Joystick Division: For the last week or so, Joystick Division has been having a pseudo-conversation about the value of story in video games. While I think most of us here put a fairly high value on what games have to say, it's relatively to consider storytelling so heavily. Nobody questioned the value of "the story" in Bad Dudes: ninjas kidnapped the president and he can only be rescued two dudes...that are bad. Even though some of the very earliest games were clearly an attempt at telling a story, any "story" to speak of was subservient to gameplay. Games are played, you play them as a game, you don't consume them as a reader of literature. But the development of more sophisticated fantasies, nuanced plots, structured narratives and other academic sounding words have challenged what a video game even is.
It's important in life to maintain a broad palette when it comes to culture and the arts. Hideo Kojima agrees, as he continues to use video games like Death Stranding to introduce people to music and other elements they might not otherwise discover.
Mojang has partnered with Merlin Entertainments to build the world's first Minecraft theme park in the UK.
A three-episode live-action adaptation of the first two Yakuza video games will debut Tuesday, March 17 exclusively IGN. Each episode is about an hour long and will stream on IGN.com and IGN’s YouTube channel.
