yes it was unnecessary but given what they had to work with i felt they done a really good job.
He didn't. He said it was a convenient way to get straight to the action because games are interactive mediums, and are thus focused on act-2 like events.
He didn't do either. He pointed out that it's the most COMMON and most easily understood (and, one can assume by corollary, least difficult to **** up).
TBH I don't even think he knows that it's a rehash of System Shock, which was more of a problem for the credibility of his argument. And I wouldn't really consider it a subversion of the 3 act system (Garden State, iirc, was); it's just told in a different order.
I don't think he mentioned that using it was by default laziness. I'm pretty sure he said 'writers have GOTTEN lazy because it's so easy to just ignore act 1 now.' And it's not unsupported--In Medias Res really is used in almost every game.
GF is not a blank slate character because absolutely nothing you do affects his story. You have to make it up outside of the actual game for yourself (like Krynn was mentioning with M&B). As for HL2's storytelling, I could drag up the old thread if you really, really want to know why it was bad.
Don't know what you're going on about. I don't remember any philosophical snobbery. Point it out, please?
No, he doesn't say 'convenient' way, he says 'cheap' way, calls it a 'problem', then brushes off amnesia stories as 'lazy', all within a couple of sentences.
'A cheap way to get away without ever having to have a first act.' Why is it a 'problem' that F:NV 'doesn't concern itself with its theoretical first act'? Tell us why three act structure should be followed, if it should be. If it shouldn't necessarily be followed, then why should it be a problem, or seen as 'cheap', when games do not adhere to hackneyed storytelling principles from Grade 10 English?
They've gotten lazy but what they are doing is not laziness? I don't understand the distinction. He does write off amnesia stories as laziness, that's the point of the vid. He might not be so unquestioningly critical of In Medias Res across the board, but that appears to be because Bioshock bucked the trend in his opinion - except it really didn't as you said yourself.
That's not what I meant he should support. He should support the implication that In Medias Res is done 'cheaply' to get people more quickly into the action, when it also clearly works as a 'blank slate' device in non-linear games.
I said he was a hybrid. GF is clearly as much a blank slate as the F:NV courier because he has no dialogue or emotional response to anything, requiring the player to project their own. Players are required to project in a similar way when they make character-defining choices in games like F:NV. EC says this combination is bad, doesn't say why.
I know why it was good; I'll dig up the thread if I really, really want to know why some people thought it was bad that they weren't spoonfed.
Point out something that I didn't accuse him of? I said I respected the philosophising. I don't respect empty arguments based on arbitrary value judgements like he's making in this storytelling vid.
I just watched the entire vid again. He never once uses the word 'problem.' He never says the word 'lazy.' I don't know when these 'couple of sentences' occur where he says all these things. Here's what he says about amnesia:
I was the one who said it was lazy--and yes, it's lazy. It's lazy when you can use the same extremely jarring plot point because it conveniently puts aside the question of the first act IN EVERY GAME IT'S USED. It's flat-out avoidance by the writers: don't worry about the story for now, just shoot the bad guys and eventually, maybe 6 hours from now we'll piece together something resembling a plot when it doesn't matter anymore.
He directly addresses this too.
Using amnesia a few times to good effect was fine. Using it as often as it has been, at the cost of good story, is laziness.
In medias res and tabula rasa characterisation are completely independent of each other.
You're comparing an RPG, where your personality choices and characterisation actually affect the story, to a linear FPS, where you have zero choice or influence on your character or the story. Um, wat?
