Stories and videogames

Recently I watched a Casual Connect video of a talk by the master of indie RPG, the one and only: Jeff Vogel.
He talks of the importance of having a good story and what makes (to him) a good story.
Gaming, for many people (Me included) is declining... Why? I'll make a post later about that, but for naw, suffice to say that one of the reasons is that developers (ok, not devs, just the big boys in suits) DON'T FUCKING CARE ABOUT THE STORY!
And why is that? Because kids don't read...I won't talk about that, but it is a fact. Kids won't read anything longer than 1 and a half page... A pity... As the saying goes... The youth is wasted in the young...
However there is a catch here! Many don't care about a story... UNLESS THERE IS NO STORY!
As Jeff my idol Vogel said: "Gamers will forgive you for having a good story, as long as you allow them to ignore it".

I wont say a word of what makes a story good, or how to write one. Jeff says it perfectly in the video (Today's cookie hint). What i will say is that good stories are important.

Personally i need to feel part of the game, part of it's world. I remember spending hours in Morrowind just reading the in-game books, and playing the main quest. The story was so good! SPOILER ALERT! How it unfolded before you, how your character turned from a lowlife prisoner, to royal spy, to fake prophesy announced hero (Needed by politics) and then it turned out to be true, and that your character indeed was the Nerevarine! Also the lore was so profound that you could easily make a story for your character WITH NO EFFORT, and that was not part of the game per se ;)

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DOS Gaming yesterday and today

Lets start with some history, shall we?
It all started in the golden age of videogames. Games started to be developed for home computers, and distributed in floppy disks, plastic bags and ROM cartridges. The one and only Richard Garriott distributed some copies of Akalabeth in plastic bags before it was published (Richard Garriott is Lord British in case you didn't know).

Sooooo, games started to be made aviable to pc owners and it led to pure EPICNESS.

Games like Zork (Text adventures), King's Quest, Karateka, Prince of Persia (No neat acrobatics), Rogue (Started a genre of it's own, pure epicness), The Bard's Tale, Golden Axe, Dragon's Lair, DOOM series, Ultima, TES 1 and 2 were released and became part of popular culture (at least some).

Thanks to this times surge of technological advances, developers were able not only to create games that were fun because of themselves, but to create whole worlds, full of lore, story and literary content. A fine example of this is my favorite game of all time, the epic, the only: DAGGERFALL.
Now developers were not limited to tell the game's story in the instruction manual, they could tell the story with videos, cut-scenes, in-game books, character monologues. This was the real start (For me) of the golden age of gaming. I cant count the hours I passed wandering the gigantic world of Daggerfall, the hours spent pillaging ships in Pirates!, the fun i had with Ultima, and let's not forget: Master of Orion.
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