The aforementioned examples of landmark storytelling in gaming all provide proof of how rethinking core gameplay design, and presentation, is essential for the medium’s advancement. Portal, for instance, is about as close as a game has ever come to putting you in control of a player-character’s actual thought process. Because the player’s only means of interacting with the game world is through puzzle solving, there’s a near 1-to-1 degree of transference between the player’s thoughts, and Chell’s. Using a silent protagonist makes the player better able to transpose their own emotional identity onto the protagonist, so we see the world of Aperture Science from our own eyes, not the character’s, designer’s, or writer’s. The story itself is relatively simple, and its outcome is out of the player’s hands, but the great writing, and near absence of ludonarrative narrative dissonance make it consistent, memorable, and powerful.
A more ambitious, and equally laudable title is something like Telltale’s The Walking Dead, which allows the player to control both the path, and presentation of its story. With Lee Everett, an independently talking, thinking, feeling protagonist, The Walking Dead casts the player not as the star of the story, but as its director. Through conversations with other characters, and frequent decision-making, the player is defining Lee through the choices they make, either as a representation of their own morals and values, or as the player’s interpretation of how they believe this character would react in a given situation. Those choices alter the path of the narrative only slightly in terms of plot, but because those choices are grounded, and the player’s to make, their impact is massive.
The ultimate outcome of a game’s story doesn’t need to be radically altered by my actions: I just need to believe that my actions have meaning within the world I’m inhabiting. Games have been trying harder and harder to be the garden of forking paths, to be Bioshock: Infinite’s sea of lighthouses, creating unique experiences by piling on gameplay variables, but neglecting the importance of their core constants. If games want to become a more respected, and better storytelling platform, choice needs to affect emotions, not gameplay; that might mean reigning in the diversity of interaction a player can have, but when the journey is good enough, it won’t matter that the destination is set in code…
…and now that we’re talking in “inspirational-English-class-poster” platitudes, that’s probably as good a cue as any that it’s time to wrap things up. Look, Bioshock: Infinite is one hell of a game, and will probably go down as the swan song for an entire generation of consoles. But with shiny new hardware just starting to crest on the horizon, now’s the best possible time for developers to take a long, hard look at the future of gaming, and make a choice about what they want it to be. Will we just keep adding more wax and spit-shine to the same old carnival rides, or are we going to work on making more games worthy of a museum, ones that can be cherished across generations of people, not just hardware? Because that’s the thing: mechanics may age, graphics will date, and consoles will die, but a truly great story, regardless of medium, is always going to be timeless.
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