Video Games and Storytelling

We live in a time when there are very, very few people who do not play video games. While back in 1993 a person might be looked down upon by the mainstream for playing Doom, today the masses eagerly look forward to playing Call of Duty. Even those who don’t consider themselves gamers may be more of one than they believe. Have you ever played Angry Birds on your phone? Have you killed time with Solitaire on your computer? When you do so, you’re participating in a video game, albeit a simple one. Whether you’re male or female, young or old, in this day and age a person who avoids video games entirely is the exception, not the rule.

            In spite of this fact, though, video games cannot escape this negative stigma within the general public, even among those who regularly play them. There exists a belief that video games can never have any artistic merit, cursed to be simple entertainment and nothing more. Worst of all, some may even chide video games for being mere children’s toys, as they were often marketed as during their youth.

            To be fair, many video games don’t aspire to be anything more than simple entertainment (not that that’s an inherently bad thing. Doom may be devoid of plot and substance, but it’s still one of the most enjoyable games I’ve ever played), but that doesn’t mean they have to be stuck that way. In fact, as a writer, I find that the element of interactivity lends the medium of video games a tremendous untapped potential for storytelling.

            The simple fact is that video games, as a medium, are simply too new to be properly judged. Film has existed for a century, with its predecessor of theater existing since antiquity. Literature is as old as civilization itself. By contrast, video games have been around for only about forty years, and have only been particularly complex for around twenty. A critic may claim “A video game can’t have the same depth of storytelling as a book!”, and for the time being, they might be right. However, this is an unfair comparison as video games still carry the disadvantage of novelty. Imagine if written language had only just been invented. Imagine an author trying to bring a story to the page, only to struggle with using these strange, new symbols to form words as natural as those spoken. Would you quickly dismiss literature as a shallow language, never to match the beauty of oral storytelling?

            Imagine a story that you move. You decide the protagonist’s morals and actions. You decide who lives and dies, who thrives and suffers. Whichever one of the many myriad endings comes about, you are the one who brought it on. One day, as we understand the potential of video games more and more, we will have a story with this level of depth.

            That’s not to say attempts at such a thing haven’t been made yet. Plenty of games exist that try to let the player control the story, from Planescape: Torment to Deus Ex to Heavy Rain. I myself have been spending a lot of time experiencing Katawa Shoujo, a title so well-crafted it honestly makes me feel a little inadequate about my own writing. However, while all of these games are valiant efforts, we have still yet to tap the true power of the medium. We have yet to encounter a story that is not only beautiful, but so firmly attached to its medium that we can say “This could only have been done as a video game.”

            I think the current social reception of video games is an eerie parallel of how comic books were treated back in the 1950s. Like video games, comics had spent a long time being looked down on as children’s entertainment. In both cases, the industry retaliated by adding more adult content to their work. Back then, we had the wonderfully violent horror comics produced by EC’s William Gaines, and now we have the boom of first-person shooters, making it more and more difficult to find a big-name release without an M rating. In each case, however, it regrettably led to the medium being viewed as even less mature than before, with the added disadvantage of attracting the ire of moral guardians. While there were a few figures interested in the artistic potential of comics, such as Will Eisner and Osamu Tezuka, these men made up a minority.

            It wouldn’t be until the 1980s that comics finally had their day. The release of Watchmen and Maus caused critics to understand the true potential behind a medium that blended both text and visuals. As I see it, it won’t be too long before the Watchmen of video games makes its way. For all the issues with stagnation in the modern gaming industry, it’s nevertheless clear the potential behind the medium is growing. Whether I’m marveling at the aesthetics behind Aperture Science’s test chambers in Portal or the orchestral soundtrack of Super Mario Galaxy, games carry more and more elements these days that very few wouldn’t call art on its own. Why then, can we not call it art when attached to a game?

            As far as I am concerned, the day gaming’s potential is realized, the day we have a game even the harshest critic will call masterful storytelling, the day we embrace the medium as an art form, is not a matter of if, but a matter of when.

            Now, if you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll play some Team Fortress 2.