Books. They are good at stories right? But books are cheating because the imagination does half the work. The written word allows for a great number of freedoms that other media have yet to gain (parenthetical comments only work in writing). Films? Not so hot. In fact quite rubbish. Even the greatest films are totally inept at dealing with the big issues or telling good stories without the overuse of coincidence or predictability (take for example the new ‘Crash’, ohhhh I didd no dat racism was so complex them shits is deep).
Books and movies are over. Done. A new form of storytelling is here and it is a game. Not games in general, you understand, because games couldn’t tell a story if the whole industry depended on it. RPGs get over this by telling stories that are so long that your mind condenses all the bullshit bits – like talking to dogs or statues or boring cutscenes – into a story that seems to make sense. It’s what the brain does. It finds patterns in randomness. And in the case of RPGs the randomness is all that Japanese shit about crystals or souls or souls in swords or swords in crystals or steam in crystals etc. etc.
FPS overcome the problem of not being able to tell a story by copying film. That way emotionally retarded kidults like yourself are duped into thinking that Gears of War must have a great story because it is based on the film which was based on the book. Bullshit. It’s not a story. It’s rubbish. It’s what happens if every fanboy in the world wrote a story and you superimposed them over each other and took the bits that stood out the strongest. It’s a my-first-war-story in video game form.
Most games can’t tell a story to save their lives. Character development, despite what you might think, is not those sketches of tits that you find in the art of Street Fighter books. It should be about building characters that you might care about or that appear vaguely alive or deep. And even “platforms” like Second Life don’t really allow people to tell a story, or make their own story unless that story is about two middle age men, pretending to be girls, having some dry entry anal justice fun with another middle age man pretending to be a asthmatic puppy with the squits. Which could probably be made into a film, but it hardly qualifies as a story.
No, the game that has cracked story telling and characters is an unassuming little game called Animal Crossing: Let’s Go To The City. AC:LGTTC is best described by gamer laureate Richie as “A single player MMO,” but unlike the stale NPCs of other MMOs the characters take on a life of their own. Over the last few months I’ve lived in a town called Gaywood and the characters are so life like, I’ve divorced my real family and made the villagers my new family. This is part one of an ongoing saga telling the untold story of my family. Here are their stories told in screenshots. Enjoy.
WARNING: these stories deal with serious big issues, these are big people stories, kids, and contain content that you may find disturbing.
#1 Peggy’s Story. The very public breakdown of Gaywood’s first pigess.
From the beginning, Peggy and I had some good times together. We were as close as a twenty-something year old man’s avatar and a virtual pig could be. We’d play jumpy upskirts together and that classic game; ‘Let’s stare at the wall.’
Then one day I received this disturbing letter. I rushed to see Peggy but she was a changed pig. Those happy go lucky days were gone. Her eyes had lost their sparkle.
She began to have severe personality swings between bouts of existential depression…
…to a seemingly relaxed inner peace with herself. At times it seemed she was “back”…
But it wasn’t to last. In between bouts of rage she revealed a terrifying plan to me. A plan that would change Gaywood forever.
I tried to confront her and persuade her to reconsider the terrible plan. But it was to no avail.
She hinted that she might cut and run. I begged for her to stop. That night she disappeared. The next day it hit the village.
The flu had come to Gaywood.
Within days, the river flowed with the bodies of the deceased.
Some of the villagers tried to organise some vigilante justice. After all Peggy was the only pig in town. But they were too late. She’d scarpered.
Weeks later and the stench of the death caused by Peggy is still fresh in the villagers’ minds. Tom Nook, her abuser, survived the ordeal.
Would she be back to exact revenge? How has my friend changed? Will the psychological scars ever heal? One day she will be back, I’m sure of it. Until then I keep an eye on Ol’ Tom to make sure that other villagers don’t suffer the same treatment in his vile hands.
Haha, I love all the stories you can pull out of Animal Crossing, and this one particularly made me giggle, good going. :D
On a related note it seems like you’re getting on well with the Wii version of AC, I couldn’t bring myself to buy a third version – is it worth buying when you own the DS and GC copies?
Yes definitely! Play all three at the same time. But if you do have friends with a Wii who play it then I would definitely recommend it plus you can transfer ‘some’ of the catalogue from the DS so it’s not too much of a slog to get a decent HRA rating going!
Oh god. Such a girl.