I’ve loved epic stories for as long as I can remember. As a first grader I would race home from school so that I could get to the TV in time for Star Blazers, an English version of a Japanese series that featured a desperate starship crew trying to find a way to rescue Earth from irradiated extinction. I spent hours playing with Star Wars toys even before I got the chance to see the movies. I collected monthly superhero comics for almost twenty years. As television offered more intricate serializations, I threw myself into series like Babylon 5 and Farscape. The grander and more elaborate the storytelling, the happier I tended to be.
I’m writing this paragraph in my local Barnes and Noble, where the amount of epic fiction available boggles my mind. There are shelves full of graphic novels; the children’s book section is teeming with adventure and fantasy series. There are undiscovered movies and TV series over in the DVD section that I will probably never get to because I can’t even keep up with all the old series that I can watch on Netflix, let alone the new series that the service is ramping up. I would have gone out my mind if something like this had existed when I was in grade school.
And yet over the last five or ten years, I’ve mostly been filling my appetite for epic narrative in an entirely different medium. I dropped out of Lost and Battlestar Galactica midway through each series and have never found the motivation to go back, even though both are easily available through Netflix. I still buy several trade paperbacks every year, but it’s not the regular ongoing habit that it was for so many years. I devoured all seven Harry Potter books in about a month several years ago, and that’s been about it for my fiction reading. These days, when I want to visit another world, I tend to turn to my computer and play a game.
The use of narrative in computer games has gotten a lot of attention in recent years, and I’ve noticed a lot of the writers I followed in TV or comics also do work on video games. There’s long been some aspect of a story in video games – giving the player a motivation for what they’re trying to accomplish in the game creates more engagement than just saying, “We want to test your eye-hand coordination†or “Here’s a bunch of logic puzzles.†But I’m not going to say I was ever that absorbed in whether or not Mario would find the princess, so “Sorry Mario, the princess is in another castle†never hit me the way a really good cliffhanger would. But I feel like the writing and the story of the game world is becoming more important, not just in the amount of tie-in fiction available but in the game itself.
Now to some extent, story is still a dressing on a game that doesn’t really require it. I played LucasArts’s TIE Fighter a lot when I was in college, and there was a single player campaign that tried to put each mission in the context of the player’s growth as a pilot and the Empire’s continued effort to thwart the Rebel Alliance. But you could easily just play the missions without paying any attention to the briefing. When I play Rock Band with my daughter, there’s a veneer of a story about our band playing bigger venues and getting more resources, but you can just as easily just play a random bunch of songs. So as much as I enjoy playing those games, they don’t have the same kind of engagement that a story does.
In other games, there’s no story provided, but the game provides the raw material for me to come up with one in my head. I have spent a lot of time on the Civilization series of strategy/simulation games over the last few years. Each game can form the basis of a story of an empire’s rise (and often fall), but there are no real characters in the game – even the avatars of leaders that the game uses don’t seem to have any real psychological life, and you never have to confront the damage that constant warfare or technological change wreak on the citizens of your towns – those things are represented as numbers and game elements, but there’s nothing personal about them. And yet, I enjoy playing these games because each game is unique, and my curiosity about what happens next is increased because nobody knows what will happen next, and my decisions in the game will help affect the outcome. I am not just an observer, but I am also a participant in a way that I can not be when I watch Babylon 5 or Star Wars, even if the latter give me a richer character experience.
Beyond sim games, there’s a growing genre that tries to combine active participation with character development and emotional engagement. For the last six years I have been a tremendous fan of the games produced by a studio called BioWare. The studio is famous for its version of computer role playing games. I tried a few example of the genre back in the 90s, but I never really got into them because the games I tried focused more on the stat-building part of role playing, and I couldn’t get engaged in the fights I was getting into. BioWare put an emphasis on character and story into its games, surrounding my player character with a group of companions who had their own agendas and who reacted to my choices in the game.
It’s amazing to me how well this worked. My first BioWare game was Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, which I’ve talked about on the site before. I loved progressing my character and his or her relationships with the companions. The combat parts of the game almost became an afterthought – I enjoyed them well enough, but they were something I did in order to get to the next conversation. Replaying the game was similar to rewatching or rereading my favorite stories, with the added benefit that I could change the outcome if I wanted. And because I had to make those choices, I thought a lot about the characters and what they wanted, and whether they were justified in their actions. Knights of the Old Republic, in particular, explored some of the questions of identity and agency that I’ve enjoyed thinking about in science fiction movies and TV shows. So I was getting a lot of similar narrative stimulation, with the added bonus of being a participant and not an observer. It’s that double-feature that keeps pulling me to the PC instead of the TV.
Since Knights of the Old Republic I have played and replayed a lot of BioWare games, along with similar games from other developers. In particular, BioWare’s Mass Effect series has been at the center of my fandom for the last five years. Mass Effect took its interactive narrative to a whole new level. Across three games, released for the PC between 2008 and 2012, the player controls Commander Shepard as he explores the galaxy and first discovers, then tries to fight, an ancient threat to interstellar civilization. Choices from the first game carry through the first and second, changing the characters that you meet and the opportunities your character has. By the third game, conflicts that date back centuries are brought to a head and Nothing Is the Same Anymore – and in fact, nothing might be the same in my game as in your game, because of the different choices we made. The conversations the characters have between missions make them feel as real as characters in TV and movies, and their triumphs and failures resonate. It’s an amazing accomplishment that I will probably want to talk about in its own post. But the Mass Effect story has absorbed me just as much as Star Wars and B5 have over the years.
Now, don’t get me wrong – this is still a developing storytelling medium. The technical challenges of branching storylines offer a lot of potential for the control that they give to the player to shape the story, but they also impose limitations. You can go to YouTube and watch playthroughs of Mass Effect and other story-driven games, but if you do, I don’t think you’re going to find them on par with the latest Pixar film in terms of character animation or with a TV series like Battlestar Galactica in terms of dialogue and character development. Right now, the personal engagement and control are helping to make up for the shortcomings in those areas. Over the next decade or two, I will be fascinated to see if technological growth and years of practice are able to bring the best of all worlds together.