What videogames should be taught at school for literature class?

Dynasty Warriors

Tyranthraxus posted...

man dad predates man fan.

This post will be cited as a primary source.

ellis123 posted...

Bioshock is pretty much the opposite of close. It's basically just a Ayn Rand book given form.

And presumably any game where some of the narrative comes through gameplay is what you are talking about. So something along the lines of Metal Gear Solid, Baiten Kaitos, and Cubivore would be what you are looking for.

The twist relies somewhat on duping the player , something that's not experienced the same way in other mediums. There's also the subplot of the little sisters which attempts to allow the player to make moral choices.
None of the other games mentioned really hit those notes. Metal Gear, especially, could probably exist as a 12 episode shitty Netflix series (with guest appearance by Kurt Russel).

ChocoboMogALT posted...

The twist relies somewhat on duping the player , something that's not experienced the same way in other mediums. There's also the subplot of the little sisters which attempts to allow the player to make moral choices.
None of the other games mentioned really hit those notes. Metal Gear, especially, could probably exist as a 12 episode shitty Netflix series (with guest appearance by Kurt Russel).

No, it's very much like other games. What it does is make it more personal in the form of you doing the things, but as a whole the actual story would not change all that much if it was put into any other medium. A book? You could do it just fine. A movie? Same boat: while it would still be less personal the actual twist would be completely unchanged by the medium. This is as opposed to something like Baiten Kaitos where the twist *could not* function outside of a game at all. In a movie, book, etc. you cannot make the same assumptions that you have in a game so having the main protagonist be a villain the whole time doesn't work as a movie or book that left the "camera" as the main character would immediately the main protagonist to switch over to them and it wouldn't cause the twist to happen at all. Only in a game can you go "well, technically you aren't Mario you're a Lakitu following Mario with a camera" and still have the person experiencing things directly assume the role of the non-camera character as that is who they control. Similarly saying that Metal Gear somehow would work in any other medium is absurd. How would a book plug the controller into port 2? How would it tell you to look at the back of the box? These things aren't things that make it literature or anything, but as an experience the entire premise of Kojima's games is that you deal with a bunch of random fourth wall breaking actions, things that cannot actually function in a different medium. This is very different than anything from Bioshock, where the feeling of dread from the desolate and somber rapture can be written in a book or how the visceral action can be shown on a movie: you cannot give a feeling of WTF in the same way as Kojima's stuff if you are not actively the one that is doing the thing in question.

So no, Bioshock is very much something that is based on a book author with content that could work just fine in a movie/book. The act of getting the person experiencing things becoming more intimate with the played character is not something that alters the story in any way meaningfully and only acts as a way to say that no medium could ever possibly be transitioned into another medium because of minor differences in how they function: it's just silly. Whether or not it would be as good as the original is mostly irrelevant as they all of their strengths and it is just as reasonable to assume a "perfect" scenario where the new product greatly capitalizes on its strengths as opposed to just assuming that they do a half-baked job and only directly transition what is on the screen onto the paper (or "why video game books basically all suck").

You're missing what makes the video game aspect of Bioshock important. It isn't that it makes the experience more personal, it's that the player is used to doing things in a video game just because an NPC tells them to. A book or movie that tells that same story could reasonably make you suspicious of Atlas; this is a dude, after all, that tells you to murder little girls. Bioshock exploits the typical video game setup which has you intrinsically trust the voice in your ear giving you the next objective and makes him the villain. Might not be too wild nowadays, but it was a fairly big deal at the time.

And I've never played Baiten Kaitos so maybe I'm off, but your description of it and the claim that it wouldn't work in a book is kind of funny. There's a famous Agatha Christie novel where the protagonist does indeed turn out to be the murderer, making him the villain of the book.

Planescape: Torment

REmake

Shadow of the Colossus

Minecraft

pegusus123456 posted...

You're missing what makes the video game aspect of Bioshock important. It isn't that it makes the experience more personal, it's that the player is used to doing things in a video game just because an NPC tells them to. A book or movie that tells that same story could reasonably make you suspicious of Atlas; this is a dude, after all, that tells you to murder little girls. Bioshock exploits the typical video game setup which has you intrinsically trust the voice in your ear giving you the next objective and makes him the villain. Might not be too wild nowadays, but it was a fairly big deal at the time.

And I've never played Baiten Kaitos so maybe I'm off, but your description of it and the claim that it wouldn't work in a book is kind of funny. There's a famous Agatha Christie novel where the protagonist does indeed turn out to be the murderer, making him the villain of the book.

That doesn't work because the player is never given a choice in 99.9% of games as to what they do. It holds narrative weight because it is personal, but as far as the whole thing is concerned the concept of "Oh man, I bet we got you good because you did everything without asking!" doesn't matter unless you are given a choice to do something else in the first place. Hence why something like Disco Elysium, where you have a *very* nonlinear approach to basically the entire game, is lauded. This is why I brought up the twist in Baiten Kaitos because it is effectively exactly the same "subverts expectations" that you get from Bioshock, but unlike with Bioshock it relies on something that it lets the player interact with. Again, the idea isn't that you cannot do any form of plot device, hence why the Agatha Christie example can exist, but it can take advantage of things that are only in a medium and thus not translate over. In the Agatha Christie novel there was no "actually you were this random shmuck the whole time," the twist is not the same outside of the barest of comparisons. Baiten Kaitos spends most of the game trying to hammer home that you are a fairy flying around the main character the entire time, including having the entire cast speaking to you, but in a far more extreme version of what you give to Bioshock it does with you and the camera: you are the camera, not the guy running around outside of cutscenes. Bioshock is not exclusive to games because you cannot possibly do anything but exactly what the game allows, Baiten Kaitos cannot be outside of a game because there is no camera that you get to control in a book or movie. As I said before if you took the narrative of Baiten Kaitos into a book or movie it would be bloody obvious that the MC was up to no good, the fact that you the player never associates the camera as the MC outside of a first person game is what makes it work. Bioshock's twist does not rely on anything unique to being the player, you can tell a story about a mind controlled main character just fine in a book (arguably the game would be even more tense in a book, even if the twist wouldn't be as personal as you were not the one doing the actions).

And what made BioShock important wasn't that it was so impressive narratively, but that it came out at the perfect time. While the mid 2000's were basically dominated by WoW + shooters, none of the shooters had a complete dominance of their niche outside of RE4, Portal, and BioShock. With that being the "era of brown" the act of having a completely unique setting that didn't use it at all gave it a far greater vibe than any of the alternatives. Outside of, maybe, Portal, a game with very similar cultural impact at the time of its release.

Nekopara

ellis123 posted...

none of the shooters had a complete dominance of their niche outside of RE4, Portal, and BioShock.

Halo 3.

i disagree. I think the narrative outweighs the gameplay. Fallout 3 had incredibly well written dialogue sequences thet were copied by every dev since then

ellis123 posted...

That doesn't work because the player is never given a choice in 99.9% of games as to what they do. It holds narrative weight because it is personal, but as far as the whole thing is concerned the concept of "Oh man, I bet we got you good because you did everything without asking!" doesn't matter unless you are given a choice to do something else in the first place.

See, I disagree with that. It has an impact on the player because your preconceived notions of how a video game works meant that you didn't examine the story the way you would have if it was in a different medium. I'd say it's the same idea as Invincible initially portraying itself as a fun superhero cartoon and then ending its first episode with a gorey massacre. You're expecting something will conform to the medium/genre, then it exploits that for story purpose.

Like I said, by today's standards that's something that's been done repeatedly and far better. Doki Doki Literature Club springs to mind. From the sound of it, Baiten Kaitos did it better too. But I think Bioshock is still worth teaching in a class like this, maybe even because it's such a rudimentary usage of the concept.

This is on the assumption that the class is actually teaching the interweave of medium and story. Otherwise I'd agree that Bioshock probably isn't all that noteworthy.

There was a lot of stuff about Bioshock that made it soar.

Ayn Rand was relevant. The imagery of the Big Daddy with Little Sister was powerful. It was a unique setting that was impressive. Zombies and steampunk. The gameplay implemented a lot of physics and visible effects from your attacks compared to most other games, see how people compare it to Portal haha. It explore religious themes. The audiologs became a staple of the genre practically because of this game. It achieved many things that other games aimed for. The cartoons are priceless. New IP new possibilities. Exciting and very violent. Good twist. Horor-action. It looked amazing as far as graphics go, shamelessly hiding everything in the dark and with reused models and a dip in quality at the end, but all for the best. It came with a lot less baggage than Halo 4 or MGS4. Other big games. The elemental powers. Haha. Bioshock , that name. I hope it comes back in good form some day. Infinite wasn't awful. Games like Alien Isolation are still very much in the Bioshock spirit. I still think they could redo Echo Night to be awesome

Like RE7 or Soma , Outlast, but yeah

Hugely influential game and made a nice pair with Fallout 3

pegusus123456 posted...

See, I disagree with that. It has an impact on the player because your preconceived notions of how a video game works meant that you didn't examine the story the way you would have if it was in a different medium. I'd say it's the same idea as Invincible initially portraying itself as a fun superhero cartoon and then ending its first episode with a gorey massacre. You're expecting something will conform to the medium/genre, then it exploits that for story purpose.

Like I said, by today's standards that's something that's been done repeatedly and far better. Doki Doki Literature Club springs to mind. From the sound of it, Baiten Kaitos did it better too. But I think Bioshock is still worth teaching in a class like this, maybe even because it's such a rudimentary usage of the concept.

This is on the assumption that the class is actually teaching the interweave of medium and story. Otherwise I'd agree that Bioshock probably isn't all that noteworthy.

It if it isn't correct then why wouldn't it be just as easy to say that basically every Sierra game should be done before BioShock, especially Space Quest, because that sort of twist is *extremely* old hat + done by the time that BioShock came out in their games (heck, it was a trope in point and click adventures: you flat out couldn't find an old one without it outside of a tiny selection)? It just hit the perfect storm of being exactly what people were looking for at the time to play. It's the inverse of, say, Shadow of the Colossus from the same time period where that one came out at a time when the people really consuming games wanted shooters so it took quite some time before people really respected what it did.

BioShock did a lot right, but the twist is easily, *easily* the most overrated reason for its success. Yeah it mattered, but the game was basically doomed for success because of factors mostly unrelated to its twist.

Bioshock was like a themepark

Didn't take much travel to reach a new exciting place and every inch was pretty realistic looking. It doesnt want you to ever quite think of yourself as being on a videogame map. Like Resident Evil