Hm, doesn't the non-correlation of Super Mario's story structure and The Hobbit's structure mean merely that one ought to choose more suitable titles to compare? If it's something with Mario's relative antiquity, consider the Ultima games; if it's something with similar influence and reach across multiple decades, Final Fantasy (about which game journalists younger than I are now gushing with nostalgia, since FF6--probably the one with the most striking story--has reached its twentieth anniversary).
I think the greater influences upon Buffy's Big Bad structure are comics and tabletop RPGs (or rather, in the latter case, how people tend to run them).
FWIW, I find that some of the seemingly open-ended games of the past few years resolve tightly to a set of rails: one's a tourist under the production team's strict supervision, not an explorer. ETA In contrast, hardly anyone new to it loves Nethack; the Elder Scrolls titles have become more and more constrained in their putatively open-ended landscape (the peak was Morrowind in 1997 2002 [duh, self, always check]); ditto Civ, which has locked down the planet well enough that the next one will reattempt alien contact.
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Date: 2014-05-02 04:26 pm (UTC)Hm, doesn't the non-correlation of Super Mario's story structure and The Hobbit's structure mean merely that one ought to choose more suitable titles to compare? If it's something with Mario's relative antiquity, consider the Ultima games; if it's something with similar influence and reach across multiple decades, Final Fantasy (about which game journalists younger than I are now gushing with nostalgia, since FF6--probably the one with the most striking story--has reached its twentieth anniversary).
I think the greater influences upon Buffy's Big Bad structure are comics and tabletop RPGs (or rather, in the latter case, how people tend to run them).
FWIW, I find that some of the seemingly open-ended games of the past few years resolve tightly to a set of rails: one's a tourist under the production team's strict supervision, not an explorer. ETA In contrast, hardly anyone new to it loves Nethack; the Elder Scrolls titles have become more and more constrained in their putatively open-ended landscape (the peak was Morrowind in
19972002 [duh, self, always check]); ditto Civ, which has locked down the planet well enough that the next one will reattempt alien contact.