#in other words: i think i found a way to let Guybrush have the biggest win.

[captmickey]

Me: Wow, Founder Threepwood AU sure is the most depressing au I have. There's no way I could give him a happy ending.

Me:

Me:

Me: But suppose there was one...

[pixelgrotto]

I believe in video game stories  I quite like experiencing a story through the format of a video game. I’d even go so far as to say that aside from reading, it’s probably my preferred method of digesting a narrative. (I’m not as big on TV or movies - shocking, I know!) I think a lot of this appreciation comes from the fact that as a long term PC gamer, I was exposed to many point ‘n click adventures at a young age. These were games that fancied themselves as controllable books, with “author” names frequently placed front and center on the box art. The Secret of Monkey Island was specifically a Ron Gilbert game, King’s Quest VI a Roberta Williams jam. And boy, did growing up with these games give me an appreciation for the excitement that interactive storytelling could generate. After my six-year-old self had successfully guided Alexander of Daventry through the catacombs on the Isle of the Sacred Mountain and defeated the minotaur keeping Lady Celeste hostage, I was a fan for life. (Note: Clicking that link and watching the whole scene might induce eye-rolling, since it seems dated in this day and age, but trust me, King’s Quest VI is still an awesome game.)  But not everyone had the same experiences as I did growing up. For a prominent segment of the population, story in games doesn’t really matter, and it never did. In fact, it seems that every other month on NeoGAF, a new thread will pop up on video game stories, and inevitably it’ll spark a debate where a whole mess of posters echo things like “90% of all game stories suck” or “story in games doesn’t matter to me because if I want story I’ll watch a movie or read a book.” Then there are hot takes on the pitfalls of game storytelling by Twitter personalities and academics that occasionally appear in mainstream outlets like The Atlantic. Case in point - one that started a controversy last month with its clickbaity headline “Video Games Are Better Without Stories.”  I rolled my eyes when I read The Atlantic article, mostly because it’s written by an academic who’s previously written stuff in a similar vein that I didn’t agree with, like “Video Games Are Better Without Characters.” The internet arguments that emerged surrounding his newest piece made me pay a little more attention this time, though. In a nutshell, Ian Bogost’s thesis is that the systems within a game should come first, and the ability of players to manipulate these systems to manufacture their own narratives is where the medium’s true strength lies. In other words, emergent gameplay trumps traditional storytelling.

This isn’t necessarily a bad point. After all, some of the most prominent and popular games in this day and age either keep plot in the background or totally ignore it in favor of focusing on mechanics that give power to the players, letting them create their own stories that stick out in their head more than any pre-engineered script could. Dark Souls does this well, with unforgiving combat and an atmosphere that makes everyone playing it feel like they’re stuck in their own personal hell. The newest Zelda game, Breath of the Wild, does it too, keeping story to a relative minimum and encouraging players to experiment with Link’s items and abilities instead. And then you have competitive games like League of Legends and Overwatch, which leave their story components out of the mix completely.  But despite all of these titles not placing story as their biggest priority, it’s kinda obvious that large segments of their fandoms feel differently. Just type “Dark Souls story” into YouTube and you’re assaulted with a staggering number of videos, and the encyclopedia of fan-assembled lore on the Dark Souls Wiki page is a force to be reckoned with. Breath of the Wild has inspired spectacular discussion on where it falls in the wonderfully convoluted timeline established by Hyrule Historia. League of Legends has a whole website devoted to its lore, and Overwatch has comics and animated shorts that fans gobble up with frightening veracity, often while begging Blizzard to release some sort of campaign revealing more background behind the Omnic Crisis. If anything, this unquenchable thirst for lore shows that despite gameplay coming first when it comes to interactive entertainment, at the end of the day, human beings still love a solid story that contextualizes gameplay, and game designers who want to create big narrative-driven experiences shouldn’t cease their efforts. Emergent gameplay is great, but going by Ian Bogost’s suggestion that games should SOLELY focus on this assumes that 1) all players want the sort of system-heavy games that he prefers (SimCity, for example), and 2) that the “traditional” route of telling a story within a game can never compete with film and literature. 

I find the argument that games can never move or shake you in the same way that movies and books do to be awfully defeatist. It’s also an unfair comparison, since games are a much younger medium that face the challenge of conveying a plot around characters that can be controlled. Books and movies don’t have to deal with this, and endlessly asking questions like “where’s the Citizen Kane of video games” is both using a (frightfully overrated) yardstick from one medium to unfairly judge the efforts of another, and ignoring the unique strength that games do bring to the table - the ability to generate investment and immersion by making the player feel like he or she is an integral participant in the plot rather than a mere observer. 

The sensation of feeling like I was part of the action is what gripped me to King’s Quest VI as a child. It’s what grips me to the best story-driven games out there, the ones that realize that they have this strength and capitalize upon it. The potential that games have for immersion is unsurpassed, and while it’s true that the medium is capable of producing plenty of schlocky, C-grade plots, the same could easily be said of books or movies, especially when you consider all the young adult fiction and superhero films that pass for quality entertainment in this day and age. Those who think all video game stories are garbage are more often than not cutscene skippers who are simply too impatient to give games a chance, biased individuals who are too used to experiencing stories in more passive forms of media or quite simply people who need to play better games. Because once you start judging the medium on its own terms and take the time to do some digging, there are many fine stories to be found out there - The Witcher games (which are arguably a tad superior to the books that spawned them), Deus Ex, the Quest for Glory series, the Gabriel Knight games, the Monkey Islands, The Last Express, Planescape: Torment and even a little game from Taiwan named Detention which could have been an indie movie, but arguably was more effective in reaching a wider audience on Steam.

Games don’t necessarily need to bring narrative to the forefront, as successes like Overwatch prove. But I’m glad that certain titles and developers do seek to accomplish this goal, because there are fans out there who believe in interactive stories and want to see this medium continue conveying bigger and better tales. I’m one of them, and I won’t stop being one of them. I’m a product of Alexander of Daventry, Geralt of Rivea, Guybrush Threepwood and all the other great characters inhabiting high quality video game narratives, and their stories are going to stick with me as long as I live..no matter what opinions pretentious contrarians publish on the internet. 

Header image of Geralt with a book is from a larger wallpaper available on CD Projekt Red’s website. You can see the big version here.