Once Upon A Time

Will Video Games Ever Have Their 'Moby Dick' or 'Citizen Kane'?

(CBS) 

Acclaimed graphic novelist Warren Ellis is less optimistic, "Great storytelling begins and ends with the storyteller, not the physics engine or the rendering," he says.

"Right now, people who write stories for a living are brought into the video game system as hired guns. They don't get any rights in the work, they rarely get a royalty, they're not there at the work's conception and they're not there at the end in most cases," Ellis says.

Ellis is currently working on a video game script. He says he enjoys the "hired gun" aspect of doctoring concepts and creating a narrative that moves the player through a gaming company's vision. He's positive about the work itself.

"But let's be straight," Ellis says. "You're not going to get anything on the level of 'Kane' in video games until someone somewhere pays an honest-to-God writer to sit in a room and create a story themselves that they are passionate about telling through game play and visual narrative."

Ellis continues, "Committees will give you kinda fun B-movies and mildly entertaining network television. But if you want an actual story that people will remember, then you go to an actual writer first and you stay with that writer throughout the process — and that's not going to happen."

Jamil Moledina, director of the Game Developers Conference, has another take on the issue,

"With videogames, the audience takes the teller's baton and continues to tell the story," he says. "This way, the game player enjoys the storyteller's thrill, adapting the narrative to his or her satisfaction, while also being the audience for the narrative elements that the game developer provides.”

The problem with discussing video games, and the stories therein, is the comparisons to other narrative vehicles like film and literature. We have never had a storytelling medium like video games.

"In a way, games represent as fundamental a shift in storytelling as the hybrid engine represents to the automotive internal combustion engine," Moledina says. "Here, game playing represents the hybrid of both aspects of storytelling, where the audience is empowered to self-propagate the storytelling creation and enjoyment. This stimulates their own creativity and gives them the experience of controlling their destiny."

"Until recently, games have had predictable outcomes, much like choose-your-own-adventure style books. However, games like Will Wright's The Sims and Peter Molyneux's The Movies represent games with outcomes exponentially beyond the limited binary outcomes of early games. This shattering of the predetermined outcome is a radical departure from the prehistoric model of storytelling and the conformist, mass communication social models that align with moral-oriented myths," contends Moledina.

"Instead," he says, "we have the emergence of an individualized, self-reliant, independent thinking storytelling model that has the potential to satisfy and develop the unique intelligence and personality cocktail that separates human beings from herd animals."

There's a huge discussion to be had about the intra-video game world as far as genres go. Can shooters be as emotionally gripping as a role-playing game? In truly open-ended games that never really end, are the developers limited to a certain amount of "story" if the player can completely abandon the precreated set of missions? Are massively multiplayer online games, like World of Warcraft, restricted because once the world is in the hands of the community, the game company has limited power over player interactions?