gaming narratives
Games are starting to get interesting. Despite some recent criticism (the bad kind, not the argumentative kind) on behalf of writers such as Steven Johnson (whose book Everything Bad is Good for You gets games just completely wrong, despite arguing that they may not be, after all, completely bad for you), video games are beginning to find ways to tell singular narratives that only function effectively in a video game. Hideo Kojima wants his Metal Gear Solid series to be a cinematic experiences, but in trying to make his games filmic, he sacrifices some of their, to use a pretty clumsy noun, gameness.
I have an unabashed love for BioShock. Even though the final boss was completely lame, and even though I felt like the narrative peaked about three-quarters through the game, what that game did with narrative and player agency is better than anything I’ve ever seen in a video game. The story plays with the core concept of a video game–meaning, that the player, more or less, must do a series of tasks in a sequence to accomplish the ultimate goal of the game. Meaning that, to accomplish to goal, to progress in the game, the player really has no choice but to play the game. A man chooses, a slave obeys, as goes Andrew Ryan’s Randian dogma. But, in games, as much as current developers proselytize about the necessity of player choice, really, the player has already chosen to act through the events of the game. BioShock plays with that very foundational concept, and the narrative payoff is incredible.
Other games are finding different ways of telling stories. I’ve been playing this nifty little iPhone game called Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor. In summary, you play as a spider who can construct webs across various domestic levels to trap insects of various kinds that have infested an abandoned house. And on that level, the game is perfectly serviceable and enjoyable. But the backgrounds themselves, the levels across which the player is guiding the spider, tell the macabre story of what happened to the Bryce family, and why this house now stands empty. For instance, the spider may crawl over a wicker basket, only to fall in and discover a bloody chisel resting hidden at the bottom. What happened with that chisel? Those questions and the environmental answers make up the passive narrative of the game. It’s really well done.
Consumable narratives have long been the purview of films and books; games are just now beginning to catch up, evolving past the kill-fest point-a-thons of early gaming, and evolving into a discreet vessel for the delivery of narrative, narratives that can affect players in ways that conventional narrative types cannot.
This post could go on for pages and pages, discussing the emotional investment in Ico, the character drama of Final Fantasy VII, the sprawling story-driven worlds of Oblivion and Fallout 3, the allegorical masterpiece of Braid. But, in the interest of space and the author’s wrists, I’ll stop here and proclaim, loudly across the internets, that it’s a good time to be a gamer. We’re seeing a renaissance of narrative execution. And it’s only going to get better from here.
