Happy birthday, Mario

Activities will surely last for the whole of the Christmas season, but it is today that Nintendo and the world celebrate Mario 25th anniversary. That makes it a good day to start discussing writing for videogames in our workshop, a new, unknown and exciting field.

Mario is proof that you don’t need great texts or great stories to make an exciting videogame: princess kidnapped by ugly monster plus hero to the rescue are enough excuse. It’s more than others offer: the basic Pong or the classic Tetris don’t even need that much.

But what happens when our game wants to tell a story? Or when we want to tell a story through a game? (I guess it’s not the same, is it?). The answer, my friends… we’re still working on it.

Cinema was born as a Carnivàle show, and took a while to find its own language. As the technical posibilites expanded (sound, colour… and now 3D), the grammer of that language grew richer. Videogames have followed a similar process, only faster: while techonology allows high quality sounds and graphics and all kinds of control systems, interactivity in narration is stillin its infancy. Indeed it’s the most fashionable topic among professionals in the industry. There are memorable cases of great novelists hired to script games who failed miserably because they didn’t know anything about the medium they were writing for.

During the next few days we’ll start our approach to the topic.

Metroid: Other M

Storytelling in videogames is a hot topic in the industry, but not the other way round: in literary circles, videogames are systematically ignored.

In our Writing Workshop we try to pay attention to every means of storytelling, so we’ll be doing our best to fill that gap. At some point I plan to record a session of our Spanish-language podcast devoted to this subject, but in the meantime I’ll try to keep ths blog updated with news or quotes on the topic.

Several specialized blogs reported yesterday the statements by Yoshio Sakamoto, co-creator of the Metroid saga, regarding one of the new function in the forthcoming “Metroid Other M“: the Theatre Mode.

[It] lets you view all of the cutscenes linked together seamlessly as a single movie… it’s hard to fully communicate a storyline in a video game with just one playthrough… It lets you make a lot of discoveries, things you missed or dialogue that makes more sense in retrospect. I hope it helps people understand the story better.”

We’ve seen other developers tell their game’s story through videos and cutscenes, sometimes in detriment of playability (we’re not looking at anyone here), and it seems the balance might break again? The debate is alive and we’ll keep an eye on how it develops.