#Rather than the finely crafted gameplay or subtle storytelling

[aurimeanswind]

Games Are BETTER With Stories. Full Stop.

So this is a bit of a different tact for a post. This kind of acts as an OpEd to Ian Bogost’s opinion piece over at The Atlantic claiming that video games would be better if they abandoned stories.

For reference, here is the article in question:

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/04/video-games-stories/524148/

Now I understand this article was probably intended to get a rise out of not just passionate video game writers such as myself, but also folks who actually write video games, develop games, and aspire to make the medium better as a whole. I have nothing against Bogost, this is even the first I’ve heard of him, but his piece seems so lacking in any credit for fantastic gaming examples at all that I thought a detailed response to the article, some counterpoints, could prove an interesting read. 

I have nothing against him, and he is absolutely entitled to his own opinion. That being said... I really, really disagree with him. This is not meant as an attack at all.

So the big aspect this article hinges on is that environmental storytelling is kind of a joke, by comparison, to “real” storytelling, like that of TV, film, and novels. The two big examples he uses are BioShock and Gone Home. The comparison of Gone Home to a young adult novel is both kind of apt, but also really dismissive of what that game evokes out of people.

Something really massive about games, and I talked about it on my Alex Talks about experiences, is that each person experiences a game differently. Now, this is absolutely true of all art and art forms, but the difference in games is that can have some form of physical manifestation. When you experience a video game differently, when it causes different senses in your brain, you will likely play the game differently. This can be a subtle thing, from dying more in a shooter to dying less, or exploring one room where another person spent hours in it, examining the environment. 

And that’s the key thing with games: everything is a story, and that story is always different depending on the player. Like I said in the video above, some games are crafted in a way to make that experience almost identical for everyone, but death count, level of frustration, difficulty level, all go a way to make it very subtly different for everyone who plays that, and thus the experience will evoke different things for different people, and in turn, will be different depending on the player. Now, I just mentioned that a different interpretation or experience is true of any form of interpretive art, but the fact that the way, the vehicle by which that changes is completely unique to games (deaths, retries, difficulty, etc) goes further to make gaming experiences have their own unique flair to them. This may seem like a weird and arbitrary detail or argument, but it’s not. It makes games accessible in ways that some mediums just art. Take my experience with Uncharted 4, compared to my mother’s. She doesn’t play many shooters, but because of the lock on and ease-of-diffuclty settings specific to Uncharted 4, she was able to play the entire game by herself, something untrue of the series up until that point, and she loved it.

Another big focus of Bogost’s argument were examples that all fell into the narrative-driven gaming experience. He also didn’t really end on an argument, a concept to push forward with. He said that games would be more interesting if we could take their worlds apart and put them back together, which I think was mostly in reference to What Remains of Edith Finch, a game that just came out today and I have not played, so I can’t really understand.

But to the argument against the narrative-driven game, let me bring up a gameplay-driven game: The Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild. Every aspect, every occurrence in that game is a story. It’s a unique story to the player that is playing it, but there is no denying that this game that “forewent its story in service of being a video game” actually has more unique storytelling to it than most games of the last ten years. Everything you do and explore and engage with is a story unique to you as a player, and all the pulls and hints and attractions of that world, while still slightly guided, are at the behest of your own agency. When I run off and find some animal that I chase into a fight with a Lynel, that is a narrative of my own making, with characters, a hero, a villain, and a complete arc. It’s unquestionably the narrative he believes games should be abandoning, but never seems to provide a clear explanation of what that abandonment would be in service of? Instead, he’d rather a game be a flat picture that evoked sounds and colors over player-driven exploration, because guess what: that’s story. That’s one of many, many ways games can tell stories, and to disregard that as “just gameplay” or “not a real story” would be to disregard the majority of ambient storytelling devices in games. 

Again, I think this may come across as an odd example, and maybe Bogost would even say that that’s merely gameplay, and in service of his argument. But I’d disagree.

There would probably be an argument saying that The Last of Us’s story is just a movie or short TV series made into a game series, and that’s fine. I’d respect that argument, if it was well articulated. The Last of Us isn't even mentioned as one of the story-focused games in Bogost’s articles, either. Probably because he’d too easily write it off as another, “better” medium’s linear narrative merely adapted into a game. But The Last of Us accomplishes so much within the medium of games. It’s a story with gripping tension that genuinely complements the set piece moments of action placed throughout it’s story. There are moments, like when Joel gets injured toward the end of the Fall season, that are experience partly through cutscene, partly through actual, interactive gameplay. Their subtle ways to trick your mind into investing in the characters, only its not really trickery; it’s genuine emotion brought out of the player. Naughty Dog’s linear storytelling approach is one that works, and works very well. People will argue about their gameplay, but the tense, slow pulse of combat in The Last of Us is almost perfectly tailored to the narrative in play. It’s top of the line.

I could go on and on, but let me just touch on one other thing.

A lot of people give JRPGs shit for having batshit stories, or as what Bogost would probably describe as an “objectively bad story”, but that’s just not true. You can tell a story that is over the top, occult, or absurd, and still have it contain gripping characters, true moments of genuine emotion, and incredible payoffs. Persona 5 is absolutely one of those. If you want to sit here and tell me Persona 5 has a bad story, be my guest, but you’d be for sure wrong. All stories have some level of subjective determination with them, and they’ll resonate differently with different people.

What’s very cool and poignant about the Persona stories is their sense of scale. They take place over such a long time that it’s a different kind of investment. The 102 hours it took me to play Persona 5 was an investment, typically far longer than any entire TV series that exists out there. And instead of the time-skipping pacing of a television show, Persona always has a strictly metered pace. Pacing is a massive advantage video games have over just about every single other medium in existence, but I won’t get into that here. What i’m saying is, by pacing things out in a game like Persona 5, so that you actually live an entire year in a person’s life, there is a gradual and steady build of investment, not just in your own character and the world, but the other characters, You have to spend some collective amount of time with another character to become their best friend and confidant, just like real life. Persona is already unique in its approach to this, and just going and watching the Persona 4 Animation ostensibly proves that you lose almost all of the magic converting what is an “anime game” to an “actual anime”, and that is proof enough for this relatively shallow argument in an example that I don’t even think Bogost would have considered.

I don’t mean to sound dismissive here. There is absolutely room for conversations about how video games could, and should, be better. They still have plenty of room to grow. But by saying that they will be stuck in “perpetual adolescence” and should ostensibly “give up” is, as Danielle Riendaeu said on Twitter, just fucking lazy. 

Anyway, cheers to Bogost’s opinion, it did awaken something passionate in me. It seems this was definitely more on the bait-y end of the article spectrum, and maybe I fell for it, but I’ve always vehemently fought for the fact that video game stories are great in their own right, interesting, and unique in both their approach and results. But like I said, he is absolutely entitled to his opinion. <3