So a quick self-assessment of this blogsitting yields a "D-". Over a week without comment? Reprehensible (not prehensile, that's completely different). Steps must be taken. Perhaps several, we'll see.

So a thought occurred to me the other day. We've introduced several new forms of storytelling to our arsenal over the last twenty years. Almost everyone has realized by now that animated books misnomered as "comics" may have real storytelling merit rather than existing solely as a diversion for children. As if the recent deluge of movies off of popular comic properties wasn't statement enough, movies celebrating animated books like Watchmen and V for Vendetta show that Hollywood at least is starting to take them more seriously. I've owned the print version of Watchmen for years, and I must say that I've read it several times and still missed things. The work is delivered in a multitude of presentations some of which far denser than others. Trying to read it in the same spirit as "The X-men go to camp" is going to leave you disappointed. It's a dense story with several interesting flawed characters that spans decades. I find it mildly interesting that it was written almost 20 years ago.

But other mediums have erupted, and with increasing frequency are demonstrating some pretty significant storytelling chops. The medium I'm specifically referring to is that of video gaming. Now, I may mean something very different by "video games" than what you may be thinking. The current market seems to revolve primarily around stories no deeper than "Shoot the amazingly beautifully rendered target" in varying ways in vaguely different locales (The past, the future, the getaway car, your mother's custard, etc.) These are not what I'm talking about. As with the pulps of the last century, you have to filter through a lot of the uninteresting and banal before you can alight on any true gems.

Most of my personal experience has been with computer gaming, where there is a growing population of 30-somethings that gamed early in life and want something more to chew on than the next big gun and the newest demonstration of gravity and logic defying boob-bouncing physics (Note: If, taken singly, one of your boobs is 80% or greater of the volume of your head, you should NOT be running, leaping and cavorting in an adventuresome fashion. At least not without a sports bra made by such reputable companies as "Firestone").

But there have been several games where the story stands out as being creative, polished and interesting. Games such as:

• Betrayal at Krondor (Based not surprisingly off the Raymond E. Feist IP)


• Beyond Good and Evil


• Baldur's Gate series(D&D IP)


• loom (Only mediumish on story, but cool based on a musical game mechanic)


• Planescape: Torment (Oh Lord Yes: Based on the now-defunct D&D "Planescape" IP)


• Deus-Ex(Original, futuristic conspiracy sci-fi)


• Star Wars - Knights of the Old Republic(Star Wars, yet not Lucas - Yay!)


• The Legacy of Kain series (vampires and such)


• Myst series (Duh. Petered out after 5 games)


• System Shock Series (Oh for the ability to play those for the first time again...)

This list is obviously by no means comprehensive. The stories involved range from dark vampiric dramas to star battles to dungeon crawls to Myst (What would you even call a story like Myst?). The release date of these particular titles encompasses a span of almost 20 years. The benefit this provides to "Authors" of these stories (Quoted as none of them are likely to have a single writer) have the added advantage of being able to show you exactly what they're envisioning, much like movies. Unlike movies, however, most of these games have vastly more content in terms of dialog, places to go and things to do. You can exhaust a movie in a couple of hours. Most video games of any caliber can take days.

The fact that they're making movies out of video games always struck me as being somewhat silly. The original "authors" already had a functional presentation for the story they had - it may have been suboptimal due to technological constraints, but reenvisioning the game as a movie seems to lead you to an increased art experience mixed with a vastly decreased effective storyline. This is akin to purchasing a "Cliff's notes" with diagrams by Van Gogh.

All of this, however, is background to my thinking. The concern I found wafting into my consciousness as I was sliding down an icy road into a railroad track was this reminder: The mixing of content and presentation given to game developers comes at a cost. This cost is realized in the fact that people have to buy special machines to "Read" what you've created. As those machines age or go out of style, that story can (in general) no longer be read. One of the titles listed above needs at least 2 different sets of machinery to be experienced, one of which is no longer produced. Several others effectively have no hardware to run them at all and but for the efforts of some technoscenti working to create artificial environments for them.

It's akin to printing stories on disintegrating paper - Eventually these masterful stories will exist only in the fading minds of their original players. Even if a copy were to be acquired (Which can become quite difficult given the current nature of IP law), the casual customer hasn't the acumen to experience the content he's made his.

Are our technological advances in the process of cursing our stories with ADHD? As time progressess, will we become increasingly doomed to only the stories of the day and be unable to experience the stories of last year? How will that effect us?

-WS (Weblog Sitter)