I finished watching the Second Life TED video and it left me feeling strange. For the extent of my video gaming life, which began with my father's old Atari at a very young age, I have admired creativity in video games. Story and cinematic quality are huge selling points for me, so I end up enjoying fantasy and action games more than sports games. I actually really hate sports games. Great. These guys can shoot a basketball. Who cares? There are games where I can battle dragons in the land of Skyrim with enchanted weapons while being willed onward by a Nordic choir. Yeah. Nuff said.
But this Second Life game doesn't have a story. You make the story yourself. My first thought is, "Awesome! I get to make the game whatever I want!" And that is another appealing part of games like Skyrim. It's open. I can choose to do a quest at my leisure, or I can craft weapons, or take out my frustration on unsuspecting mud crabs because I didn't mean she was fat, I meant she looked fat that day and IT'S THE CRABS' FAULT SHE'S MAD AT ME!
http://elderscrolls.wikia.com/wiki/Mud_Crab
This blog is slowly revealing some of my deeper issues.
To the real point. If the freedom of a game begins to overwhelm the story of a game, the story becomes unnecessary. As a person who hopes to do creative work of some sort someday, maybe even writing a video game, this is a bit frightening. I hope that story structure will always be important in video games, but Second Life doesn't need a story. It's isolating the fact that people use video games to escape from real world limitations, even the limitation of a story in other video games they may play, and giving them pure freedom. Hopefully there will always be people like me who have a soft spot for quality creative work, but perhaps this is the future.
Thanks for reading.
XOXO
Chad Rhiness
I completely agree with you about the whole freedom vs. creativity in gaming and I think at the end of the day to each it's own. Though both types of people look to video games as a sense of escape of reality, they reach towards in different ways. One person may be tired of how stifling and monotonous their day to day lifestyle is and look towards video games as a way to create their own fantasy. Another person on the other hand may be tired of how unpredictable life can be and look to video games as a world that has a set path to follow and results are directly correlated with the work put in. Moving forward, game makers are going to have to cater to both types of people.
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