Laura Reyna at 2009-10-27 14:07:58:

I guess I'm in the monority with this "the best writing is in television" opinion.

I don't see it.

I've tried watching Oz, Entourage, Sex and the City, Weeds, Mad Men, Lost, among other series of recent yrs... none of them held my interest for more than a couple of episodes.

I did enjoy Deadwood and Rome, but even those got old after a season & a half. Very few ideas can sustain themselves for very long. After a while, TV shows lose their excitement and seem redundant to me.

Alexy at 2009-10-28 00:56:46:

i know this isn't a video game blog, but game-writing is increasingly interesting ... and i'll just say i think mckee is WAY off the mark on his comments on video games.

i especially object to his claim that games "by their nature, cannot be rich, subjective, and have all the other qualities of art."

games are an 8-12 hour experience, usually; movies about 90-130 minutes (usually) ... so, if anything, games can be far more expansive, deep, rich and subjective than a feature film, which is strikingly static by comparison.

note: i love feature films and TV, and i also love McKee's book "Story," but i think his views of videogame storytelling are really condescending and unfortunate.

Scott at 2009-10-28 09:11:53:

@Alexy: I concur. The stories in videogames are a reflection of the interest in gamers immersing themselves in a story universe, and so in some ways, they're even more complex -- not necessarily better -- than movie and TV 'worlds.'

And I don't know if you saw this in the NY Times yesterday:

"Yet I had never seen hundreds of people enter the concert hall a full hour before showtime until Sunday night, when “Video Games Live” sold out the hall. There were a few things to actually do in the lobby beforehand, like participate in a Guitar Hero competition and a costume contest, but most of the crowd showed up early just to hang out.

Tommy Tallarico and Jack Wall, the video-game music composers who created and direct “Video Games Live,” put on a captivating, proudly bombastic show. But that demonstration of community on the part of the audience was almost as impressive as anything on the stage.

That is not faint praise. The term “multimedia presentation” is dry, but it is perhaps the only way to fully describe the spectacle of several dozen classical musicians, the Temple University Concert Choir, two guitarists and a female flutist dressed as an elf, all playing music from the Japanese video games Chrono Cross and Chrono Trigger while three large video screens suspended above the stage displayed scenes from the games in sync with the music."

Amazing how deeply ingrained into all aspects of our culture videogames have become.

John M Osborne at 2009-10-28 12:40:52:

Actually, by definition, a video game is "subjective". Sometimes it's rich, sometimes it's dreadfully simple - but in any craft, one can appreciate elegance.

Further, there's a tension between character and plot that's pretty interesting. The most sandboxy games are all about character - character motivation RUNS plot, literally. So you have to pepper the player with motivation, and see where they go from there. The player becomes said character, and viola, plot. In the most linear games, plot literally drives characters through.

But this is another discussion for a different topic - but it is something to think about, and I'd love to see analysis on this.