I’m sure I’ve spent a heck of a lot more than 30 hours. Other games, like Oblivion, Mass Effect, Fallout 3, include far more gameplay time than that.

Even if you like both, games are generally better value for money, even at the high price point they’ve reached in this generation.