God of War man bored of storytelling

Tuesday 18 July 2006
David Jaffe, the man behind the incredible PS2 game God of War, has been expressing his dissatisfaction with attempts to tell stories in games, on his consistently entertaining blog.

He says he is losing interest in games that are typically story driven and has "lost interest in making any kind of game that does not fully and only embrace interactivity in the most purest sense".

Jaffe then goes on to make one of the best/worst analogies ever to describe the role that storytelling has in games:

"To me, most (all?) story based games are like taking a trumpet and playing it a little, but also using the brass exterior of the trumpet to carve a story on to a wall. Sure you can do it, and you may even have a nice story scratched on to the wall when you are done.

"But it's not really what the trumpet is for and there are a hell of a lot of easier ways to write a story. Plus, you've got this nice, shiny trumpet - which is now all scratched up - just sitting there, begging to be played, begging to be used as it was intended."

Um, yes.

He then goes to explain that he wants to work on projects that speak the true language of videogames and not one that take "elements from other media and try to squish those elements into a product".

For more weirdness like this, why not take a look at David Jaffe's blog.