5 Reasons Why Games Should Not Be Like Films

1. They Are Always Too Long (for the story)! Oh man, I love a good long game. Like a Final Fantasy (X and prior) or something. Something with a big bold story full of great characters who over 60+ hours I come to love. What I don't love is a game with a cinematic story (ie. 90 - 120 mins of story) stretched out over 5 - 12 hours. Crysis 2 is a great example of this. It's like a 15 minute short movie stretched out over a series of really boring city levels. Top and tailing these levels are a bit of crap giving your yet another reason to change direction. Of course, every now and then a scripted event will happen, usually in the distance and you'll go ohhh and ahhh like a baby who's seen its first penguin. Cinema is a finely honed art. It has been honed over the last 100 or so years and let me tell you, they have the narrative beats down to a science. People have written books about it. Don't read them. Games, through necessity, can't follow these tried and tested narrative formulas so instead they just bloat out the travelling and fighting. For a start, the hero can't refuse the call to action (thus building suspense) because if he did that you'd have nothing to do. The heroes also rarely fail and require a good mentor because lets face it, failing in a game is game over. What you get 9 times out of 10 is a game with a weak and contrived plot that is just a series of expensive, well animated, but ultimately pointless set pieces that take the game out of your hands. A game needs the equivalent of a whole novel worth of writing just to stretch to 10 hours and have a decent story with good dialogue. Games like Final Fantasy 7, or Skyrim could probably fill a whole saga. Click "next" below to read our final part, "The Exception"...