#i need to do a boneworks deep dive because that game fully consumed me for a year

[racsow]

dimensions of storytelling (quickly becoming a rant about interactive media)

storytelling in different mediums is something i've been thinking a lot about recently.

writing is the simplest, most direct form of storytelling. it leaves the most up to the reader. it has the fewest technical barriers - the only requirement is understanding of language. i would not call it primitive, but it is the oldest (aside from verbal, of course).

video tells a story in two mediums; sight and sound. it communicates a story through these subsidiary senses, its words are sight and sound. It can evoke imagery and sensations that we rely on our imagination to conjure with the written word, with the result that it is a more vivid experience but also more regimented, more definitive.

games are three-dimensional storytelling, but instead of involving more senses, they add an axis of interactivity - a dimension of time, almost. It is a damn shame that most game companies focus on making just that: games. The moments i most remember from video games are not usually enjoyable gameplay but evocative environments and scenes. There is so much that this medium, at a base level, has to offer. Its potential not as entertainment but as a medium of storytelling feels much less explored than anything that came before.

To me, virtual reality is the same dilemma multiplied. I cannot tell you how sad it makes me that VR seems to constrain itself to physics-based shooters a la Boneworks or low-poly minigames. Story almost never is a priority in VR titles. They are marketed as immersive entertainment.

VR has a latent sense of realism that makes it the most effective storytelling format I've ever experienced. More than film, games, or written word, when I recall VR it feels real. I remember walking through the environments, picking up objects, physically crawling through tight gaps or feeling dizzy standing at a precipice. Memories of VR blur the mental categorization of reality and media.

The result is that even though VR is painfully lacking in engaging stories, I still felt so emotionally and mentally present in my time playing them. My favorite moment of any game was from the VR title Boneworks, the 2018 pioneer of the phys-shooter. The part I remember had no enemies, no dialogue or any physics gameplay for which it's been lauded.

I had emerged from a metro ride into a grungy underground station. There was this faint pattering noise from above which I wondered about as I restored power to the station and pried off the boards that led to ground level with a crowbar I found lying around.

And I went up the stained tile stairs, rounding a corner, ascending step by step. The noise grew louder, and then I walked out into the Central Station, vast and empty with a great curving glass roof. Rain was hammering down, forming actual rivulets of water that coursed into gutters emptying nearby. The virtual city outside was engulfed in a storm, but through the deluge, framed by the station windows, I could see the looming Monogon Tower with its red lights in the mist, the end destination of the game, its huge countdown clock blazing in the turbulent sky as Michael Wyckoff's melancholy synth hummed in sync with the drumming of the rain.

I stood there for a long time. I actually laid down in real life, fully on the floor, the grungy station tiles millimeters from my face, and laid there looking up at the glass roof for something like 20 minutes.

The story of Boneworks is, well, barebones, and it always takes an immediate backseat to adrenaline-gorged combat and middling puzzles with lackluster greyboxed environments. If it were a flatscreen game, I would've forgotten about it immediately. But the innate vividity of VR has ingrained this game in my mind permanently. I think about that moment all the time, and when I do, I remember a place I've really been, not a game I played.

And by god, if that's what a greybox phys-shooter like Boneworks can do, then can you even imagine what the potential of this medium is? What experiences we can craft, what worlds we can build and explore? What emotions we can evoke? What stories can we tell with this medium? And why, for god's sake, aren't we?