The Art of Storytelling

I haven't written much about video games lately, mainly because I've been in Korea and not playing a whole lot of video games for a while. I think I mentioned Uncharted 3 in my last post, but I have to tell you that this is the only game I managed to get on the day it came out since I left home. Mom helped, of course, by preordering and picking up Uncharted 3 on the day it came out, November 1st. It arrived here in Korea on November 11th and I managed to start playing it on November 12. I finished the story mode at 2am on November 20th. I'm not nearly done with this game because it has a great multiplayer component, but the story of the campaign mode doesn't have any more surprises, so I can talk about it now.

The story is titled "Drake's Deception" and focuses around the relationship between Nate Drake and his father figure and partner in crime, Victor Sullivan. I thought it was really interesting that the game started with a flashback to "20 years ago" when Nate was in his early teens. The game did something I didn't think it could do, and that's improve on the last iteration. Uncharted 2 received perfect ratings and Game of the Year awards from just about every major publication. The technical stuff was better than Uncharted 2, the graphics, gameplay, everything was better. The story was far better, even going so far as to have some real downer moments where you see Nate looking pathetic and beaten down. In the last game the lowest point we saw Nate was with a bullet in his stomach hanging off of the edge of a cliff in the Himalayas. In this one we see him dead tired, laying his head down on Elena's lap saying "I'm sorry." Ann Hennig is an amazing story teller, I wish she'd write a novel with these characters.

Now speaking of storytellers, I think there's a divide between someone who can come up with a good story, and someone who can write the dialogue and wield the pen the write way to make a story truly great. Case in point: Dan Brown. He's gotta be really rich after his success with The Davinci Code and Angels and Demons. I've seen the movies, and I thought the stories were great, complex, and well suited for film. I've recently been reading The Davinci Code, and I think it's a great story, but something about the writing just doesn't work for me. Somehow its believable on film, but in the book I'm finding something about the sentence structure or dialogue to be a bit disingenuous. I think he's created a great story, but that somehow it falls flatter than it should. Now, I don't think Dan Brown is a bad story teller at all, he certainly writes better than I do and has some huge feathers in his cap. I just think that there is a difference between a good storyteller and a great one. That's not even a fair statement, there's a difference between a great storyteller and a stellar storyteller.

I would love to be a novelist. I think I have the basics of writing and grammar down pretty well. I can speak two languages. I can be creative. My problem is on follow through. Somehow I missed the beginning of NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month, which would have been a great way to get started. Maybe I'll check it out and see if there's any deadline goals or anything that I can just impose on the month of December or something.

Anyhow, the whole point of this ramble is that I think Uncharted 3 was quite inspiring in the sense that it was just a great story, told well, and produced perfectly. It's even got me wanting to read a nonfiction book. Thanks to the kindle store, I'll be reading The Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T. E. Lawrence because he was a significant figure in Uncharted 3. I think it's funny how an intelligently made video game wants me to do something more intelligent like brushing up on history.