The Longest Journey: Visual Dependence

I was a major bookworm during my K-12 schooling.  Now when I try and read something solely for pleasure, I find myself impatient, usually unable to hold my attention on the book for more than twenty minutes or so.  At first I thought this had to do with what sort of work I was doing in college.  Being an English and writing major, I tend to look more toward visual media such as movies, video games, and graphic novels for entertainment purposes.  The last thing I feel like doing after I finish my reading assignments is to pick up another book.

The more I think about it though, this impatience with written text seems to have something to do with the nature of the medium itself.  In many basic ways, books struggle to compete with the sensation of more visual media.  When you read a book, there are no visual depictions of what is playing out, you have to create them in your mind's eye.  You have to hear the voices of the characters in your head.  Movies, television, video games... they all eliminate the need for this sort of effort and imagination.  Your eyes and ears are bombarded with stimulation, easily achieving the instant gratification of being pulled into a story or world.  Experience an entire tale in two hours, not twenty.

Don't get me wrong: I love books, and I bemoan the onset of E-readers and other such devices that shift away from the classic paper-and-ink combo that has stimulated the minds of humanity for centuries.  The sad thing is, as technology improves we're conditioning ourselves to find literature less and less appealing.

What got me thinking about this actually doesn't have much to do with books at all.  However, I feel that this onset of technology hasn't just affected the way we experience books, but how we've been trained to experience storytelling itself. 

When I have free time, I'm always on the lookout for a good story, be it a book, movie, or game.  In high school, I stumbled across a TV show on the G4 network called CinemAddicts, which aired user-edited play-throughs of story-heavy video games.  Essentially, they would mash all of the game's cutscenes together into one big movie, with small bits of game-play left in to fill in the gaps.  One of these episodes focused on a game called Dreamfall: The Longest Journey.

  Once I found out the game was a sequel about ten minutes into the show I chose not to pay too much attention, even though I was interested.  I didn't want to ruin the original's story by watching part two.  Nevertheless, I filed Dreamfall away on my mental to-play list, thinking I'd look into it at a later date.

As it turns out, that "later date" was just two weeks ago, nearly four years later.  My memory of the game was jarred when I read a list of the top 10 female protagonists in video games.  April Ryan, star of the original game (The Longest Journey) was on the list.  I looked the game up on Steam, and got to playing.

Now, this game was originally released twelve years ago, during the holiday season of 1999.  The late 90's were a point of transition for many game developers.  In an attempt to do away with wall-of-text storytelling, the concept of having fully-voiced characters and cinematics was being experimented with more and more, pushing the boundaries of the technology and storage available at the time.

The Longest Journey is a point-and-click adventure game.  The game consists mostly of exploring the environment presented onscreen with your mouse, clicking on things in order to pick up objects, solve puzzles, or interact with characters.  The game is fully-voiced, but due to graphical limitations the character models do little more than gesture slightly with their arms or move their heads up and down when they speak. 

What this amounts to is that a vast majority of the game is spent listening to the story unfold while looking at mostly-static scenes:

Like so.

 I got really antsy playing this game.  I was pulled in by the story, but the presentation threw me off.  It wasn't visually-stimulating enough to hold my attention just with what was going on onscreen, and I almost always finished reading the subtitles far before the character finished delivering the line of dialogue.  I wasn't content sitting back and letting the voice actor finish reciting the line- I often went for the instant gratification, skipping past a character's line immediately after I finished reading it, forcing the narrative to move at a faster pace. 

I felt caught in a strange limbo of story experience: the scenes weren't compelling enough to sit there and watch, but were too short to warrant listening to while multitasking with some other activity.  I felt like I was cheating the voice actors by just reading the text and not listening to them deliver it... and so the only thing I could find to hold my attention on their delivery during longer scenes was to stand up and do some stretches while listening.

The story itself was rather fun and interesting, and April was a compelling character... but as with my inability to read contently for long periods of time nowadays, I found my attention drifting because the game wasn't fast-paced enough to compete with modern entertainment I've been trained to emotionally respond to.

I'm interested in getting around to playing Dreamfall and comparing the experience.  Dreamfall came out in 2006, boasting far fewer graphical limitations and a much more cinematic story presentation.  Something tells me I'll be a lot more engrossed.  And I'm a little ashamed.