XIII is about amnesia?

[Anders_Hallin]

@hermyhermit

The movie Memento used a very similar plot device to great effect, I wonder if the director played PS:T. :)

Enter Brian Koontz.

[Mark_Asher]

@Mike_Cathcart

I’m wondering why nobody has bothered to ask Mark to list all of the games with original and creative storylines that he’s been playing. Aside from Ape Escape 2, I mean.

I didn’t like Ape Escape 2. It was too console-y. I watched my kids beat it though. I thought the story was moving. I wept.

[RichardC]

@hermyhermit

Not to derail this topic even more but… it also succeeded because it actually wasn’t just a cliche.

Yeah, cheers ;-) What I meant was that when it was first announced, all we had to go on was the cliche. You had to actually play the game to see that there was so much more to it than just the Plot-O-Matic stuttering into life.

[Ben_Sones]

Amnesia is an overused plot device in games, but it’s easy to understand why. It eliminates the need for exposition to explain all the things that your character knows about his world–give the character amnesia, and they are just as clueless about what’s going on as the player. I’ve even seen it used well a few times (Torment is a good example), but too many developers merely use it as a clumsy crutch to avoid having to come up with creative ways to present background information.

[runesword_forger]

@Ben_Sones

Amnesia is an overused plot device in games, but it’s easy to understand why. It eliminates the need for exposition to explain all the things that your character knows about his world–give the character amnesia, and they are just as clueless about what’s going on as the player. I’ve even seen it used well a few times (Torment is a good example), but too many developers merely use it as a clumsy crutch to avoid having to come up with creative ways to present background information.

That’s also why it shows up in so many fantasy books. The other common ways to make the point-of-view character ignorant are to make him come from another world (thru the looking glass), or make him come from an isolated island or polder.

Torment does it especially well because you can see the designers thinking the amnesia thing through, working out a detailed backstory, and have it develop from the plot. It’s not just an excuse to have some bad guy you “vaguely recognize” pop up and shoot at you.

[J.theYellow]

@Pie4Foo

Here is where I might insert a comment about how no one plays shooters for their storylines anyway.

I guess Deus Ex 2 and Thief 3 are federally fucked then, huh?

[Viridian]

One of the reasons that the amnesia plot works in Torment, Memento (as well as Hal Hartley’s film Amateur) is that it is a motivated amnesia. As has been mentioned above, in your run-of-the-mill amnesia story (Nine Princes in Amber comes to mind), the amnesia is a convenient way of introducing the world to the character and the reader at the same time. In Torment, Memento and Amateur, the characters have some key thing about themselves that they very much WANT to forget, which makes it much more central to the story itself, and thus it doesn’t seem like just a convenient narrative crutch.