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Notes -
Meta-gaming question I have is: what are some game stories that can only function in the form of a game. Archetypal games that were bound to happen at some point.
Games have art, music, story as components. The unique part is the interactive component with the player. A game like SpecOps:TheLine could function as a book. Spitballing a few famous tropes.
game has no story. pure skill expression.
gameplay making sure the player understands the story.
games that setup difficulty as an exclusive club:
games where the entire main story is a lie that the player can optionally uncover
morality where being evil makes the game easier
EDIT: actually, I'm going to generalize this a bit: "Science Sandbox" is a unique video game genre. Kerbal Space Program is the obvious one, but it also works for the soft sciences, as below.
It would be really difficult to do something like "The Interstate Anarchy model of international relations is true. Discover (or blindly follow) the constraints this places on a country and win, or miss (or defy) those constraints and lose.", as described in the Teaching Paradox series of blog posts.
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Choose your own adventure books exist, but I think that whole genre just fits way better with a game. Multiple ending options based on how you played just makes sense within a game.
Any stories that play off the actions of the player are going to be more powerful in game form. Bioshock is a good example here, but far from the only one in the genre. Dishonored is another one where choosing to be non-violent, or staying completely hidden will change minor details in the following levels.
More power and game changes depending on choices is the thing I'm pointing at. Because choose-your-own-adventure books can't change the experience depending on the choices.
Dishonored is a great example too. The game offers the player all these fun powers to brutally murder enemies, which makes the decision to endure a stealth low-revenge play-though aligns the player-as-human and player-as-morality-in-game decision making. Someone playing blind might not realize that the action-fight at the end is a consequence of their actions in the game.
Dishonored also has a unique video-game feature of choices that take creativity to recognize as a choice at all. Like the mission in Dishonored where Corvo signs up to duel a party-goer, and first to death wins. But the player can use sleep-darts instead of lethal-darts to win the duel without killing the other person.
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You can do this in a book, like Pale Fire - many postmodern authors have tried with varying degrees of success. What makes Dark Souls unique is the minimal information you get and the diegetic storytelling (Silksong take inspiration from the latter and really ramps it up).
I think the question of difficulty and slogging-through as an emotional experience is closer to the core of the question, but that's also in books and films - look at Laszlo Krasznahorkai's Seiobo There Below or Bela Tarr's adaptation of his novel Satantango, or Twin Peaks: The Return for TV. IMO the slam-dunk in this list is branching paths, like morality choices changing the game.
A notable difference I see between Pale Fire and Dark Souls is that there's a real possibility for a reader to miss the content of the underlying story as a medium.
When reading a poem like Pale Fire the reader can experience the story differently depending on order they read the poem and the footnote-narrative. But because the medium of the book presents all the story in the same up front manner there's no opportunity (at a medium level) to hide a second story underneath such that someone exploring every nook and cranny is going to find a new character that they couldn't even perceive without some skill/knowledge/exploration checks in the interactive domain.
A novice reader can simply open up page 140 of Pale Fire and plainly observe the words of Kinbote's commentary, whereas a novice Dark Souls cannot observe Gwyndolin's story or even know it's there ahead of time.
I probably should, but cheeky answer is that I probably won't go the first-hand experience. While I enjoy the idea of it I probably won't walk the walk in this kind of thing.
I full agree on changing the game itself, the way of interaction, more than the branching morality paths.
Choose-your-own-advence books have branching paths based on choice to experience, but because of the medium can't give a difference experience depending on the choice, only different words.
But there is a second story! Who is Kinbote, really? Did he kill Shade? Where are the jewels? Are the index cards of the poem actually in the right order? Is Zembla even real? I recommend this frankly brilliant and insane paper to see how deep the rabbit hole goes, and it's not at all apparent from simply opening the book any more than Gwyndolin's story is from looking up the description of his crown.
You're welcome to avoid that, I honestly wouldn't ever consider watching Satantango again, but for anybody interested in Seiobo, the first chapter is available free here and has bitten quite a few of my friends with the bug.
Choose-your-own-adventure books have some similarities but are too limited. You could, in theory, write one that kept track of variables, had branches that intertwine deeply, etc., but nobody actually would. It's a huge difference, I'd say bigger than that between a comic book and a movie. I'm not sure what you mean by "experience" - if you mean words aren't an experience, I recall people experimenting with choose-your-own adventure DVDs, but those have even worse capability issues than the books.
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Maybe I’m misunderstanding what you mean here, but isn’t that just the entire field of literary criticism? A reader who isn’t perceptive enough or doesn’t put enough thought into what they read won’t be able to fully uncover all of the implications of what was written on the page. For a non-academic example, consider the painstaking work that Gwern put in in order to show that a certain enigmatic short story by Gene Wolfe is actually abouta town in which vampires “won” . And that’s just the most literal example of how new information or “lore” can be discovered in written stories by those who have superior “skill” in reading, to say nothing about higher-level concerns (i.e. rather than merely understanding what the work is saying, can I understand what the consequences of what it’s saying are, and whether or not I agree with them, and why?)
I was thinking that a game could present more author Text, while literary criticism can only offer alternatives through ambiguity.
I've had trouble understanding literary criticism before, so I intuitively see the additional text of a video game as more real (and therefore different) from literary implications. On reflection seems there's less difference than I thought
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