Story in Games closer to plays than screenplays?

[Alf-Life]

I was reading a book which was detailing the differences between a [theatre] play and a screenplay/movie, and it struck me that games, so often striving to be like movies, actually have more in common with the theatre than the cinema regarding story.

I mean, look, the camera in a movie tells you where to look, zooms in on facial expressions and basically shows the audience what they should be looking at - like a cutscene in MGS.
In theatre, the actors motion with their bodies with actions that would look 'too big' on-camera, and you're not 'told' where to look - like a scripted sequence from Half-Life.

Another thing is with regards to 'scenes'. The camera in a movie can jump around from location to location, even backwards or forwards in time. A theatre must use tricks if it is to do this, but in general, it's constricted to sets which aren't that easy to chop and change within a second of editing.
This is similar to 'levels', I guess in games.

Any thoughts?

[crazylegs]

interesting viewpoint but i wouldnt really cosider half-life a play

now a musical! that would be great

half life the musical
starring gordan freeman, alex vance and special guest star the g-man!!!!!

[Molloy]

Excellent point.

I think dialogue driven stories in general don't work too well in games. Something like Ico works well because most of the plot is visual. It's sort of a throwback to the 16 and 8 bit days.

Something like Street Fighter II tells you everything you need to know about the characters through sound, animation and level setting. With something like Tekken they throw in cut scenes but the actual ingame visuals don't have that level of character so you never care about them as much.

I was watching a show about Hitchcock recently and I could see alot of parralels with gaming. He was a rather big fan of silent movies. He thought they were something unique to the medium. But when talkies first appeared all the producers made the directors produce novel and play adaptations to legitimise cinema. It took him years of fighting with his producer before he could break out of this restrictive liscenced play/novel template and create films that had their own style of storytelling.

[rossman]

Its certainly an interesting subject, and was something I was very taken with in university.

There is a book by Brenda Laurel which might be of interest to you called 'Computers as Theatre'. I would imagine its a bit out of date now (it almost was when it was released) but she makes some good points regarding computers as a performance medium.