Why Bungie gets visual storytelling wrong (Destiny)

by Leviathan , Hotel Zanzibar, Sunday, July 26, 2015, 20:15 (3196 days ago) @ Cody Miller

You’re reading a book. How does the book engage you with the story? Not the way the author writes, or the situations and structures of the narrative, but how does the actual medium draw you in? Like everything, the answer is emotions, but the way, and the kind of emotions are specific to text. It appeals to your emotions through imagination, since everything that happens is happening inside of your head, with no real sense of time, chronology, or any sense that it is beyond your control. Your mind can stop, go over details you find important, and focus on particular things. A moment can hang in time or even reverse until you have processed it to your liking.

What about the visual arts? These engage your emotions in a completely different way. They work by simulation. We react immediately and viscerally to things, because the representations seem real. We see it. We hear it. It plays out in real time mimicking the way we perceive the world. The illusion is very convincing. If you stop reading a book for a second, nothing happens, since the book does not depend on the continuous nature of presentation. In fact, very few books are even meant to be finished in one sitting. But pause a film? The illusion breaks down completely.

So your emotional reactions to audiovisual media are intense, spontaneous, and more cathartic. Has a book made you cry? Maybe. Has a film? But has a book ever made you jump out of your seat and scream in fright? That I doubt. What’s on screen comes at you wether you want it to or not. With a book, since it’s all inside your head, you have the final say…

Is it any wonder that the Red Wedding elicited such a visceral and intense response? There were ‘reaction videos’ mere hours after the event, where people filmed other people watching it for the first time. People cried, screamed. These videos were played everywhere, even on Jimmy Fallon. But this is not the first time people are experiencing that event. The book came out many years prior. So why were there not accounts of the reactions of people reading the Red Wedding? There were parody reaction videos for sure, but note that these came after the show, and well, they are parodies. Why is it completely normal to see someone freak out when they see Rob Stark die, but be ridiculous if they do that when they read that he dies? Because visual media elicits emotional responses differently than text. (Also note the language. 'I saw him die'. It wouldn't make sense to say 'I read him die', but that you 'read that he died'. The text itself removes the immediacy of the event.)

Heh, some years ago my girlfriend was reading the book that contained the Red Wedding (I don't remember which novel has it - I've only read the first book) and one day I got of the shower and she was just sitting there balling her eyes out. Anytime I asked her what was wrong she just started crying again and the rest of the day she was just slumping around.

I was surprised when I got to that point in the show of course, but had nowhere near that kind of reaction. :)

Books and text excel at Lore and Legend. The world in the Hobbit and LotR was so big, expansive, detailed, and mysterious. I’m sure a lot of people wanted to be there. Your mind fills it in and wants to know all the details. This appeals to your sense of wonder and curiosity, and you emotionally engage. But did you feel the same way reading about a battle, that you did when you saw Luke blow up the Death Star?

Yes, the first time I read the multi-chapter Battle of Pelennor Fields was an amazing, engaging experience, and every time I randomly pick up Return of the King for a minute I find myself engrossed in that excitement again.

While I agree that books and films do generally have different strengths and pretty much agree with your point in this thread, great passion can still illicit all kinds of responses from an audience it resonates with, no matter the medium. From my experience, if the reader has a good imagination and the author writes in a way that keys into it, a book can be just as powerful in the way that films can be.

I think a lot of your examples of comparing famous reactions to films and television to those of novels are not fair comparisons. Films and television are much more popular and accessible than novels and, perhaps more importantly, generally experienced by that wider audience around the same time when they are released or broadcast. The number of people who had read the Red Wedding was far less than the people who watched it, and since that startling, shocking event in the book occurred not on one specific Sunday night across the world but instead in different places in different times for each reader, you're not going to hear about it in the same way. When the Red Wedding happened in the TV show, you could talk about it with others at the water-cooler the next day. When my girlfriend read it she had no one to talk to.

The bridge doesn't fall when someone randomly jumps up and down here and there, but when everyone jumps up and down at the same time. Films and TV have the power that kind of cultural impact while books generally do not, and I think that taints your examples above. You did't hear about one person reading the Red Wedding whenever they got to it, but you did hear when millions watched it at the same time.

Perhaps a better comparison would be the release of the novel Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. Since that series had crazy, uncommon numbers of readers and by that point were ready to gobble up another book immediately upon release, you DID hear about the reaction to a certain death near the end. You could almost hear the shocks and cries that night and it became a meme the next day.

This is why having characters who think and respond and act like a real person would is so critical. Even if you have never seen or heard anything about Mad Max, you know just by watching the film that it’s a world after a nuclear war where water and oil are precious. The film doesn’t need to say that at all, because you get that by what the characters do! But Destiny, completely bludgeons you with a guy telling you about the traveler and the darkness and all that. Did Halo have an opening narration saying “Humanity is at war with the covenant, blah blah blah?” Nope, you went straight into the action, but it was easy to piece together based on what you were seeing the characters doing. We know Humanity is losing, we just got our ass kicked and had to crash land on Halo! This is why the opening title crawl to ODST is stupid; it actually DID that despite perhaps having the best potential characters with which to tell all that. Games benefit MOST from show don't tell, because we have complete access to the world via interaction!

Agreed. And what's surprising is that Destiny does tell that story very well in the art direction - as in you can learn so much about the Destiny universe by observing the beautiful, detailed environments. There are just no characters present or dynamic enough to engage with and bring the story up to the excitement Halo had.