I would choose “Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas” as game that aims to incorporate strong narrative elements. It is the 5th game in the series which first started out with a nameless and faceless main character. It now has a very strong narrative element. The story has always been that you are a career criminal trying to make it rich throughout the series.
There is a large game world. And interactivity in the game comes through the variety of things one can do such as hit random people on the street, highjack cars, rob banks or enter race car competitions. Almost any vehicle can be operated and almost every object reacts to your actions (basically it can be destroyed).
This game would be a good counter argument to the supposition that narrative & interactivity can never co-exist. You are free to take on missions at any time and there are plenty of things that the player can do between missions. Eventually you get bored and decide to complete the mission. I think boredom and wanting to open up more portions of the game world is a big motivation to move along the narrative. The interactive nature enhances rather than limits narrative. Take for example an assassination mission. There are many way to complete it due to the interactive nature of the game and each leads to a variety of outcomes such how much your “wanted” rating goes up by. If you can do the job in a way that you are undetected, you may simply walk out on the street. Else, you may have to escape to a safe house and wait for things to cool down.
Of course when it comes to some points in the narrative, the user loses control. This is especially when it comes to cut scenes in which the character is forced to do a special move such as jump out of a plane and parachute to a location. Nonetheless, I wouldn’t say there is an very high tension or a trade-off between narrative and interactivity. There comes a point in games when sometimes all you want to do is watch the story unfold like a movie. I’m actually guilty of playing just to watch cut scenes especially when I was playing Warcraft 3 & Max Payne. Hence there may be a tension but I just don’t feel it’s that pronounced enough to conclude that narrative and interactivity cannot co-exist.
1 comment:
I've only played through the first few missions in GTA:SA (got bored at that point), but to me it seemed that the game suffers from the same problems as Oblivion - lack of motivation and direction. Sure, you can steal cars and drive wherever you want, but this is part of the problem - there's nothing really to make me move forward in the narrative. And when the narrative moves forward, its in a pre-defined tragectory. The way I moved through the previous mission doesn't seem to make a difference to the story. Perhaps I didn't get far enough, but it seems to me that the classic divide between game and story is still there, despite claims of free exploration and "sandbox" play...
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