Gamasutra posted an article from the Hollywood and Games Summit on The Art of Pitching. It is an interesting read because it shows just how far the divide between games and film remains, partly because the gaming industry still hasn’t matured enough to create great stories that could stand on their own. Our industry’s greatest storyteller is probably Hideo Kojima, and that’s something I wouldn’t be entirely comfortable with. Western developers certaininly have a greater grasp of traditional storytelling – one would think Bungie with Halo and David Jaffe with God of War are probably the closest to converging games and storytelling. But I disagree. Although Halo and other games have a limited extended universe, these are mostly due to their unexpected sucesses and the desire to maximize the exposure of their franchises rather to expand on their lore. In a sense, they are limited because they were made as games first and foremost, rather than as games made to tell a story.

Look at the huge worlds of World of Warcraft, Anarchy Online and EVE. MMORPGs by default have cities, planets, even universes full of content. The boundaries of these have been defined within the game, with the exception of Second Life, and a story can be extracted from the most miniscule of elements within that game world. These can be tailored for any medium – books, film, comics, etc.

Probably the best recent example of storytelling within a game was Donald and Geremy Mustard’s Advent Rising. The story, which was originally planned as a trilogy of titles, was first storyboarded in comic book form and then farmed out to scifi author Orson Scott Card to create a fully realized screenplay. Although sales of the game nearly put Majesco, its publisher, out of business, and technical problems marred the final product, it was recognized for: an engaging story, creative art style, and a motion-picture quality orchestral soundtrack. In order of importance – story, visuals, sound – these characteristics are essential for any medium. It just so happens that the game industry doesn’t prioritize them the same way.

I think game designers are selling themselves too short. We all have great ideas but are shoehorning them into design documents, rather than letting ideas breathe and take on a life of their own. These stories need the freedom to grow, only after which they would be ripe enough to tell.

Next Generation has posted the Ten Greatest Years in Gaming. Among them is the best year of my life, 1996. Everything about that year was awesome. The PSX. The Saturn. WipEout, NiGHTs, Virtual On! and Saturn Bomberman (on the Saturn). Still playing Snatcher on my Sega CD (and being able to buy it for $30 from a newsgroup trader). Millennium and X-Files on a lethal Friday night lineup that will never be topped. Partying with $20 on a weekend night and coming home with change. An entourage of friends. My first new car. Trainspotting. The best music of any generation.

Most important – the freedom to enjoy it all.

I just wanted to give props to myself for having the foresight to request a next-gen continuation of the Colony Wars franchise. 1UP’s 1UP Yours Podcast this week said the same thing.

Next time I’m in town, you guys are buying!

The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion has lit up the sales charts this year, and has received heaps of praise from the press. It is, quite frankly, the greatest thing since slice bread to hit your game console or PC.

But in five years, or even two years time, will it matter? Will the success of the open gameplay and 100 hours of freedom in the Elder Scrolls world influence other games?

Bethesda has been making games like this for years. Not just the Elder Scrolls series either. Pirates of the Caribbean originated as Sea Dogs II, a pirate adventure in the same vein of Morrowind, but it was snatched up by Disney as a movie tie-in, which meant a drop-dead date to coincide with the film’s release. Which, ironically, drop-dead is what the game did, though no fault of Bethesda’s, because of the limited window to sufficiently QA the large, open-ended world. And of course there’s the vaporware Fallout 3, which has made a pretty good poster at the last two E3s but not much else.

Arguably, Oblivion has sold past expectations, and is one of the biggest, if not the biggest, hit Bethesda has had. But glance over the games shown at this year’s E3, and you’ll be hard-pressed to find more than a couple titles from the same mold. Are companies frightened at the immense effort necessary to put together such a title? Is the water just that much better at Bethesda? It seems more developers are aiming at World of Warcraft’s magic, although there can only be one WoW before the expected bounty becomes fragmented by competition.

So in five years, what will the landscape look like? Will Oblivion clones graciously scatter the gaming landscape? Or will we just settle for Fallout 3 and Elder Scrolls V amongst a dead sea of failed MMORPGs and iterative franchises? Which really asks a greater question, are we learning as an industry? Without innovation, I fear it is in for a cleansing.

If anyone wants to get into the game industry, the best place to start would be reading post mortems in Game Developer. Generally written by the game producers, these post mortems offer a glimpse of what it really takes to create a game, from idea to implementation.

Next Generation has started to get into the act, and they’ve posted a post mortem on the Atlus title Steambot Chronicles. What makes it even more interesting is how impressions of the game are decidedly different between the US and Japan.

A couple of zingers worth mentioning:

On a related note, we knew that Steambot’s sincere ‘tude would clash with G4′s snarky ‘tude, but we sent them a reviewable copy against our better judgment. A few of our titles are great fits for G4, but not Steambot, so we’ll be more selective with what we send them in the future. (That’s a big downer: We lust for the exposure of mainstream outlets, but can’t always trust those outlets to give fair and accurate coverage to our hardcore titles.)

A GamePro editor messaged us after receiving a review build, asking about nonexistent “bugs,” so we were prepared ahead of time for an iffy review

Click on the link to read the entire articled. And aspiring game developers, take notes…

Just as I was coming down hard on OXM, and upon receiving my final issue before I let my subscription run out, the editors of the magazine finally came up with an article worth reading: The 20 Best Xbox Games You Never Bought.

I’m not going to list them here, because I encourage even non-Xbox owners hunt down the article and give it a read. But I will mention it is so refreshing to see actual sales counts for titles printed. Many times, the only thing we see are monthly ranks and platinum statuses, the occasional press release applauding a new release or the more-than-often editorial chiding us consumers because we didn’t buy a title we should have. For instance, we all knew that Psychonauts and Advent Rising hurt Majesco, but I never realized just how much those two releases crippled the company: only 57,000 copies of Psychonauts sold for Xbox? And just over 64,000 for Advent Rising? What is also interesting is that serious game-of-the-year candidate Chronicles of Riddick sold a meager 250,000 copies. Crazy!

Check out the July 2006 issue for the complete read. It’s the one with F.E.A.R. on the cover. Kudos OXM crew!