The brilliance of video games as vehicles of literary themes
When I was a kid, video games were mostly pixelated plumbers jumping on mushrooms. Video games were largely marketed to children, and most of their game dynamics revolved around the gameplay of timing your jumps appropriately. There wasn't a lot of heavyweight story telling, unless you count the princess being in another castle. Even games with a rich world of diverse characters like the Zelda franchise, usually divided their characters into categories if "good guys" and "bad guys". The modern game industry is bigger than the movie industry, and creates some of the best and deepest stories in our culture. These stories can remain completely hidden from huge swaths of American demographics because enjoying video games as a form of art is an oddly binary experience, either you play games, or you don't. The fact is that for many people, video games are still thought of as little more than jumping plumbers, but there is something unique about video games among all forms of storytelling: participation. Oral storytelling, perhaps the oldest and simplest form of storytelling, is necessarily one sided. You and your cousins sitting around the campfire while grandpa tells you all of how he once outsmarted a troll to cross a bridge, while a fun and captivating way to experience a story, isn't interactive at all. The listeners are passive receivers only. Literary novels have been the pinnacle form of storytelling since Don Quixote was written four hundred years ago, and the private experience of having the novel's plot play out inside your own imagination gives us a much closer relationship with stories than with the oral tradition. Visual storytelling arts such as comic books and movies broaden our experience of a story because they show us elements that we would fail to imagine from reading on the page alone. Visual styles don't just tell the story, they also show us how the storyteller imagines the story. Movies and comics have a story and a perspective. Modern video games are the only form of story telling that effectively invite us to participate in the story.Â
An example that illustrates this well is the Witcher series. The Witcher started as a popular fantasy novel series written in the eighties and nineties, it features a protagonist who hunts monsters as a profession. Sword and sorcery novels are often written for audiences who don't expect a lot of philosophical nuance or moral ambiguity. Brave knights slay evil dragons and rescue virtuous damsels, and that's all... or so we're told. The Witcher series was appealing because it transcended the traditionally simplistic expectations of fantasy novels and told stories of genuine moral ambiguity. The protagonist surprises the reader in some clever reinterpretations of classic fairy tales with the moral that sometimes things that look different deserve our respect, and sometimes the worst monsters are the human ones. Far from mindless escapism, I think many young readers of the Witcher series would come away with a lesson from the wise and respected storyteller, that ugliness and monstrosity comes from actions, not from appearances. The Witcher series has since been expanded into visual forms. It is currently an under production live action television series, and a successful run of comics. The comics tell more stories from the protagonist's travels, one of a woodsman who claims to be haunted by a monster, only for it to later be revealed that the woodsman is haunted by people he committed atrocities against. In addition to the beautiful story, we are given beautiful artwork as well. The dark and foreboding forests on the pages might be close enough to how each of us would imagine it, but the creative interpretations of the creatures and monsters share the illustrator's perspective on the story with us. We are able to use our own ears to listen to the story being told, but in a way, we use the artist's eyes to see it. We know the illustrator a little bit better now because we see how they interpreted the previously written word. We have a story, and a perspective. The video game adaptations of the stories are very true to the original novels. We play as the protagonist, and venture around the countryside hunting monsters. We act our way through the plots and talk our way through the dialogues of the novels. When a monster needs to be killed, we are the ones who have to dispatch it, when a monster is spared, it is by our mercy. When we're faced with a real moral dilemma, we have to make a real choice. The choices in many modern video games have lasting consequences that fundamentally change the story and set a different context in which we must interpret the moral character of the protagonist. In the game Fallout 4, we are faced with artificial humans, some of whom ask to be treated with the dignity and respect of regular humans, some of the artificial humans don't even know that they are artificial. We then have a choice to treat them as sentient beings, on par with, or at least very close to real humans, or to treat them as a very advanced and often dangerous technology. Our own moral intuitions can inform those choices, but the truly brilliant storytelling comes from scenarios that cause us to question our own intuitive choices. Our participation in the storytelling of video games gives us a unique chance to literally play out each scenario to its conclusion. In no other form of storytelling, can we get an answer to the question "What if it was different?". What if Luke had joined with Vader and they overthrew the Emperor together? What if Hamlet decided not to try and kill his uncle? What if Batman decided to kill the Joker? We can only speculate about the what if's in movies and books, but in video games we can make the choice. Because we make the choice, we have to take ownership of that choice, but because the choice is in a virtual world, that ownership comes with a return policy. Stories present us with interesting challenges, only through the medium of video games do we get to answer the questions "What would I do in the face of that challenge?" and "What would it feel like to have done it the other way?". Video games are more than just storytelling, they are story participating.