Low Culture: Media across medium: How we tell stories

Two weeks ago, my column was all about media (as in plural of medium) and why, say, TV is a different medium than film. Basically, the answer to that question comes down to senses and time.
Film, for instance, is defined by actively engaging our sight and hearing (as we can physically see the action and hear the dialogue, rather than imagine it), but it's also meant to be consumed in one sitting. One film is one work of art from beginning to end. There may be sequels or prequels or spin-off whatevers, but those are fundamentally different pieces of work. Television, however, is meant to be consumed in staccato sittings. You watch an episode knowing the plot will continue the next week. You watch a season that continues the next year.
Last time was all about the mechanics of the principle, rather than the nitty-gritty of how that affects our storytelling, since media are about communicating stories and the intricacies therein.
I'll start with film, since it was functionally the first new media. Film, with active sight and sound and one sitting's worth of material, is built for very compelling but simple stories. And simple doesn't mean shallow. Very deep stories happen in film, and they happen a lot more easily than they do in other media.
The reasoning behind that comes from how easily we interface with them. Sight and sound are our two dominant senses, so it's very simple to engage with them. We like whole stories told in one sitting, which is why episodic TV shows still have complete arcs inside of episodes. It's not hard to win us over in film because it so closely resembles real life.
However, not all stories are built for movies, especially those that are intense character studies. Characters should develop during the time we interact with them, both in the long run and in one sitting. When we spend the entirety of a movie with one character, they had better be different at the end, because otherwise why have I wasted an hour and a half? Luke Skywalker changes fundamentally in every Star Wars movie. And that's important. Syncopated media does it differently.
TV, for instance, is almost entirely built around compounding tiny changes, if there are changes at all. Sitcoms are built on a paradigm of change, but also of modularity. We watch Homer Simpson showcase the love for his wife in one episode, but then see him (comedically) screw things up again and again. Is he changing in the long run? Well, maybe you could track it, but the real answer is that it changes us. Great sitcoms (Futurama, Community and 30 Rock, let's say) do this. Fry in Futurama's first season is different than in the sixth, and the same can be said for Troy, Liz and all the shows' main characters.
In TV, we want to see change, but more importantly, we want to see growth. There are very engaging mechanisms for stories. People don't change overnight, hell, some don't change at all (most often, those are antagonists, by the by). TV reflects that. People change gradually, one grain of sand at a time, and TV showcases that kind of change for us.
Graphic novels are meant to be read in one sitting, or at least broken into sequential parts, but comics are the TV to graphic novels' film. They passively engage our senses of sound, touch, smell and taste, but are visually active, which is why comics are generally action-based. Action is visual.
 Melodrama, however, is auditory. Say we want to pinpoint why superhero comics sell more. It's because of that principle. That's not to say that you can't have melodramatic superheroes, but the form more commonly lends itself to action. Yes, Spider-man is going to fret about Aunt May, but he's going to do it while he punches Doc Ock.
But comics do something else that separates them from film or TV; they portray time differently. See, for comics, time doesn't pass normally. In a movie it does; we watch and feel seconds pass by as seconds, but in a comic, you can't tell how many seconds are represented by a panel. Some panels are half a second, some are half a minute. More importantly, the space between panels also holds time, because between one panel and another, everything happens in our imagination.
This time dilating and strobing effect is best used for longer, more developed and complex plots that take place across years. Think about it, it's very hard to track time in a film without a title card reading SIX MONTHS LATER. But comics are built on captions like that, so it isn't jarring to read SIX MONTHS LATER. For this reason, comics tend to play that game a lot. One issue of Batman will cover an incredible number of scenes, locales and plot points in an incredibly short space. This is why a 22-page story feels complete as one issue, even though it takes five minutes to read.
Games activate the senses of sight, sound and touch (controllers, folks) to form a complete experience over multiple sittings. They engender a crazy mix of storytelling tropes, most of which have never been seen at all. Because games engage both dominant senses, sight and sound, while also allowing for direct input with another, touch, we actually have agency in the stories of games. I make this character move, rather than watch him move. I tell him what to say or see.
Those are incredibly engaging experiences which completely change our storytelling mechanics. Firstly, we add another layer of engagement to keep us interested (gameplay) but also we relate much more to the story than a film or TV show will. We make Commander Shepard shoot reapers. For the most part, games take advantage of that to tell powerful stories. Even games that aren't blockbuster hits tend to register somewhere on people's emotional scales.
The big thing with games, however, is about them finding their artfulness. It took film a long time to do so, and I expect games are slowly getting there. Right now, it's an industry driven by businessmen rather than artists, and while some artists have tricked the businessmen into publishing artful games, we still have trouble getting games on par with novels, movies, or even to a certain extent, TV.
But that's an article for another columnist. Media are devoid of art. They're devoid of story. We place story and art into them as vessels for communication, and it's very important that we understand what that vessel is built of. Because not every story fits in every vessel, hopefully we can start thinking about that distinction. I suspect that once we do, we'll be seeing many more fully realized pieces, rather than walking out of some movie saying, "Yeah, the book was better."