How Metal Gear Solid manipulated its players, warning us of an age of Fake News

[Johnny on Flame]

You can build narratives into music, such as what Erudite music tried to do so many times with much success, and you can use music as a medium for delivering narrative such as conceptual albums, and scoring a movie can completely alter the meaning of scenes, the same way that including strong narratives and story beats delivered as cutscenes can evelevate a game beyond what is transmitted through exploration, symbolism and "mechanical gameplay". I don't see why is that so important. If anything, it only shows how much potential there is in video games, since you can interweave all these different mediums and still get a cohesive experience.

[Clovis]

But we're actually doing something about Climate Change, whereas we keep willingly making privacy rights less. Climate Change is getting worse, yes, but we have consciously passed legislation that has made a real difference to the percentage of our energy budget spent on non-renewables, whereas policy-making in the context of privacy has only made things worse, and we can't even blame physics for it.

[Geikkamir]

No, you will get a solid 0%, because The Sorrow is completely meaningless without the player. The thing that makes The Sorrow powerful is that YOU chose to kill those people, not that Snake did. It doesn't work if you are just a passive observer.

Yeah, you can say all of that about Doomguy. Well, not exactly. Doomguy actually does have mannerisms. But for the most part, yeah, he doesn't have much of a character in the original game.

You're practically making my point for me. If the ability to make someone identify with literally fucking nothing isn't a great feat of storytelling, I don't know what is. To be clear, I'm not talking about whether or not either of those games are great stories. That's irrelevant. Half-Life was just a convenient example. What I'm pointing out is the extremely powerful and utterly unique storytelling ability that the medium itself has inherently. It can make you care about and empathize with a character in a way that you never would be able to as an observer, even if that character has absolutely no identity whatsoever, and even if, as you pointed out with DOOM, there is barely even a story surrounding the character.

There is no way to translate that to any non-interactive medium. Period.

To give a better example of this actually being utilized, look at Papers Please. It's a game where, again, the protagonist has very little in the way of character. His personality is dictated almost entirely by the player.

I personally would consider Papers Please to be one of the most impressive examples of games being utilized as a narrative medium bar none. The thing that makes Papers Please so impressive to me (and why I would say that it can't be meaningfully retold in any other medium) is just how much of the story is told through the player. To elaborate, the absolute most significant thing about Papers Please's narrative isn't the plot or the dialogue or the other characters, it's how the game conditions the player to act, and the way it makes you understand the protagonist and their perspective without ever having to show or tell you virtually anything about them.

The game never has to have a little shot where the protagonist is struggling to shuffle through all of the paperwork in front of him to tell you that he is frustrated that the desk that he's been issued is way too small for the ever-increasing mountain of documents and busywork that he's expected to sift through for every single one of these chucklefucks coming through the checkpoint, because as the player you already know, because you've been having to cram all of this fucking bullshit onto the tiny desk-space you've been provided with for the entire game.

The game never has to have a paragraph of text telling you what a dingy shithole his state-issued apartment is and how much empty space there is in his fridge to tell you that he's struggling to make ends meet because as the player you've already been grappling like hell to make enough money to pay all of your bills.

The game never has to give you a single internalized thought or sign of body language to tell you that the protagonist is struggling with the morality of whether or not to take a bribe from a dirtbag who absolutely has criminal intentions if he's being offered triple the pay he would get for playing by the rules just to look the other way, because you already know how fucking stressful and uncertain it is trying to keep your family from being cold, sick, and starving when you have to rush to process enough people to make enough money to keep the heat on with the fucking peanuts they're paying you, but you can't go TOO fast or else you'll miss an error and they'll dock your pay and oh god every second I'm spending deliberating over this is another second I'm not spending hastily rushing through another person.

You just understand all of these things about what the protagonist is going through and how you differently you might actually behave if you were put in his shoes without the game ever having to explicitly show or tell you any of it. The game's mechanics just naturally push you to think and behave a certain way.

You can't do that with a film or a book. In a non-interactive medium, you can never be anything other than an observer, so everything about the story has to be conveyed by show and tell, it can't ever be told by do.

I don't know any more effective way of conveying a story than to actually condition the audience into another person's mindset, rather than to just show it to them from the outside.

[Johnny on Flame]

If anything, this happens more because SH2 takes everything the first game succeeded and added even more on top of what is already a masterclass example of survival horror, both games are regarded as master examples of the trade, if a little bit outdated due to tank controls and whatever (which I'd agree works to the game favor, since it affords the game usage of many clever camera angles and what not).
I don't see anyone criticizing movies for that same reason, I don't see why is this a fair comparison at all, they're basically just 24 still frames per second with audio on top conveying music and/or spoken words and yet I don't see people talking down on the 7th art just because "picture books can tell the same story".

This is a very narrowing vision of it, great storytelling might aswell show you relatable stories from an outside perspective, as to force you to reflect on your situation as if it was someone elses, and these were the most impactful I've had, and many other kinds of tales.

Also if "Great stories describe how the hero's character is being tested by some challenge, in the world.", why is Doom I and II, Hexen, Heretic, and other games of the lot not great storytelling? You're basically being engrossed in Doomguy's battle versus hell itself, that's a mighty challenge of his resolve.
If you were unable to actually stop the deaths from happening, like you can when playing, the scene wouldn't have half the meaning, and while the game has a heavy plot with a fuckton of codec calls, the gameplay itself is still storytelling, you're the one pushing snake forward and crafting & executing cunning plans to overcome challenges, which your own definition says it's "great storytelling".

[Vuu]

Full AI is a long time away

Augmented people with insane processing power running the government? I'd say inevitable very soon

[junker|154]

I absolutely agree with this sentiment. I remember playing MGS2 a long time ago and it was like a fever dream. In hindsight I can see glimpses of some geniune twists but a lot of the storytelling and exposition is done in such a contrived and boring way. Sometimes I'm absoutely lost in the exposition and absolutely insane crap that the games come up with. It's certainly unique.