TV, films and games, and their influence on SFF writing

Toby Frost

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I wonder if sometimes, when people come to write SFF, their experience of science fiction and fantasy isn't based in other writing, but in things that have been on the screen.

The visual media are better suited to depicting certain things. The awe of a vast battle scene is probably easier to do on screen. Likewise anything that requires movement or a sense of speed. An in-depth character study is easier in print, because you can literally read the character's thoughts. Epic statements of the sort you get in films ("The two mightiest empires in history tore each other apart without mercy or remorse", "Can a man who loses his soul win the struggle to regain it" etc) often just feel a bit empty and fake when written down.

In visual media, some things are treated superficially in a way that you couldn't do in a novel. Say the hero's son is killed by aliens. On screen, the hero rages, goes quiet, swears revenge and takes it entertainingly. In a book, this just isn't enough: it's not convincing. Films, shows and, especially, games, are much cruder in this way. They can use stereotyped characters and situations and get away with it. I don't think prose writers can.

Then there's the issue that the cutting edge of ideas has often been in print. The Matrix may have been unusual as a film, but its ideas of false reality were being discussed by Philip K Dick in the 1970s. Not having that background runs the risk of repeating old ideas (as is often said when non-genre writers turn their hand to SFF).

I wonder if this will have a lasting effect on the genre?
 
I'll hold my hands up here and admit that while not entirely on the game/film side of things, I probably do err towards that end of the spectrum. I'm not the most widely read person when it comes to SFF, or most things really, but I'm well aware of the tropes and common elements of SFF because tv and film etc, and just general living in the world. And even when I think of a great idea, a unique idea, I can bet that if i search enough ill find someone did it back in the 50's. I don't ignorance of the history is an excuse to remake the same ideas though.

I certainly agree with you that they are vastly different mediums, and things in film work so well, but when transcribed they just fall flat. Your character development example, is definately true. I know it's something I've spent a long time thinking about, 'how did they do that so easily?' etc, but i think there are exceptions to this, series' mainly. They have more time to explore the ramifications of events and actions, where films gloss over, a 20episode season can go into great depth of character, and in my limited opinion some do even as well as books; thinking of BSG here and just about anything by Joss Whedon, which to me do come across more as visual novels.
So that side of it can and does work, but flipping it around and and writing a novel from like a film is less likely to work for the reason you have stated.

I think it comes down to that old 'picture says a thousand words' thing. And as films/tv are completely tell-y mediums, the show vs tell gets brought in as well.

As I said, (in this not very coherent post) I probably fall closer to the visual medium, and certainly in my earliest writings that came across, but I think I identified it quick enough in my own stuff and learnt to use POV properly. I think @Brian Turner said in the other thread, that the influence of the visual medium means that a lot of writers start in omnisceient, even when it isn't how they story shoud be told, that's just how they picture it in their minds. I do this, I picture most scenes in my head as a screen adaptation, I find it easier to write what I see, setting, characters, actions etc. but the key point is tht I translate it onto the page, rather than copy.

But omniscient wasnt something I did. I have never really taken to anything that isn't close 3rd or 1st, reading or writing, I just don't get that same attachment to the characters (there are a few exceptions, of course), which probably comes down to the fact that I don't understand it or how to use it.
 
It's impossible to escape the effect of film and TV, especially from a young age. Additionally, we're a very visual species. IMO that means when someone first starts to create a story, it's inevitable that it will be imagined as a visual experience - and be written in a basic omniscient viewpoint in order to "show" the action. There's nothing wrong in that as a starting point, but by itself it's not enough.

It used to be the case that it was - some older fiction seems to turn on awing the reader with the presentation of a fantastical world. But nowadays seeing them literally before our eyes has become routine with film, TV, and even computer games.

Over the past few decades, writers have increasingly sought to exploit the novel's one big selling point over all other media - getting inside the heads of the characters, so that we can experience the desires, conflicts, joys, and pains, of very different people. Sometimes these may be simple wish fulfilment figures - characters who are more powerful than us, giving the reader the imagined experience of being an alpha male or female. Other times it is the difference between characters that is the biggest draw.

Ultimately, it is not the personality of these characters, but their inner conflict, that offers the richest experience for a reader. Historically, novels have often attempted this anyway to some degree - the difference now is simply that there tends to be a deeper focus on that, because this is the one thing that a novel can do that no other media can.

So the modern aspiring writer should ideally look to work with that, and develop that into the story. Sure - start with a visualisation - but write in the character experience at some point. Some stories use as few characters and as little experience as needed, but IMO the less of both, the less engaging the story may be.

However, the deeper character experience is an ideal that is easy to talk about, but very challenging to write.

And this is all just a suggested opinion, at this time. I may be quite wrong, or my ideas on this may change - but I offer it as part of the discussion.
 
In many ways a writer aware of the visual media can use that to their advantage when describing scenes. Star Wars & Star Trek for example, comes with pre-defined ideas and visuals that seep into other SFF narratives.
It doesn't mean the writer has to give everyone a red shirt, but some things are established.


I find the better TV/Movie adaptations pull from a written story (though they don't always stick to the arc) an author somewhere has sat done and worked out why the character is they way they are.
Will it have a lasting effect? It already has. There are many ways to consume SFF. Game genre has its own rules, while they take from SFF they openly embrace stereotype so a player can drop into a game - they know what to expect. Movie/Film are prefer archetype development because of the time it would need to develop and explain a backstory other wise.
SFF prose (if you will) has the luxury of avoiding these 'new' rules but only if you can find someone to represent it because of the ones you kick to the side.

Re-worked ideas isn't new. Authors are re-working Greek tragedies, myths are the go-to thing now.
Cutting edge is rarely a place where investment is returned or the mass public can understand. (I hate myself for saying that.) While there is a market, writers don't exactly shout about the millions they make from it.

The best things I have read in Interzone and elsewhere dance around these two ideas and accept that not everyone has the time to invest in working out the nuances of a story or the technical complexity of a gadget.

So long as someone sees a thing and looks to the future with "What If" I think there will always be forward thinking prose, sometimes taking an old idea and working it over to the new technologies of the day. Some will write up a new gadget, and then there will always be those that declare "It can't work like that!" Good... those are the people that turn imaginations of years before into reality. Those who write for other mediums may well admire that first story and aspire to be that kind of writer.
Unfortunately respect and admiration doesn't keep the lights on.

Readers of the genre know that established doesn't mean set in stone. Readers make the best writers IMO ;)
 
I do think soap operas have a lot to teach.
I've thought so.
But I realised that useless for dialogue as written dialogue doesn't be the same even as Radio Soap. Also no use for Plot Development ideas. I agree I think for characters, misdirection and incidents useful. But I'm not going to start watching one or listening to the Archers, I did seriously consider it though.
 
I wonder if this will have a lasting effect on the genre?

An interesting discussion Toby. Do you believe that there is a shift in SF&F writing today that is becoming pronounced because of this?

The problem for your argument for someone like me is that, well, I haven't known anything different. I went to see Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind when they first came out in the cinema - so that puts me aged six (and a half) at the time. At roughly the same time I was definitely devouring fantasy and SF on the Telly - Blakes 7 was '78 and I'm sure Star Trek was evening telly on BBC1, and although I can't remember it, I'm sure I was starting to read my first books then too. So really it's all mixed up for me. Have we forgotten all the terrible novels (or were there none?) that were pumped out around and after '77 that riffed off these audiovisual delights with shallow plots and clichéd characters?

As for games - when I graduated to reading Stephen King and brick sized fantasy trilogies in the 80s, it was clear to me that a good number of authors were so Dungeons and Dragons I felt I could hear the roll of dice in the text itself. (Of course D&D then tracks back to the Fantasy master canon.)

I agree with you totally that written fiction has its great and majestic strengths (I'd say it was far more intimate and, if done well, brings you much closer to the mind of another human than any other art form*.) However I would be an idiot to say that all these other forms haven't influenced my 'SF&F' thinking in some manner.

I'm less worried about it I suppose - there's always going to be movements from one art form to another, action and reaction all the time. In fact I think it is probably a sign of a healthy genre. Look at Vampires, (taking Bram Stoker's Dracula as a starting point). The book was loosely copied (nicked) by Nosferatu into Cinema, then moved to the stage, where an unknown actor, Bela Lugosi toured the play in the US, which then took to the cinema again (this time translated from the play first...) and so on up to this present day, endlessly re-inventing itself for the moment and for all sorts of different art forms. And if the genre is strong and 'rolls forward' then there is a good chance that if excellent fiction is your thing that there will be writers who will step up to the plate and produce it. As well as the other 90% (they say) who write clichéd drivel and throwaway pulp fiction :).

In that respect as well, I'm less worried about ideas being 'cutting edge', although I will admit that it does matter to some degree. However there is personal perspective. I'd read up on Descarte before I ever touched a PKD book or even had a sniff of a Matrix movie and he had both of them licked on false realities by a good 300+ years. ;)

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* purely my opinion
 
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One of the biggest influences on me, especially for the 'serious' stuff, is the excellent Playstation game Vagrant Story [sadly, being an early 3D game the graphics have not fared well]. The translation from Japanese to English has Shakespearean undertones, and the mingling of English, French, German and a little Latin helped to make it feel like the world was diverse and old [even though the whole game occurred in one abandoned city with very little social interaction].
 
Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind when they first came out in the cinema
So did I, but I had been reading SF & F for maybe 12 years. I was dating, We had a Third Encounter of the Close Kind at that film, then we got married and it was more fun to watch films at home.

I do think SF, more than Fantasy has become affected by the TV & Film SF, most of which is really Space Opera or Horror in Space or Effects and generally terrible SF. Certainly in the 1960s & 1970s I read mostly SF and now Fantasy, or older SF I missed. I've found very little recent SF I like. It's too full of either implausible nonsense or ideology. If I want implausible nonsense, then Terry Pratchett or Piers Antony (Centaur Isle etc) are more fun.

Look at the loads of TV & Film spin off SF books of Star Trek, Star Wars and others since 1970s
 
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Reading this thread had me nodding, agreeing with a lot of the comments; I get a little rolly-eyed when I hear people use TV or movie formats to justify their stories. How many times has one of us cautioned that TV and Movies are not the same as books? Whilst I agree that I'm aiming for the character investment of, say Breaking Bad or Battlestar Galactica, I don't think that is dependent on the media format, just well-written characters. I think you can have an amazing story with poorly realised world-building but great characters whereas a fabulously realised world with poor characters will never be a good read.

However, something else occurred to me as I read through the posts; I wonder if it is genre-based. Fantasy and SF have this important mix of spectacle and character - the sweeping panoramas of Minas Tirith or Theed, or the marching armies at Helm's Deep and the spiralling fighters and mass of capital ships in the Battle of Coruscant. We've been affected by these in the movies (I get that LOTR may be an inappropriate example as they're books before they're movies, but you get my point, I hope) and they create that sense of awe that we'd be insane to not want to recreate in our stories (although - as was referred to in a recent thread about how many epic battles - sometimes it's the things you leave out). But as a horror writer, my writing is dependent on giving the norm a sense of weirdness and terror. That doesn't need scale; just characters that the reader can identify with, or care about.

CE3K has a great sense of normality that Spielberg brings with the dialogue of Teri Garr, the chaos of the kids' running amok round the suburban house, and details like the station wagon. You can fit all that into a book without needing to reference the actual movie format. It's people's lives.

This realisation has given me a bit of respect and sympathy for all you epic SFF writers ;)

pH
 
@Phyrebrat you could have an amazing story with poorly realised worldbuilding, but trying to conjure up what that would entail for me that brings to mind 'enjoyable flim-flam'. A book I might not put down and enjoy but...at the end of it all still missing quite a lot. Great books will have with amazing stories and great worldbuilding. Even horror ones ;). Just because it is set in the 'real' world does not mean the author can skimp on bringing to life a rich world for the characters to live and breath in. Dickens, Hugo or Tolstoy springs to mind for me personally on totally immersing me in their 'normal' worlds.

As for the sense of awe feeling with spectacle and sweeping panaromas in film...I oddly go the other way. Film is better suited for the personal and the emotional. Helms deep is a great battle sequence with some spectacular imagery, but it's good because you as a viewer are placed as a PoV in the thick of the action. It doesn't look like four men in costume trying to pretend to be thousands. Minas Tirith was well done too - but some of the long shots had me thinking 'oh Rome:Total War on steroids, very good!'. The two stand out moments of the battle for me are individual character's dialogue - one the inspirational speech from Bernard Hill (as a man it almost gives me tears to the eyes, I don't know why :p) and the 'I am no man' reveal when the Witch King gets a bit of a shock.

However as a SF geek, rather than a fantasy one, I'd argue that the best written SF does 'awestruck' in a way that no other medium can do, because IMO great SF should also have at its core big ideas as well as great characters, plots and worlds. I think I crave that 'sense of wonder' that actually understanding something big in actual science, philosophy or any intellectual endeavour brings me. So even if the ideas are fictional I still get that pleasurable feeling of my mind expanding :). The written word does this for me in a way that no other medium comes close.
 
I think I crave that 'sense of wonder'
I think it's really hard to do and combine realism.
In one of my series the Human Woman thinks she ought to feel awestruck being with these Aliens that had reached our current technology level 4,000 to 5,000 years ago. But on reflection it's because visually things only vary in artistic style and you don't know what is inside to make them go or how they were made. You also can't really have a sense of awe discovering the lacquer coating on some items is seamless artificial diamond. Only Apple Fanbois are in awe over an Apple Watch. Or possibly Jeb Bush, who bizarrely thinks a wearable device can replace an insurance scheme.

Of course film today seems to jump between shots of cropped heads suitable for a 4" screen and long shots that need a 72" screen in a small living room. Composition on TV and Cinema seems have gone down the drain with adoption of wide screen.

My daughter says no film or computer game photography or CGI beats the BGI, Brain Generated Images from Book input.
 
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Oh, I just knew you'd be along being all contrary ;)

@Phyrebrat Great books will have with amazing stories and great worldbuilding. Even horror ones ;). Just because it is set in the 'real' world does not mean the author can skimp on bringing to life a rich world for the characters to live and breath in. Dickens, Hugo or Tolstoy springs to mind for me personally on totally immersing me in their 'normal' worlds.

...

However as a SF geek, rather than a fantasy one, I'd argue that the best written SF does 'awestruck' in a way that no other medium can do, because IMO great SF should also have at its core big ideas as well as great characters, plots and worlds. I think I crave that 'sense of wonder' that actually understanding something big in actual science, philosophy or any intellectual endeavour brings me. So even if the ideas are fictional I still get that pleasurable feeling of my mind expanding :). The written word does this for me in a way that no other medium comes close.

Yep, you're right. I agree; I didn't mean to suggest that horror didn't require worldbuilding, but that if your writing is set in the real world (and present time, at that!) your audience has an automatic frame of reference that'd be missing in a new world. You don't really need to go into describing what a lion is, or a train, etc. I wouldn't call Dickens a world builder so much, but it's semantics really, because in the end, he really is describing a world, just a contemporary one that his audience would understand from their own cultural capital (had you said E.M. Forster I would have agreed anything you said because I love his style, but if you'd said Conrad I'd've gone 'lalalalalalala not listening' :p ).

Absolutely regarding SF and ideas - I think that is why I am totally unaffected by Arthur C Clarke's lack of characterisations; I enjoy the concepts or McGubbins behind his story.

pH
 
It's impossible to escape the effect of film and TV, especially from a young age. Additionally, we're a very visual species. IMO that means when someone first starts to create a story, it's inevitable that it will be imagined as a visual experience - and be written in a basic omniscient viewpoint in order to "show" the action. There's nothing wrong in that as a starting point, but by itself it's not enough.

Omniscient POV in modern fiction may be trying to capture the camera-eye view of drama the way TV and movies do. However, it's very different from the omniscient POV traditionally used in fiction, where the god-like author has a voice and speaks of things that don't happen on-screen. "And so it came to pass that the city of Corinth fell into faction and strife, the men abandoned the ways of their fathers, and the grass grew through the paving stones of the forum as the citizens stayed in their homes for fear of the flashing knife of revenge. Even green-bearded Poseidon turned his back on the city founded by his mortal children." You don't come across that kind of omniscient authorial voice anymore, because it has analogue in TV and film.

It used to be the case that it was - some older fiction seems to turn on awing the reader with the presentation of a fantastical world. But nowadays seeing them literally before our eyes has become routine with film, TV, and even computer games.

True. But I find the imagery inspired in my mind by well-crafted fiction to be superior to any TV show, movie, or computer game.

Over the past few decades, writers have increasingly sought to exploit the novel's one big selling point over all other media - getting inside the heads of the characters, so that we can experience the desires, conflicts, joys, and pains, of very different people. Sometimes these may be simple wish fulfilment figures - characters who are more powerful than us, giving the reader the imagined experience of being an alpha male or female. Other times it is the difference between characters that is the biggest draw.

Ultimately, it is not the personality of these characters, but their inner conflict, that offers the richest experience for a reader. Historically, novels have often attempted this anyway to some degree - the difference now is simply that there tends to be a deeper focus on that, because this is the one thing that a novel can do that no other media can.

This is probably the biggest impact a culture immersed in TV and movies has had on fiction. The argument has been made that it was the close-ups of movies that fostered an appetite to really get in the skin of a character. Before that, we were accustomed to observing fictional characters, having sympathy for them, but no really crawling into the skins and feeling like we are them.

Another influence is that since TV and movies can't get into the head of a character, they must express their feelings and thought very overtly and broadly. A character in a movie slams his fist on a desk when he's impatient and says "those idiots at city hall don't understand what closing down the youth centre will do to this community!" That can be handled much more subtly in fiction, but a lot of writers adopt the broad gestures of TV and movies out of habit.

When a show does demonstrate restraint, it's often admired as 'novelistic.' I'm enjoying the TV adaptation of Wolf Hall, not least because many of the most emotional and dramatic scenes show nothing more than a character gazing silently at another character, or reflecting on a recent encounter. As the viewer, I'm invited to imagine what the character is feeling and thinking. That kind of collaboration between author and audience is common in prose, much less so in TV and movies, where you're almost never in doubt of exactly what you're supposed to be feeling moment to moment. I think authors should place more faith in their readers than TV and movie writers do, and let them fill in some of the gaps with their own imagination and sensibilities.

Of course film today seems to jump between shots of cropped heads suitable for a 4" screen and long shots that need a 72" screen in a small living room. Composition on TV and Cinema seems have gone down the drain with adoption of wide screen.

In SFF, that's certainly the case. Compare 2001 A Space Odyssey with the latest Star Wars movies, or Excalibur with the Hobbit movies. The genre is now all kinetic action, with no still composition. However, dramatic TV is where you go now for beautiful and clever composition. Breaking Bad and Mad Men offer tableaus that would make Stanley Kubrick proud.

My daughter says no film or computer game photography or CGI beats the BGI, Brain Generated Images from Book input.

Your daughter is wise. I remember when I came out of watching the Fellowship if the Ring with my buddies, turning to them and remarking that "it was incredible, almost as cool as the Middle Earth I conjured in my own imagination."
 
Do you believe that there is a shift in SF&F writing today that is becoming pronounced because of this?

I think the influence of visual stuff has increased very much over the last 10 years, and I would put this down to CGI and computer games. Personally, as a writer, I’m influenced quite a lot by films, either as concepts or as things to expressly parody, but they’re mainly fairly old films and lack the slick quality of over-produced big-budget modern films. Even in a film as violent as The Wild Bunch or Where Eagles Dare, there’s a willingness to let things play out, to build the world a little more solidly than a modern remake would. Computer games are, I think, a pretty pernicious influence (and I play a lot of them). Their characterisation is minimal, their settings repetitive and usually second-rate copies of other media, and dialogue awful. There have been recent improvements, but for every Bioshock or The Last of Us there’s a lot of Space Soldiers v Communazis playing out like a bad sequel to Aliens (a good sequel would be fine by me). We are moving forward in terms of quality, but in an area where the intended audience is a 12-year-old boy, it’s slow (out of interest, it seems clear that the actual audience isn’t predominantly 12-year-old boys at all).

If I was to pin this feeling of mine down, I’d say it was when I saw 300 in the cinema. This was the first time that I’d felt that a film was offensively stupid: not just daft entertainment, but utterly dumb. It was like having a bodybuilder shout “Sparta! Huh!” in my face for two hours.
 
Don't get me started on 300. Apart from the fact that how one could cheer on a society of anti-democratic, infant-killing pederasts it was all, as you say, utterly dumb. (And I think the bravest soldiers on the field were the 700 Thespians or so who all volunteered to stay in the rear-guard with the three hundred Spartans on the final day of the real battle - because there were tens of thousands of Spartans left back at home, whereas the Thespian contingent was every single hoplite that the city had and their loss represented a vast sacrifice. The Spartans of course could not do this sort of commitment, either for strange religious reasons or that they needed the soldiery to keep their slaves under control.)

Computer games are interesting. I too probably play far too many of them, but I've got a tendency to do sandbox games so things like characterisation and dialogue are things that are generally in my head, if there at all :) and not really provided for by the game itself. They do generate a great deal of secondary literature from the players who do have to fill in a great deal themselves - think of the fan fiction that The Elder Scrolls or Eve Online produces. (Admittedly I don't read much of it, because I have a suspicion it's not brilliant, but hey to be a writer you have to start somewhere and if that fires you up, then that's fine by me.)

I personally don't know - I'm a bit haphazard on what I'm reading at the moment, whatever comes to hand really - so its difficult for me to say if we as a genre are getting heavily influenced in a negative way by these flim-flam 2 hour SF&F films. I will say that the last few SF books I did read were 'action' based and I wasn't impressed at all by them. But there is still a great deal of good stuff lying out there too.
 
By how I see it the only way to break away from the influence of the media it is to study in depth some subjects until you reach the point where there is nothing to be proposed and you're forced to create yourself. Should be writing to influence the film.
 
I think the influence of visual stuff has increased very much over the last 10 years, and I would put this down to CGI and computer games. Personally, as a writer, I’m influenced quite a lot by films, either as concepts or as things to expressly parody, but they’re mainly fairly old films and lack the slick quality of over-produced big-budget modern films. Even in a film as violent as The Wild Bunch or Where Eagles Dare, there’s a willingness to let things play out, to build the world a little more solidly than a modern remake would. Computer games are, I think, a pretty pernicious influence (and I play a lot of them). Their characterisation is minimal, their settings repetitive and usually second-rate copies of other media, and dialogue awful. There have been recent improvements, but for every Bioshock or The Last of Us there’s a lot of Space Soldiers v Communazis playing out like a bad sequel to Aliens (a good sequel would be fine by me). We are moving forward in terms of quality, but in an area where the intended audience is a 12-year-old boy, it’s slow (out of interest, it seems clear that the actual audience isn’t predominantly 12-year-old boys at all).

This is going to sound terribly elitist, but I don't personally expect to find much worthwhile in terms of story from movies and games aimed at adrenaline-jacked 16-year-olds. When I hear that a game has a deep and mature story, I add the proviso for a videogame. I know a lot of people think that's unfair, but I see very little overlap between what I find engaging and moving and what a typical 16-year-old gamer enjoys. I feel like I have to be almost apologetic for being a different person than I was when I was an adolescent. And big-tent action movies aren't much better; they need to recoup those huge budgets with international box office, and that means writing for a mass audience that doesn't have english as a first language.

If I was to pin this feeling of mine down, I’d say it was when I saw 300 in the cinema. This was the first time that I’d felt that a film was offensively stupid: not just daft entertainment, but utterly dumb. It was like having a bodybuilder shout “Sparta! Huh!” in my face for two hours.

The 300 is execrable. It's like watching a more blatantly racist Triumph of the Will, with great lashes of homoeroticism thrown (there's nothing wrong with homoeroticism, except in this case it's targeted at an audience that would fiercely reject any suggestion that they enjoy seeing oiled and naked men pose and cavort in high-definition). When Gerard Butler denounced the Athenians as effete boy-lovers I almost choked on my drink. Then there's the depiction of the Persians. One of the reasons I was inspired to depict the quasi-Persians in my historical fantasy WIP as noble and chivalrous was as a corrective to the 300's noxious stereotypes.
 
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MWagner, I'd say most games can't match books for stories, but that's a shade unfair as games have to do lots of things as well as story, whereas a book just does the one thing. Would we judge books poorly for their bad gameplay? :p

There are a few good stories out there. The Last of Us is fantastic.
 
MWagner, I'd say most games can't match books for stories, but that's a shade unfair as games have to do lots of things as well as story, whereas a book just does the one thing. Would we judge books poorly for their bad gameplay? :p

There are a few good stories out there. The Last of Us is fantastic.

Yeah, I get that. But then I don't expect stories from my games. I play stuff like Total War: Rome, Europa Universalis, and X-Com. If I do play an RPG, it's an open-world game where I make my own story. I pretty much ignore the cut scenes and hackneyed storylines. I game for gaming, and read for stories.

However, I have heard enough good things about The Last of Us that I'm willing to give a try.
 

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