When I say the word, “story,” what comes to mind? Books,
likely, are the first thing to come to mind. Our culture is steeped in books,
until the last few decades it was the sole way we stored information and passed
on tales and culture.
We might also think of the oral tradition of storytelling,
be it telling tales by the campfire, our parents telling us fairy tales before
bed, or if you’re one of those brainy types, the prehistorical period in which
the written word didn’t exist, and the only way we could pass on information
was verbally. If you’re my children, it’s pretty much every word that comes out
of my mouth. “Dad, are you just telling a story?” is a common phrase from my
daughters, even when I’m not lying to them.
Fewer will say Film or Televison, though once they’re
mentioned none will deny it. Film is just over a century old, television just
under a century, but they’ve become an accepted mediums in which to explore
story, even though they’re sometimes “ghettoized,” their quality as a form of
storytelling considered “lesser” than that of novels or even oral storytelling.
This is where it gets tricky. What other forms of “story”
are there?
Comics—be they comic strips, comic books, graphic novels. This
might be a hard sell for some, impossible for others. These are even further
ghettoized than television, seen as drivel or wish-fulfilment (and, really,
what’s wrong with wish fulfillment?), spectacular for all negative connotations
of the word.
Dance? Don’t worry, we’re not exploring dance. At all. Though,
I imagine that, because of the cultural importance of ballet, one would get
less resistance than they would over comics. Music—that one is pretty obvious,
more so when you consider the longer forms, such as Opera.
That’s it, right? That’s the whole of the human experience
in storytelling. What about our ancestors’ cave paintings? The whole realm of
visual art: paint, sculpture, architecture? A bit of a sidestep, but I’m sure
some arguments can be made, likely with more weight for some pieces than
others.
The Garden of Earthly Delights, by Hieronymus Bosch.
Yeah, there’s probably an interesting story here.
For the sake of this paper, however, I’m going to explore
and argue in favor of a newer art form as a development of the literary landscape,
Video Games, and explore the similarities video games have with other literary
forms.
So, an intermission. A comic for you to read: (Opens directly, scroll down to read story) A totally innocent story
Now, this is more than just a cheap jump-scare—but we’ll get
back to that in a moment.
The form of this piece is the comic strip. The comic strip,
comic book, graphic novel, all aim to tell a story with visual elements as well
as text. There is no magic formula for the ratio between the text and visual elements,
but you may know instances where the medium is ill-used. When the text is
overwhelming—we’re not reading a book. When the text overwhelms the visual
elements. When the visual elements are nonsensical, at least in that they don’t
convey story.
To the contrary, the comic form works best when the visual
and text elements work in parallel. Not necessarily fifty-fifty; rather, when
they ebb and flow, each taking their turn when their aspects would best serve
the story. A wordless series of panels is a great way to depict action. A pure
black or white page, with spots of dialogue, can be a poignant moment in which
we move plot forward.
Now, for the comic I’ve unjustly forced you to read. First,
let me apologize, as I’ve done for everyone I’ve shown this to. Usually my
explanation is, “This is a horror story,” so they go into it expecting
something spooky. What isn’t expected is for one of the panels to move—and
that’s a big part of what makes this piece work. It’s a forced interaction,
absolutely unexpected, because my introduction, “It’s a comic…,” and more
importantly the historical state of the comic. It’s static. Even in this
digital form, you expect it to act like a page of paper. Depending on what
browser you’re using to view it, it’s also impossible to scroll away from the
moving visual—if you attempt scroll, the video remains on your screen, but the
text behind continues to scroll.
This is a merger of two types of media in a way that
subverts expectation, and since it’s using horror tropes in its storytelling,
this subversion is an excellent way to achieve its goal. It wants to achieve a
reaction from the reader: it wants to scare. And though it’s a one-time trick,
I find this important in that it represents a story that could not have been
achieved any other way.
The other point I want to make is that, we’re well beyond
the printing press. We, as writers and storytellers, have more than just the
page to tell a story, and opening ourselves to the potential provided by
alternate media only opens new possibilities for storytelling.
Emergent Storytelling
Though this doesn’t wholly fit within the scope of this
paper, I want to mention the idea of “Emergent Storytelling.” These types of
story usually occur in visual mediums: video games, and less often, comics.
It’s an undirected story that relies heavily on the reader/player doing the
heavy lifting. In emergent storytelling, the “teller” alludes to story, either
giving pieces of backstory, snippets of goings on, people and situations the
reader/player has interacted with.
As an example, I’ll refer to the board game, Tales of the
Arabian Nights. In this game the player(s) traverse a map of the Middle-east
and nearby countries. Each turn they have an interaction related to the type of
terrain they are in on the map: desert might yield an interaction with
caravans, snakes, sandstorms; Forest might lead to interactions with wild
animals or hidden temples. Each of these interactions comes with a bit of text
that is read to the player, and after some board game magic, these bits of
story have a positive or negative resolution. What results is a bullet-point
list of occurrences:
·Angered a Djinn, banished to the forest.
·Found a cursed statue, turned into a monkey.
·Traveled to a city and stole food, got thrown
into jail.
·Found a secret jungle map in prison. Escaped.
·Traveled to Jungle temple, was declared its lost
king.
·Met game’s win condition, became sultan
Now, each of these events is entirely separate, but it’s not
difficult to find a through-line for all of them. Many of the events in the
story are generic enough, and self-contained enough, that it’s not difficult
for the player to resolve them as a contiguous story, and the board game does
part of the work in that the terrain type demands that the story taking place
will mesh with the traveling the player has conducted. It’s instances like the
last two bullets above where the player has to do the heavy lifting, resolving
how becoming the Jungle King led to becoming sultan. Did they realize he was
the sultan all along, and it wasn’t until he took a leadership role in the
jungle that this truth was brought to light? Did the jungle kingdom conquer its
neighbors? Or was this jungle throne the original seat of the prophesied true
sultan?
Though it’s not obvious from the list above, but the prison
event is a similar type of emergence. Each turn in prison an event happens, and
then the player either escapes or doesn’t. The player didn’t have to follow the
route on the jungle map, and could have gone anywhere else (but really, why
wouldn’t you?). Thus two unrelated events, by virtue of the player’s choice,
appear to be connected, and become further built upon in the form of the
player’s own storytelling. That is, the game only provides a series of
unrelated or loosely related events, but it’s the player that builds the story.
For the sake of this paper, I’m going to steer away from
emergent storytelling. Instead, I’m going to look at directed stories, a story
that its teller has attempted to craft as a whole. This includes situations
where there are multiple endings, such as many video games, the movie Clue (if
you’re not familiar, the theatrical release had three different final reels.
Depending on which theater one attended, they could have seen any one of these
endings, all of which were crafted to fit the whole of the movie before it). This
also includes Choose Your Own Adventure books, in which the beginning is static
but the reader can choose the direction of the story, as these multiple
branches were crafted, as a whole, by their author.
***
Among the largest difficulties with recognition of video
games as a form of storytelling is its history. The Magnavox Odyssey was
released in August, 1972, featuring almost exclusively sports and shooting
games. However, we’re probably more familiar with the Pong! Consoles from 1975.
There were technical limitations that would have made storytelling impossible,
but a larger problem came later. After two home-console market crashes, the
Nintendo Entertainment System was released in 1983, and attempted to avoid the
home console stigma by marketing their system as a “toy.” While this likely
saved home video gaming, this stigma still exists today. Video games are viewed
as a child’s plaything, and consuming them is frowned upon. And yet, we
wouldn’t frown upon a person reading a book. I don’t know that I’ve ever heard
a parent worry that their child is spending too much time with their crayons.
Tying in with the “origin” of video games, we do have to
look at what kind of games there were in the early stages of video game
history. Super Mario Bros. (Nintendo, 1985)—Most people are at least familiar
with this game, though I imagine most everyone has played it or one of its
sequels. Mario is a cultural icon, and has starred or appeared in countless
titles.
So, what’s his story?
He’s a plumber, he has to defeat Bowser/Koopa/King Koopa in
order to save the princess. We have a protagonist, an antagonist, a love
interest and a goal. Some of the elements of a story—only there’s no story. The
whole of the game consists of Mario (or, if you’re my younger brother, Luigi)
running, breaking blocks, and heartlessly crushing turtles and mushrooms. Every
four levels you fight Bowser, and then some kid wearing a mushroom hat tells
you that someone gave you bad directions. As far as storytelling goes, Super
Mario Bros. is minimal at best. The player isn’t even provided with motivation,
it’s direction at best: these are the good guys, help them. These are the bad
guys, murder them.
The limitation is wasn’t the technology as much as it was
the perception of what video games were—they were just that, games, their goal was to provide a means
of empowerment and fun. More on this in a moment.
First, considering Super Mario Bros., I want to provide a
graphically similar comparison: Thomas Was Alone (developed by Mike Bithell,
2012). Mechanically, like Super Mario Bros., the game is a platformer—that is,
it’s mostly about moving and jumping. Visually, its graphics might be
considered simpler than those of Super Mario Bros; the titular character,
Thomas, is a red rectangle. The largest difference between these two games is
apparent after the player’s first movement. “Thomas was alone…” the narrator
begins, the words simple, but his tone lonely.
Throughout the game the narrator periodically conveys the
thoughts, opinions, and mental states of the cast of rectangles that are
encountered. We come to know the anti-social frustrations of Chris, John’s
desire and joy in helping others, Claire’s fascination when she discovers that,
while water is death to her companions, she alone can float on water. Before
long we attach personalities to these simple shapes, we root for the group, we
find a favorite. As the game progresses, the characters grow and change: Chris
has a fondness for Claire, and through vulnerability, allows others to get
close to him. Admittedly, this style of narration would have been impossible in
Super Mario Bros., but in Thomas Was Alone, it’s the player’s first engagement
with and the primary source of the story.
Additionally, between levels there are occasionally placards
depicting emails or news reports, detailing a larger story. Early on we become
aware that, whatever Thomas’s journey is, it somehow interacts with the “real”
world, and ultimately his becomes a story of friendship, sacrifice and hope. This
idea, the use of placards to relate story, could have been accomplished, and in
fact they are used in Super Mario Bros.—but only to show what level you’re on,
and how many lives you have left.
Ignoring the particle and shadow effects that are solely
visual detail, Thomas Was Alone is on a level of complexity equal to Super
Mario Bros. It’s the insertion of story, however, that gives this story an
emotional depth.
Above I say their limitation of storytelling in Super Mario Bros.
wasn’t the technology, because as early as the 1970’s role playing video games
had existed, among the earliest roots of storytelling in video games. Ultima
was released to home computers in 1981, also predating the NES. Finally, Dragon
Warrior and Final Fantasy were released on the NES in 1986 and 1987,
respectively. All of these predate or are on the same system as Super Mario
Bros., all of these attempt to tell a story—but their origin lies less in video
games than it does in tabletop Role Playing Games. The genre of this type of
video game is actually “Role Playing Games,” wholly undifferentiated from their
analog counterparts.
Early on, the storytelling in video game RPGs is clunky, and
brings to mind a quote by game developer Chris Hecker, “They didn’t realize
early on that you could film a movie in a different sequence than you showed
it. The concept of editing was, they had to figure that out. The didn’t know
you could move the camera…and so I feel like we’re really, really early in
games.”
Without several aspects of technologies that would come
later, there was no voice acting, so the whole of the story had to be told
through speech bubbles. It was arduous, sometimes several pages worth of
reading, and heaven forbid you accidentally talk to the same character again,
restarting the whole conversation—there was no way to skip out of it, unlike in
modern games where you have the option to abort the conversation or just walk
away. My favorite example of how clunky early storytelling in video games could
be is in Final Fantasy VII. There is quite literally an info-dump in which
Cloud, the story’s main character, has the whole of his memory return to him,
and spends thirty minutes—and, no, that isn’t hyperbole—explaining his life
history and connection to the big-bad. The only grace to this, and it even more
accentuates my point, is that there is a save-point in the middle of this
info-dump. Even the game’s designers realized how harrying this big pile of
dialogue was.
Speaking of Role Playing Games
Dungeons & Dragons has become a facet of popular culture
and geek culture. Released originally in 1974, it was an offshoot of Wargaming,
but instead of a player being in charge of an army, they were in charge of one
character. D&D is now considered to be the root of all role playing games.
The crux of a role playing game is that a moderator tells
the core of the story and proctors rules, and the other players take on the
role of the story’s main characters, stating their actions and vocalizing their
conversations. D&D, like many video games, is about empowerment—the
characters are talented well beyond the average person, and they spend their
time doing “cool stuff.” But, like video games, it has its limitations, because
of its origins, and because of this is often seen as “vanilla” role playing in
the modern Role Playing Game community.
D&D’s origin is in Wargaming, and as such D&D uses
numerical statistics to decide whether or not an action works. For things like
running, fighting, jumping, this works rather straightforward: your character
is this athletic, so he has this chance of succeeding. This even
works for the mental statistics, in which the amount a person knows can be
quantified. But, even though D&D has social stats, this is perhaps the
clumsiest part of the game. What does it mean if I am marginally more charming
than another character? What’s the difference between slightly sweet-talking
the guard versus overwhelmingly sweet-talking the guard?
In the last decade there has been a “Modern Role Playing
Game” independent games movement, this idea that a character doesn’t need to be
defined by a pile of numbers. Instead, these games focus on storytelling and
social interaction, and as a result they focus on the emotional aspects of
storytelling.
For example, Dread,
released in 2005, is a game that focuses on creating, as its name implies, a
sense of dread. Unlike D&D, the character creation is done by filling out a
short survey of leading questions that guide the creation of a personality. The
idea is that this personality is flawed—they aren’t a hero, they’re a normal
person that’s had both high points and low points—and this is the character the
player will take on as their role. Because the leading questions in the survey
also bring these characters a motivation and reason for being in the same
place, they likely have personal goals they bring to the situation.
Instead of using die rolls to determine success or failure
of an action, there is a shared Jenga tower placed in the center of the group.
Whenever a player wants to take an action that has a chance for failure, they
draw a block from the tower; if the tower ever falls, that character dies. As a
result, there is a physical representation of the threat in the story sitting outside
of the story, and this sense of threat can only grow, as each time a player
successfully removes a block, they only increase the chance of future failure
for the group.
The Changing of the
Guard
The way people interact
with art entertainment…is primarily at an emotional level. The emotions that we
support as games is basically power fantasy right now. Whereas if I asked you
to make a game about two people falling in love, you’d be like, I have no
idea…” Chris Hecker (from Minecraft: The Story of Mojang)
I have a personal passion for independent game companies,
both in the physical board game arena, and the digital. Large game companies,
the AAA game companies, as they are often called, are too often worried about
the bottom line, and as a result must be concerned with selling enough units
that they not only break even, but make a profit. The result is that larger
companies tend to produce a lot of the same thing, both within their company
and within the industry. They know “what works,” and they steer toward
middle-of-the-road concepts that will appeal to a large audience.
Small companies, frankly, don’t know any better. They’ll do
something because they don’t know any better. Or they may have one weird idea
no one would ever try, and because they have the one brush, they work miracles
with it. This has resulted in some of the most powerful storytelling in recent
years, with games like Gone Home and Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, games
which use numerous identifiable writing tropes to reach a true emotional state.
In the same interview from the quote above, Chris Hecker
posits that current-day video games are in the same place early film was in—we’re
not making videos of trains passing by, or people sneezing, that would be the
Atari era, the “hey, look what this thing can do” era. Video games are in the
experimental era, and we’re only learning how video games work as a
storytelling medium, much as Georges Mélièshad to stumble and play with
film to discover how it could be used.
The largest strength for video games as a storytelling
medium is interactivity. In a novel, yes, we interact with it, it becomes part
of our mental existence, enough that, as research has shown, reading about
sensorial information in a novel exercises the same parts of the brain as
actually interacting with those things in the real world.
Video games take it a step further. The player isn’t a
passive observer—the player is in the
story. This reaction to games is easy to see when someone talks about sports
games, or first-person shooters. “I slide tackled him, took the ball and
scored!” or, “I headshot that guy and then tea-bagged him.” While I don’t
condone the behavior of that second example, the point stands. This concept of I—I did this thing—is powerful, perhaps
one of the strongest narrative tools to date. The truth of the matter is that
all I did was wiggle my fingers over
a plastic controller, but just as reading a novel can elicit corresponding
brain-responses, pushing these buttons creates a sense of ownership, of agency within the context of the game.
All that was left to do was put a story into the game.
Sometimes It's hard to choose only one...so I chose two.
When it comes to storytelling video games in the last
decade, among the top contenders is Telltale’s The Walking Dead (Telltale Games, 2012). This game is not unlike
the many, many adventure games released in the Nineties. Classically, Adventure
games are among the more prominent “storytelling games.” In an adventure game
the player usually acts as some character, interacts with their
environment—often as a series of puzzles, problems they must solve that
essentially remove a “gate,” allowing them to access the next bit of story.
The innovative part of The Walking Dead over classic
Adventure games, however, is the heavy use of dialogue and its affect on the
story. In The Walking Dead, the player controls Lee, an African American who
grew up in Atlanta. When the story opens, he’s sitting in the back of a squad
car, handcuffed. There’s a cop in the driver’s seat who says, “Well, I reckon
you didn’t do it, then.” At this point you’re presented with dialogue options:
“Why do you say that?” “You know what they say about
reckoning.”
“Does it really matter?”
“…” (I believe this is supposed to
be an auditory non-answer. Like a grunt.)
Lee in the background, about to make a bad choice. Hint: They're all bad choices.
There’s actually a fifth option. Since there’s a timer that
runs down, slower or faster depending on the intensity of the situation, you
can choose to make no dialogue choice, and this is taken as Lee refusing to
respond, or not being able to react in time.
Okay, there isn't a clean way to do this. Start: 4:46 End: 5:40
Here’s the trick: except for a few instances, whatever you
choose has no effect on the events that take place in the story. You can be the
nicest person or the worst person, and you still rescue Clementine, you still
meet Shawn and end up on his farm. You still meet Kenny and his family, and the
rest of the folks at the drug store. By the end of Episode 1, you still end up
at the motel. In the above clip, whether you choose to save Shawn or Duck, Shawn dies, Duck survives.
What’s the point, you might be asking. If nearly every
choice you make doesn’t alter the plot, why bother with choice?
Even though the plot doesn’t change, the reactions of the
characters around you change. That is, the choices made by the player affect
characterization. To put it colloquially, if you act like a shit, everyone is
going to be a shit back to you.
By making a dialogue choice, the player is choosing how Lee
interacts with each of the characters, and because the characterization is
solid, the interactions play true. For instance, Kenny is traveling with his
wife, Katja, and son, Duck. Early on Kenny mentions he had to save his son at a
gas station, and through similar interactions it becomes clear he’s a family
man. When confrontations occur, if Lee backs Kenny, Kenny will act positively
toward Lee. However, if you truly want to be in Kenny’s favor, you need to prioritize
Duck. In the above clip, if Lee saves Duck, Kenny views Lee as a friend--and you'd be surprised how important it is to hear a few kind words when the world is falling to crap around you.
Likewise, there are characters that are, well, they’re just
assholes. The hulking Larry knows about Lee’s conviction, and no matter how the
player acts toward Larry or his daughter, Lilly, Larry is going to punch you in
the face and leave you for dead.
More importantly, through their choices the player guides
Lee’s characterization. Lee can be shifty or honest. He can be a dominant
leader that others look up to, but of course that will likely put him at odds
with other characters that think they should lead. He can be friendly and
encouraging or a hard-ass. He can prioritize family or survival. Again, none of
this affects the plot of the story.
However, since the player’s agency is exercised through Lee, these choices
affect the player’s own interaction with the story.
***
Last, I want to talk about Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons
(Starbreeze Studios, 2013). The first game developed by Josef Fares, this is an
excellent example of what can happen when a person blends multiple media. Fares’
background is actually directing for film, but he is also an avid video gamer—and
it becomes clear that his interest and experience with both directing and video
games allowed him to merge them into a story that, quite literally can’t be
told any other way, to the point that he actually insists on the game being
played with a controller, despite its initial release on computers.
The story itself is a fairly straightforward coming of age tale: the father
becomes ill, and the healer informs the sons that there is a cure, water from
an ancient tree. They set out on a journey to collect the cure and save their
father. The player, however, is put in charge of both Naia, the older brother,
and Naiee, the younger brother, which leaves us with a question. As most
“coming of age” stories focus on one character, who is this story about?
It’s important to point out that the whole of the story is
told without true dialogue or text. The brothers do interact through short
spouts of a gibberish language—their intonations hinting at the emotion inside
their gibberish, but their gestures and expressions are also well represented,
such that we get a full picture of their brief conversations. This choice was
intentional, according to Josef Fares, the game’s designer and director, in an
interview by Kyle Hillard for GameInformer. “But that’s part of the
interactivity that I like about games, the player can read the body language
and figure out what they could say.” By making this choice, the player is
forced to engage with the game further. Rather than being a passive listener,
the player is forced to actively ‘translate’ the engagement between the
characters.
The game’s designer insists the game be played with a controller, and it isn’t
until the end of the game why this is. For now, I’ll explain that the control
scheme for the game requires a two-joystick controller (a standard Xbox or
Playsation controller). The right joystick controls movement for Naia, the
older brother, and the right trigger button is his “action” button, causing him
to interact with the environment (ie, climb ropes, grab things). The left
joystick and trigger buttons control Naiee, the younger brother—again, this is
another important design choice made by Fares, and again, we’ll get to it in a
moment.
The story follows the brothers as they leave their fishing
village, which is isolated by water on all sides, into the world beyond. They
work together to overcome obstacles, but their tasks are often
interchangeable—except where strength or height come into play. Whenever there
is a large lever or a high outcropping, Naia must assist the younger Naiee. And
because of Naiee’s fear of water, brought on by a boating accident in which
their mother died, it’s entirely through Naia’s encouragement that Naiee is
even able to leave: Naia literally carries his brother as he swims from the
village.
The story itself has a fairy-tale quality: the brothers
travel through a Giants’ battlefield, revealing how small these two, who have
never left their small fishing village, truly are; they aid a pair of monstrous
trolls, a husband and wife, who were separated and enslaved, highlighting the
importance of family.
The brothers succeed through their fairytale required
single-minded focus. But near the game’s end Naiee loses sight of the quest,
instead allowing his focus to fall on a similar-aged girl in an abandoned town.
When Naia tries to urge his brother back toward their quest, Naiee refuses,
instead following the girl—and as in any fairytale, seals his fate. The girl
turns out to be a shape-shifting spider, and though the brothers succeed in
defeating her, Naiee is mortally wounded.
Here’s another place interactivity with the story is
prominent. At Naia’s death, we have a cut-scene of Naiee weeping, and then
pulling the last handfuls of dirt from a grave he’s dug. The player must walk
from the grave to Naia’s body, Naiee moving slowly and weeping the whole time. The
player must then drag Naia to the hole, and then move between the mounds of
dirt to push the dirt into the hole over Naia. This whole ordeal forces the
player to engage deeper with the story—they don’t have to dig the hole (that
would be more annoying, honestly), but the act of placing Naia in the hole and
burying him forces the player to put themselves in that situation, and take a
physical part in the story.
So, here’s the point of the game being played on a
controller: for the whole of the game, you’ve been asked to play with both
hands in tandem. While a little clumsy at the beginning, doubtless by the end
of the game you’ve found a way to compensate for controlling two moving points
on the screen. However, with Naia dead, the right side of the controller is
useless; for most people, this is also their dominant hand, so the fact that
Naia is now “missing” is all the more apparent.
Here the game quickly draws to a close, this being a pacing
choice on the part of Fares—he doesn’t want the player to become accustomed to
controlling only Naiee. When Naiee returns to his village, he’s confronted with
his first and greatest obstacle—the river, which Naia had to carry him across.
Any attempts to cross are met with the same reaction Naiee always has to
water—he gets to about knee depth, and no amount of joystick pushing will make
him go any further. Push the action button, and Naiee only shakes his head. At
this point, the player may look around for another way across, be it another
path, a shallow point in the water, but it eventually becomes clear that the
river must be crossed.
And here is the most powerful point in the game. Eventually,
all other options exhausted, the player will push Naia’s action button. Doing
so, Naia’s ghost-like voice calls, “Naiee,” as it had so many times before in
the game. With that, Naiee steels himself, and, crying and panting, forces himself
to swim the river. This one button press, a matter-of-fact action that only
recently was made prominent because it suddenly did nothing, is now given so
much more weight because it is how Naiee draws on his brother’s memory and
strength to accomplish a task he couldn’t otherwise. For the next few minutes
Naiee will climb heights and pull levers he couldn’t at the game’s beginning,
by making use of both action buttons.
This has become Naiee’s coming of age story, the punctuation
being that, some time later, as Naiee and his father stand over the new
gravestone they’ve erected for Naia, it’s Naiee who stands stoic, comforting
his grieving father.
All the games?
Certainly
not every video game needs to be a bastion of storytelling for its medium, just
as not every movie is Citizen Kane, and not every book is Moby Dick. We can
still have beat-em-ups, shooters, sports games, games that are fun because the
player is doing “cool stuff.” But, what we can have is the end-state of what we
have now: a burgeoning mode of storytelling that is far from explored, one
where the “rules” of the medium are far from set.
Ken Williams, co-founder of Sierra
Entertainment, is quoted as saying, "My vision of this is once people
taste interactivity in storytelling that they're not gonna be content to sit
back and just watch, and that someday the Academy Awards will merely be the
non-interactive segment of the storytelling industry." I look forward to
that day.
