Extra Lives

In "Extra Lives," Tom Bissell "wonders why, despite their technical sophistication, videogames are so bad at telling stories," reports Jonathan V. Last in the Wall Street Journal (6/11/10). Perhaps it’s that videogames are participatory and good storytelling is inherently authoritarian. Having control while also giving it up could be mutually exclusive where "the best narrative art forms" are concerned.

Jonathan Blow, a videogame designer, thinks a "central problem with storytelling in videogames is that the actual mechanics of playing a game — moving your character to jump over a barrel, or eat a power pellet or punch an enemy — are divorced from the stories that videogames are trying to tell." However, Chris Suellentrop, in a New York Times review of Extra Lives, points in the opposite direction.

Chris quotes Tom as writing that videogame interactivity can be "as gripping as any fiction I have come across." He cites Grand Theft Auto IV, in which players have to dump dead bodies, for example, as creating "an engine of a far more intimate process of implication" than a book or movie ever could, turning "narrative into active experience." And despite the lack of quality of the storytelling in most videogames, he thinks the interactivity enables "a form of storytelling that is, in many ways, completely unprecedented."