Kids play tons of video games, which is great. Games are not only fun, but they can be valuable educational tools as well.
The problem is, many kids don’t read books anymore. And with such entertaining, 21st century spectacles at our fingertips, who has time for hard-to-access, brain-straining storylines locked inside ancient tomes anyway? Right?
The badass super soldier. An evil villain who’s evil for no apparent reason. Flirtatious, big-breasted women.
Said simply, clichés abound in video games. If you’ve ever played video games, you’re probably familiar with their trite characters and predictable plots, even in the biggest titles. At best, these hackneyed elements are brainless fun. But they also get annoying really fast, and what’s more, they keep games from fulfilling their potential.
We’ll always have our B-quality productions. Even so, some games have already transcended the clichés, and we should be demanding the same qualities from all of our titles.
Would Edgar Allan Poe have written storylines for video games?
With a game like Dante’s Inferno under development at EA, anything seems possible. If we can have an adaptation of the Dante Alighieri’s epic poem — a staple in high school classrooms across the country — why not other literary works as well?
Hollywood has borrowed time and again from classic books, and it’s about time video games do the same. So from magical realism to romantic adventures, here are 5 masterpieces that would make great game concepts.
Gamer Culture, Nintendo DS, PC, PSP
Imagine, if you will, a world in which you’re on the plane ride home to visit family for the holidays and suddenly you realize that your Laptop, DS, or PSP’s batteries have been completely drained and you forgot the charger back in your apartment. A world of terror and fright, as now, you are back home, with not a gaming system in sight. What is there to do without your beloved games? Fear not, for there are alternative solutions to the mind-numbing boredom you may face.
Game Design, Gamer Culture, Movies, TV
“Tell me a story.” It is a phrase that embodies pure innocence, that we all uttered as our parents tucked us into bed at night. As we grew older, we replaced the spoken narratives of our parents with picture books. As we grew even older still, those were replaced with novels and we learned to appreciate television and film as artistic media. Now that we are old enough to appreciate the beauty of a good story, we have even more places to find them. Each entertainment medium is capable of telling moving tales, but they are all done in drastically different ways. What is it you want from your stories? And where do you look for them?
Books. Yeah, you know. Those hard things with words in them and few or no pictures? They’re not all about hobbits or boy wizards, and they aren’t all made into movies and then games. While Hollywood may absorb classic literature and secrete something that passes for a movie version and a game, some classic literature might actually make for good video games…if they skip the movie and stay true to the freaking book. Finally, being an English Major pays off.
“Classic literature” is a relative term, but I see it as stories that have stood the test of time and inspired other works for generations. And no, that’s not what I was told in English 101. Even if you have never read a book without the term “strategy guide” in the title, I’m sure even these stories sound familiar.
