GAMING IS DA POOP! NO MORE!

The intelligence of writing in games is, more often than not, far less than television or film, copying their basic concepts but never fulfilling them. Games like Grand Theft Auto V or The Last of Us are blatantly inspired by films like Heat (right down to the lens flares of Michael Manns style) and Dawn of the Dead. What GTA V didn’t rip from Heat were its narrative risks, such as killing the protagonist at the end, opting for an ending where relationships are magically healed just after Trevor discovers that Michael lied about the fate of their heist partner -as well as Michael himself- for over a decade and all four(!) bad guys are killed in a single day. TLoU asks the question “what if humans are the real monsters in a zombie apocalypse?” … a question asked and (potentially) answered over the course of 39 years by the likes of 28 Days and The Walking Dead.

When people called the Last of Us “gamings Citizen Kane moment” it infers that it has made significant leaps and bounds for storytelling and the technology and methods to make those leaps and bounds happen. What we instead got was an "exploration" of a tired concept nearly half a century old.

The longer length of games that triple-A audience’s demand also causes further narrative stagnation, trying and failing to be more like movies (a medium that’s usually less than two hours, unless you watch David Lynch movies) and stretching a concept from a lean period to potentially over of hundreds of hours long.

A movie like Nightcrawler explores the relationship between the media and brutal violence and how mentally fucked you’d have to be to even take part of this relationship. Trainspotting and Twin Peaks: Fire-walk with me explore the horror of self-destruction to differing wavelengths of tragedy. Three Billboards outside Ebbing is about the element of revenge always present in a pursuit for justice as well as how dangerous mob mentality is. In just two or so hours, you’re introduced to the world and its logic, you experience its plot points, its emotional highs and lows, and then it concludes. In a 30+ hour game one can only expect a decay of narrative quality. GTA V is very guilty of this, because whilst the game is anywhere up to 80 hours long for the single-player it starts and ends plots like it has 10 hours instead.

Thanks to the expensive nature of game development and studios being kept alive by capitalists and investors rather than artists, narratives in gaming often also have to play it safe to maximize profitability. Ghost recon: Wildlands explores the drug war in a boring, black and white way- high concept themes of the war on drugs like the CIA’s alleged complicity or the financial and political exploitation from the conflict are never really covered until the very end where the game will pick one of two endings where the man you've spent the entire game preparing to kill is taken in under witness protection as a rat or killed by your adviser. Otherwise though, the plot goes like this: the Drug cartels are bad, so please invade Bolivia as an American military no-scoper expert and shoot them in the face and follow it up with unengaging dialogue.

The pursuit of next gen visuals and mass market appeal has compromised games as a potential art-form, made worse when legitimate attempts to push forward are shunned. Whilst Grand Theft Auto IV is still a critically acclaimed and best-selling game many complaints were made about its story and tone. Now that we live in a world where GTA V has a completely underwhelming narrative IV's story has begun to truly shine- an exploration of america after 9/11, where an Immigrant escapes from war in his home-turf to find "peace" in a country that's been at war for years and is unwelcoming of immigrants who have any potential combat expertise only then for his past to catch up with the protagonist. In 2008 it was also a narrative that included concepts of people using online dating to start a relationship, a concept that was almost unheard of in media in favor of romance remaining a physical thing and still is to this day. It wears its The Sopranos inspirations on its sleeves and I think that choosing a television show instead of a film did wonders for the plot structure; trying to be "like movies" has demonstratively been harmful to gamings artistic merits because of the pacing issues I mentioned. The way television handles its plot is not too dissimilar to games and I think that if you aspire to just imitate another artistic medium it's your best bet.