No Time To Play

Remember this article from three months ago, which decried the treatment classic game franchises get nowadays? Turns out, the feeling is shared. Which isn’t exactly surprising, and maybe I wouldn’t have bothered mentioning it, but for the remarks I made in my previous article.

See, the fact that many modern games (and movies) have terrible stories can be forgiven. It’s a matter of fashion, and fashions go as easily as they come. But when you make a sequel of a cult classic from decades ago, turning it into a brainless GFX-fest — as is the current trend — simply can’t go unnoticed.

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So, I spent much of last week preparing and then running an RPG session. Normally, I suck at making up stories (believe me, I tried for years). But as a game master, I’m actually adequate, or so my players tell me. Which used to puzzle me: if static, linear storytelling is hard, interactive storytelling should be much harder, right?

It took me a long time to understand that it’s the other way around. With the imagination of other people helping you, it should be much easier (for reasons I will explain in a moment). But this conclusion raises another question: if that’s the case, why do videogames, as a rule, have such sucky stories that some people question whether they should try for stories at all?

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The browser is tempting as a game development platform, for a variety of reasons. But while output is pretty much standardized now that we have <canvas>, input is still a problem. Or so I thought.

That’s because people keep complaining how making DOM events work across browsers is a pain, blah blah. And for a while I listened to the complaints and just didn’t bother. But I should have.

See, I have this game called Square Shooter (also available as an Opera widget). Due to the nature of the gameplay, I need to track the position of the mouse inside the canvas. Easy enough, right?

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