Craig Ostrin

I know I haven’t written in a while. Finals dominated April, and I’ve been preoccupied with a slew of activities this summer (more on this later). I just wanted to put this up before I forget.

This is a comment I wrote (with slight edits) on Chris Remo’s response to the question of Dante’s Inferno: essentially, whether it’s a “good thing,” “bad thing,” or neither.

It doesn’t have much to do with Remo’s take on Dante but, instead, was sparked by a small section of his post.

I know it’s not the duty of any individual game designer to ‘justify’ games to anyone who doesn’t play them, and it shouldn’t be, and obviously as a gamer I know full well that games are capable of more than this. But the reality is that most games DON’T have anything to say; most games DON’T communicate any meaningful thought; and most games DON’T deal with their subject matter in anything other than the basest, most ridiculous way. You could say the same for most fiction of any medium, but it’s certainly even more true for games.

My reply:

I’ve been listening to the Creative Screenwriting Magazine podcast¹ lately, in which the host, Senior Editor Jeff Goldsmith, interviews a different writer on each episode. You’d be surprised at how much thought goes into even the most explosion-riddled action flick.

Have you seen The Island? It’s standard Michael Bay fare, with a dystopian clone world as the backdrop for slow-mo action and over-the-top special effects. The movie was written by the same guys who did the new Star Trek’s screenplay, and during the Trek interview, they mentioned that they’d had loftier ideas for The Island, which weren’t quite realized once Bay and the studio got a hold of the script.

Even The Dark Knight—on the surface, a fairly standard adaptation of a classic superhero series, albeit with exceptional acting on the part of some of the players—had a ton of thought and care put into the themes and characters.²

I think the biggest problem with storytelling in games right now is that most developers don’t know how to craft a protagonist. Either they’re non-existent, as in most first-person games, or they’re absolutely flawless, with no room to grow and develop.

At their core, stories are about characters. If we can’t create compelling characters, we can’t tell compelling stories.