PC Gamer Editorial - "less story is more immersive&quot

[deus101]

epikitscheesy! get in here an validate ME!

 

[epikitscheesy]

epikitscheesy! get in here an validate ME!

Just saw ye...
Did my sheer neglect hurt your feelings, sissy?
And yes, I will. RL calls fttt. Give me some time, man.

 

[epikitscheesy]

Anyway, some thoughts:
1. Are "immersion", "immersiveness" really that under-defined?
Not from my rpgamer's pov! When it comes to rp, these terms should really be understood as immersion into the role of a character , as opposed to immersion into f.e. Tetris.

Well...yes larping can be a valid goal.
But do not forget the munchkins, remember the G in RPG, the challenge factor as provided by the various gameplay mechanics most also be immersive.

That is, how much fun and engaging is it to deal with the limitation your character got?

I'm just speaking out loud because it seems we are on the same page, however you're a bit vague on what you would define as a good story, i would say a good RPG provides not a story but a series of events that combined makes a story.

In that quantity not quality is the better choices, to many fags at gamasutra wants stories to be LOTR EPIC, action movie epic and thus lead down to the path of overexposure of NPC's with voice acting and cinematics.
Which completely drowns the "Narrative motivates player" method.

Well, you're right about the g-factor in rpg.
Also:

Ask twenty different Codexers what the definition of an RPG is, you'll likely get twenty different answers.

Yeah.
And of course, there is, f.e. the traditional interpretation of rpg as it originated from tactical war games in the 70s as the initial pnp, or those games that would end up as pure tbt if you took away the rp part.
(Btw, I always wanted to be that "munchkin" type of person, seeing how much fun my friends had with our dice-heaviest pnp sessions. Guess I just lack the brain structure )
However, personally, I am less interested in what forms "RPG" assumes/assumed in the past, than what the term basically means, how it defines ITSELF. Because, that is the bit of common ground you need to fruitfully discuss.
A role-playing game is basically a game wherein you play a role, period.
That assumed, the gameplay should indeed be immersive in the way it is involved in the story-telling process and vice versa, because in the end, all of it, all the game elements intertwined determine whether i feel immersed into the role or not.
Concerning quantity over quality storytelling, that's really what I wanted to address with that hierarchy thingy. If the inital story concept(as it should have evolved out of the initial game idea) is good, then there's no need to ellaborate it too much, it'll still be a good story.
However if ellaborated, it should be told through massive gameplay instead of cinematic-epic stuff, because interactiveness is the unique proposition of games.
"Less story is more immersion" oversimplifies/distorts that.

Of course, you can apply radical constructivism on everything, but man, I wanna be RIGHT! On everything!

Not sure what you're trying to say here.

JFGI.
Well, in my words: RC is an epistomology, not an ontology, that defies the objectivity of claiming objective truths. Whenever I state something to be a general truth, that's rather my brain's interpretation of general truth, IF there is one(RC's not an ontology!). But, in the words of Ernst von Glaserfeld, a thinker of the RC:
"the inherent difficulty is that in order to interact with other people, you have to concede an intersubjective reality, which is not a reality in which things exist in their own right, but a reality in which your ideas become more or less compatible with the other person "

 

[SkeleTony]

A thousand times no! I don't see hordes of people flocking to play Wizard's Crown. It has a pretty minimal story, but tons of tactical combat.

Proof that developers for the most part don't have a clue, and you couldn't ever hope to give them one. :poop:

Bad example. Wizard's Crown is considered a great RPG by most who remember it but the reason people are not "flocking to it" are because if features ascii graphics and several other artifacts from the 1980s such as difficult saving/loading, no automap(IIRC), more cumbersome UI and just does not run well on modern PCs at all.

Story in CRPGs tends more often than not to detract from teh games. Even when the writing is not God-awful(but still not good compared to...you know, BOOKS.) like Planescape it is still a chore for those of us who like to play GAMES and read books but not READ games or PLAY books.