Destiny's Union

I love video games just as much as I like good written stories. But I am greatly amazed by video games because itself is a medium is composed of various elements, such as visual art, writing, spoken dialogues, gameplay, animation cutscenes and music that works in tandem to create an immersive experience for the players. Written stories, particularly novels and short stories leave room for your imagination to recreate the scene being described in the writing, which include the smell, the touch and the feeling of the character. Your imagination of the scene may be limited by the words being written. If the description fall short, then the readers would usually fill in the blank with their imagination. In fact, all good stories encourages the viewers to use their imagination to enhance the storytelling experience. In some cases, the viewers were able to use their imagination to fill in the plot holes!

If that is the case, then video game is more superior because the simultaneous use of video game elements mentioned above provides a consistently conductive atmosphere for the players' imagination to freely fill up the blanks in the scene. In writing, the author would describe, in words, of seeing a white castle. But in a video game, the white castle would have been animated or illustrated, and even come with some sort of backstory to emphasize the significance of the building. Through these elements, the players can recreate the game world setting in their minds easily. As such, this makes more room for the players to use their minds to study the plot events and the interaction between characters. Here, the use of intermission situations help give players some room for breathing and digest the information of the game storyline to-date. This is a rather unique feature of video games, particularly those story-driven games, because players would appreciate the given space and time.

One major drawback of video game is that the gameplay have to be entertaining. It's very difficult to avoid making a video game without repetitive gameplay elements. However, it's highly important that the gameplay element needs to be entertaining. Otherwise, players would stop playing the game and miss out any interesting story of the said game. I have to admit that it is not an easy task and many video game companies could not consistently achieve this goal. Nevertheless, I applaud video game makers to continue their effort to deliver the best video games (stories) to us.

p/s: Most of my blog titles are named after the songs I am listening. Usually I listen to video game soundtracks.