At a moment when I was questioning the entire point of blogs, I found David Byrne’s. Unknown civilians that blog require a time-consuming vetting process, and the average celebrity blogger is just a blowhard pimping a children’s book or something. The whole point of reading the journal, musings or essays of another person is to have an interest in that person’s perspective. Byrne is mysterious, eclectic, intellectual and artistically faithful to himself. He’s the man behind Talking Heads and True Stories to name the most obvious entries on his CV. If anyone has an interesting perspective it is David Byrne, and it is refreshing to discover that his musings aren’t too different from my own. Here he talkes about what watching the Transformers movie made him think about:
…re video games, movies and emotional involvement that video games could achieve what this and a few other recent blockbusters do without too much further development…
It has frustrated the hell out of me that so few video game (of the type that I enjoy) put a strong emphasis on story and character development. The average FPS (First Person Shooter) and TPS (Third Person Shooter) make Splinter Cell and it’s lead gun-toter, Sam Fisher, feel like Shakespeare. At the pinnacle of video game storytelling, IMHO, is Metal Gear Solid which makes Splinter Cell look like Tom Clancy….oh, wait. The Japanese producer of MGS (Hideo Kojima of Konami) has a serious passion for American films like Escape from New York, The Gauntlet, Big Trouble in Little China and The Good, the Bad, and The Ugly (which was itself inspired by samurai movies). That passion shines in the details of the story and character development. It ain’t perfect, but I’ve never played anything with a story half as interesting or immersive.
I can’t stand RPGs ’cause there’s so much reading. One great exception is Star Wars: KotOR. It’s not a strict RPG, more like a FPS-RPG hyprid, and it was done very well despite my established interest in most things Star Wars related. But it truly allowed the player to choose his or her own moral path that affected gameplay, the character’s appearance, and (rumor has it) the final outcome. I only played through to the end of the game once so I’m not so sure about that.
With such a low bar in the FPS/TPS field, surely a great writer could swoop in and grab all the marbles, but very few game developers risk resetting that bar a notch up. I suppose if there were a real financial incentive that would change things. Here I could tell my fellow gamers to quit buying stupid games with crappy writing, but Tom Clancy sells because most people are OK with not having taste.
Side Note
I would like to thank Mr. Byrne for refreshing my memory of the McGuffin (aka MacGuffin) literary device.
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