Have you ever noticed that most of games are actually movies?
Think about it. Your actions make no difference.
You lose?
Oh, checkpoint, start again until you get it right and the story can go on.
To me, a vast majority of videogames are an animated movie where the play button is a complex combination of different buttons (↑ ↓ → ← ▲
◘ • X). The combination of those buttons may vary, but the ending result is the same: the story just keeps going.
I'd love to see a game where if you win or lose a battle, makes a difference on it, having a lot of differents endings. I know it would be expensive, or it would take a lot of more work, but that would make the game re-playable. After your first try, you could decide where to win or where to lose to see where it takes you.
The only games where your actions make a difference on the final result are multiplayer shooters (counter strike, for example), but there's no story. Or there is, but it comes down to
Terrorist wins or
Counter-terrorist wins.
Maybe there are games like the ideal kind of games I'm talking about, and perhaps I haven't found any of them because I'm not such a huge gamer. Of course it's fun to see what Kratos can do by pressing different buttons, but then that would mean that the enjoyment of a game is on the gameplay, so the story now becomes irrelevant.
Oh, but a game without story is just pointless! I play videogames because I can be part of the story that way!
Well, you aren't really part of the story if your actions make no difference. You could just watch a movie, where the only button you press is the
Play button, and there, the story goes lineal, just like a videogame where you MUST win so the story can keep going, and if you lose you either retry or start all over again.
Most games don't bifurcate.
There are books that does. The choose your own adventure type, where while you read, you can make choices.
So to me the only reason left to play most of games is just for boredom. To spend time when I have nothing to do. Not for the stories, just to play.
It happens with most of books too. But the point of a book is not the story (not completely), is the poetics of the author, is the how an author tells a story. Because if the whole point of a book were the story only, then harry potter would be like "there was this kid that almost gets killed by a mean magician but he escapes and then he grows up and meet people and does stuff and then beats the bad dude and the end".
The same with movies. You shouldn't focus on how loyal the adaptation was, but how the director tells the story.
You already know the story, you idiot. Why the hell would you like to hear THE SAME STORY AGAIN?
Of course changes needs to be done.
Not only for what I just wrote, but also for obvious reasons like you can't tell a 600 pages story in 2 hours. you can't even read it in that time. Unless the story is utterly shit or it has a lot of poetic pictures that can't really be traslated to the screen, or they can, but you can do it in only one frame if you wish.
Everytime you go to perceive any kind of art, have in mind that the point of it is to see how the author tells the story, either an original one or one based on a book/any other type of story-telling media.
On a whole different topic, I found an animators group from my country on Facebook.
Over 3300 members.
All I see is crap.
What the hell?
[/spoiler]
[/spoiler]