http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2007/09/25/retrospective-planescape-torment/

Easily my favourite story, out of any video game I’ve played. Rumor has it, Interplay re-released it for its 10th anniversary.

http://eddyfate.com/2010/03/27/moving-from-blob-to-blob/

Hope it helps.

My wife and I play MMOs. Compared to that (fun, but) sometimes repetitive drudgery, anything from Bioware feels like some kind of holy beast, pared down to nothing but animate muscle and steel bones — something that consists of absolutely nothing but narrative and boss fights. Even when repeated four times.

(And I didn’t mean to say that it seemed like you were saying stories and games were two lines that couldn’t meet — it seemed like you set up the criteria for *sophisticated* stories and game-stories as never-the-twain-shall-meet. Didn’t mean to be unclear, and in any case, that was just my impression.)

Heh. Sorry.

And I don’t doubt that the LEGO and language thing was something I unconsciously picked up from you in the past.

Sophistication remains a sticky wicket of a word, but I wanted something that wasn’t “effective” — effective, after all, really indicates good or bad. If something isn’t effective, that’s another way of saying “it doesn’t work.” That’s not what I want to say, I don’t think.

Sophistication, though — all connotations of hoity-and-toity aside — is something that indicates both complexity and abstraction. The older a medium gets, the more sophisticated the work can become (I think — I mean, if you go back to “cave paintings” and jump forward to “Picasso,” I’d argue you see an increase in sophistication). Chess, as a game, you might say is a more sophisticated game than checkers. It’s not just the complexity, but what is born from that complexity.

I don’t necessarily think it’s bound up with genre. Finch, for instance, feels like a very sophisticated tale. I’ve read a number of very sophisticated horror novels, too. But, it goes outside of that — Virginia Woolf, or the poetry of T.S. Eliot, and on and on.

I’ve played sophisticated games, but I don’t know that I’ve played games with sophisticated stories. Maybe I have; possible I’m just not conjuring it yet. Braid comes close, but even there it’s more a play on existing stories and existing games, so the jury’s out. (The jury in my brain, for the record.)

Maybe that’s the fault of the audience, or the companies producing this stuff. That’s an argument for a whole other time, though. (This rings possible; I actually think that games maybe told more sophisticated stories ten or twenty years ago. Maybe.)

It’s maybe just that games and their stories aren’t evolved enough yet, though. In ten years, we’ll see something wholly different. I dunno. But that’s part of what I’m attempting to suss out: what are the new tools and blueprints one might need to tell a sophisticated story through the medium of a game? It’s a different animal is what I’m getting at.

– c.