Previously on Spectre Collie, I got alarmed at what I saw as the rising sentiment against storytelling in videogames. The people on the message boards and blog comments kept saying that storytelling and interactivity are mutually exclusive, that story-based games aren’t games at all! And notable people like Will Wright were making proclamations that the old ways are dead, and sandbox games are the future.

I did the most sensible thing in response: I made a game that proves storytelling and gameplay can not only co-exist peacefully, but can support and enhance each other, turning videogames into the most engaging storytelling medium there is.

Wait, hang on — I didn’t do that, because really, who has that kind of time? Instead, I started writing a series of lengthy posts on a low-traffic weblog about it. And as it turns out, I was being a little reactionary. It’s never a good idea to interpret postings on message boards and comments on weblogs as being accurate, objective indicators of public opinion. And Will Wright’s championing sandbox games is about as alarming as Frank Miller advocating stories about whores.

Three of last year’s biggest releases — The Orange Box, Mass Effect, and BioShock — were mostly story-driven, and the two that I’ve played found ways to start innovating with storytelling in a big-budget high-profile title. And if you look at the schedule for this year’s Game Developers’ Conference, you’ll see dozens of seminars about how you approach videogame storytelling. So either the field is still wide open for story-based games, or game developers will say anything to get a free pass to a conference.

Still, I know where my paychecks are coming from, and I do like to pontificate, so I’m going to keep on trying to debunk the Myths of Interactive Storytelling, responding to actual statements I have read on the internet.

Myth 3: Storytelling is inherently passive.

This one usually comes up whenever a Hollywood type announces plans to get into the videogame industry. They’re all doomed to fail, apparently, because movies and TV shows have nothing in common with games, and there’s nothing to be learned from passive, old-school media. Every time you try to apply the techniques of cinematic storytelling to a game, you’re killing the interactivity and stabbing a dagger into Mario’s heart.

The reason this is bunk is pretty simple: it assumes that communication between an artist and audience can only go in one direction at a time. In a movie, you shut up and watch while the filmmakers tell you a story. In a game, you’d like to get to playing at killing bad guys and saving the world, but the designers refuse to shut up and instead keep trying to tell you a story.

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Helvetica is an hour and a half of people with bad hair and bad accents talking about fonts.

I don’t want to discourage people from seeing it, really. It’s a very well-made documentary, doing all the things a documentary should do. It stays neutral throughout (like you’d expect from the subject matter), but a couple of sections are downright clever. You can find plenty of reviews from people who never expected to be at all interested in a documentary about a font, but came out pleasantly surprised.

My problem with it is the same thing that pleasantly surprises people about it: it’s not quite a documentary about a font. They do a great job of giving you the history of it, and the intention behind its design and use, and showing how ubiquitous it’s become, and gauging all the different reactions to it.

But to do this in a film without its turning into a dry History Channel-style documentary, they have to interview a lot of people. People who have strong opinions about fonts. In other words, the kind of people you really wouldn’t want to be spending much time around in real life.

Part of my problem with the movie is that I like to believe that geekery is a contained phenomenon, and not some global pandemic that’s all part of the human condition. It’s like Sanctuary for the people inside the city in Logan’s Run* — I know that in the circles I travel in, people obsess over comic books and TV series continuity and the efficiency of algorithms; but I want to believe that there’s a better world outside where the people are free of that.

But this just perpetuates the idea that because of the Original Sin or something, we’re all mired in our own little worlds of pointless obsessions. I have to hear insufferable people claiming that they know they won’t be popular for this, but The People simply must hear their opinions of “Battlestar Galactica” or BioShock or “Sam & Max”. And now I realize that others have to hear insufferable people saying that Helvetica represents corporate oppression and war, or that they realize they are being iconoclasts and their views might not be popular, but they cannot condone using more than one typeface in a publication.

It’s movies like this that make me think humanity was just better off back when we had to spend all our time worried about finding food and not being mauled by large animals.

* The fact that I used Logan’s Run as an example merely proves my point.