#i obviously got a lot of content because i follow lots of video essayists but i never personally consumed anything directly or searched it

[szecretary]

i was free from marauders brain worms for almost a decade and that was ruined this past month because i started watching deep dives into the fandom out of boredom instead of avoiding most HP content until inevitably getting an "anything for our moony" edit on my tiktok fyp and i just. lost my mind again. the found family of it all always does me in.

[innuendostudios]

Video Games Are Better When We Don’t Get Prescriptivist About Storytelling

Oftentimes, when I read an essay by Ian Bogost, I start wondering which of the following is Ian Bogost’s deal:

A. Ian Bogost argues a position because he believes it. B. Ian Bogost argues a position because he thinks it’s interesting and he thinks he can argue it, without much interest in whether or not he believes it. C. Ian Bogost is the kind of Philosophy major who sees no difference between A and B.

I wondered this when his ostensible review of Flappy Bird argued that games are inherently ugly, and I wondered it recently in his new piece, ostensibly a review of What Remains of Edith Finch, which argues games are inherently bad at storytelling.

As a person who grew up on adventure games and last year spent forty hecking minutes talking about what games get right about storytelling that no other media do, you can imagine: I am so, so, so bored of this take.

I mean, hey, I appreciate that the next time some YouTube commenter says that my defenses of interactive narrative are arguing against a straw man, I have an article literally titled Video Games Are Better Without Stories to link them to. (Just kidding, I don’t read the comments.) But, honestly, someone writes this take every six months or so. This time it’s Ian Bogost, next time it will be Raph Koster or Frank Lantz. In game critics circles, we never really got past Ludology vs. Narratology, the debate where Ludologists insist that systems interaction and raw game design are what make games games, and Game Narratologists are fictional gremlins who live under the beds of Ludologists. Bogost's arguments aren’t particularly new.

Much of the substance of the article have already been pored over: Patrick Klepek pointed out that, whether or not you think games should tell stories, people are going to tell stories with games, so this argument is pointless. (Patrick’s piece also links to Danielle Riendeau’s Twitter dissection of Bogost’s piece, which goes through several of its major points.) Austin Walker followed up by pointing out that even a bad story can make a game better than it would be with no story at all. If you care about the history of these arguments, Errant Signal summed up why Ludologists keep tilting at windmills over two years ago, and Emily Short wrote some thoughts in 2011 when it was Jon Blow’s turn to make this argument. (Jon shows up in the comments and they have an... interesting back and forth.) And, for broader context, Elizabeth Sampat brought up how, if Ian Bogost were a woman, male gamers would certainly accuse him of trying to ban narrative games, but, since he’s a man, his arguments will probably be used by male gamers to dismiss narrative indie games.

Before I get to the thoughts I want to add to this discussion, I’ll focus on one of the better exchanges I saw on Twitter: Scott Benson brought up what we could call The Myth of the Medium Store: the Medium Store is the place where, once you’ve thought of a killer story you want to tell, you pick out the best medium for telling it. The Games Are Bad At Stories take typically stems from the idea that most game narratives would be better served had they picked a different medium from the Medium Store.

Scott points out that, in the real world, Medium Stores don’t exist. Giant Sparrow didn’t make What Remains of Edith Finch because they thought it would work better as a game than as a film; they made it as a game because they’re game designers. I run into this framing in my own work and it causes me all kinds of anxiety - why do I make video essays? Do I adequately justify the use of video in my work? Couldn’t I just write articles like a normal person? And I can come up with all kinds of answers to this question: video allows me to illustrate points in a matter of seconds that would take paragraphs to render in text; I think text is just as much a medium as video, and I don’t think most print articles have to justify their use of text; these days video reaches a wider audience than text does on the internet, which makes it a more viable medium for me. But these are all ways of answer a question that I no longer believe is worth asking. I make video essays because I’m a video essayist. In some fantasy world where anyone can become good at any medium, maybe I would choose print over video. But, in this world, with this brain I was stuck with, I am better at video essays than I am at writing articles. I enjoy it more. My writing works best when it’s meant to be read aloud. Video works for me. That’s reason enough.

And my favorite response to Scott’s tweets (included in the link above) was Carolyn Petit’s: “A movie with the same plot as Gone Home would be fundamentally [about] different things, or [about] the same things in fundamentally different ways.“

Carolyn says, in far fewer words that me, what I was trying to get at in the ending of Story Beats: it doesn’t matter whether you think the plot element of “main character makes friends with an inanimate object” works “better” in Castaway or Portal, because the two are accessing completely different sets of emotions in the audience. Watching Tom Hanks say goodbye to Wilson and throwing the Companion Cube in an incinerator yourself are not the same experience. Comparing them is like comparing a chicken egg to a Faberge egg; which is better? The question is meaningless. You can’t cook with a Faberge egg and you don’t leave a chicken egg on your mantle. They are superficially similar but they serve very different purposes.

(And after watching the Super Bunnyhop video about What Remains of Edith Finch’s Cannery level, I don’t understand how Bogost can argue that this scene would work better as a non-interactive film.)

So, most of the valid talking points having been picked over, what’s left for me to say?

I think what’s most frustrating to me about Bogost’s take, and takes of this kind, is that it’s easy. I should throw Bogost a bone and mention that he has authored some very, very good games writing in his time (and so have Koster, Lantz, and Blow). I don’t mean to sell him short. But writing off interactive narrative is and always has been intellectually lazy.

It’s not difficult to look at a medium and see what it has difficulty doing that another medium does well. Video games have trouble with pacing, with players who fuck with the system instead of roleplaying, and with branching narratives quickly becoming too unwieldy to author content for. Movies have none of these problems, so it’s very easy to point at these issues and say Edith Finch would be better as a movie.

What is much harder, and, to me, a lot more interesting, is articulating what a storytelling medium does well.

Yes, movies fair better than games in these areas: they have tight pacing, the protagonists stay in character, and their narratives are linear. But those qualities are not what makes movie stories good. We don’t walk out of a movie raving about how the story didn’t branch and the main character didn’t jump up and down on their sidekick’s head. What really makes a movie work at storytelling is often more intangible, and harder to fit into a pithy list of reasons why movies are better than video games at telling stories.

It would be just as easy, and just as intellectually lazy, to mount a defense of telling stories in novels and not in films. After all, films have a famously hard time adapting themselves from novels without drastic changes. Movies tend to be very external, where novels can easily give us a character’s thoughts, and the only (inelegant) solution most movies offer for this is voiceover. Movies tend to be capped at 2 hours, 3 tops unless you’re on the arthouse circuit, and that streamlining tends to be far, far less nuanced than a novel that may take the better part of a month to work through. But, again, no one says what makes novels great is that they are long and very internal - by that definition, Hemingway was a terrible writer.

What makes a medium good at storytelling is a set of mostly aesthetic reactions. What makes movies good at stories is their essence: moving pictures can do things that text can’t. Watching a semi-truck flip over in The Dark Knight works in a way it never would on the page, in the same way the narrative payoff at the end of Braid works in a way that it never would on the silver screen.

When we start talking about a medium’s essence, it’s tempting to get, well, essentialist: that if that hard-to-quantify something about games is interactivity, than games should focus on that interactivity to the exclusion of as much else as possible. Games are systems, so they should focus on systems, and systems work better when they aren’t hampered by stories. But, again, this is like saying a movie shouldn’t involve sound because sound is a radio thing, and shouldn’t involve words because that’s a book thing, and shouldn’t have actors because that’s a theater thing - motion pictures are at their best when they are just pictures and motion. This is, obviously, ludicrous. Games can be just as additive as any other medium. Games are moving pictures, and text, and music, and actors, and interactivity. Even a tiny amount of interactivity added to an otherwise mostly filmic experience can make all the difference - this is what makes The Walking Dead work.

We are acclimated to the ways that telling stories in any medium other than games is weird. Films never mounted a defense against “why isn’t this a novel?” We just raised a few generations of people with narrative films until they forgot to ask the question, until no one would think to ask such a dipshit question. Novels, movies, plays, radio dramas, operas, they all have their weirdnesses as storytelling media, we are just so acclimated to those weirdnesses that we don’t see them. We see past them to what makes them valuable.

I’ve spent the last couple months while I was finishing up school keeping myself level by playing a lot of adventure games. I love adventure games. If someone is giving me a lens through which something I love is worse, I will accept that lens if it reveals discrimination, racism, homophobia; “this thing you love is bigoted” is a worthwhile perspective. “This thing you love is, by the criteria I’ve just outlined, inauthentic” is not a worthwhile perspective. “What Remains of Edith Finch would work better as a film” is not dissimilar from “What Remains of Edith Finch is not a real game.” It’s a way of saying that an experience you may have found worthwhile wasn’t actually worthwhile, and I don’t see how this enriches anything. This won’t make better games. This won’t make better stories. This just tells designers (not directly but implicitly) not to make games they want to make and players not to enjoy games that they enjoy.

Ian Bogost isn’t saying anything that Jon Blow wasn’t saying in 2008. Every time a piece like this gets written, all the people who enjoy stories in games come out and write their rebuttals, and however many months later another article comes out that ignores every bit of it. This conversation doesn’t advance because the people arguing against story in games consider the conversation over. They repeat themselves as though they’re waiting for everyone to get the message. Meanwhile, people like Aaron Reid and Porpentine and Anna Anthropy and Brendon Chung keep doing unprecedented things with stories in games and they keep finding their audience. Only one side of the game narrative conversation is advancing, and that’s the side that interests me.

It’s not a real discussion. This is little more than a way of “heating up the takes.” An article about Flappy Bird that says it’s kind of janky in a way that’s interesting is a valid but rather uninteresting article; an article about how Flappy Bird proves that all games are grotesque? That’s a hot take. Ditto how an article about how What Remains of Edith Finch is interesting but might have worked better as a film contorts itself into an article about how the entire medium of games has failed at storytelling. And, I’m sorry all, but I’m over it. I hear new arguments defending stories against Ludologists every few months, and I haven’t heard a new argument against game narrative in nine years. These opinions are not just bad, they’re boring.

So can we be done with this now?