During a session of watching a friend play Skyrim some years ago, he remarked that the game was similar to reading a book. A silence then, which continued as I chose not to remark back at him and allowed that silence to fill in the details.
I was not impressed.
Video games, even the text-heavy ones, are not like books. Books are like books. Audiobooks are quite like books, but video games are like video games. I understood the sentiment, but it did a disservice to both mediums. No game has ever captured a maturity of form that Tolstoy achieved in Anna Karenina, but on the return swing, no Jack Reacher novel ever broke bones like Fighting Vipers.
It is true that we cannot help but draw comparisons, but the enchantment of written fiction, however absorbing and wonderful its effect on the mind, is a linear experience. You are directed by page and paragraph and the relationship is strictly author to reader, front to back with no more interaction than a finger to turn the page or else scroll down the screen if you are the sort of person who actually enjoys reading that way.
But games have controllers and controllers have lots of buttons. You have options and options create narratives. Narratives that you tell, be they a sudden urge to go collectable hunting in the local fauna of Skyrim or starting a mid-session rampage on Grand Theft Auto. Forget the hand-fed narratives that both of these titles foie-gras down your throat as the main game, the real stories are in the control of your interactive whims, and that is why I have returned to Grand Theft Auto so often over so many years.
I have made many a story across volumes of those games. It has always helped that whatever button I choose to press, something strongly apparent happens. This button steals a car, that one activates a power slide. Grand Theft Auto was always understanding about that. Get a car and get going. There is a story to tell. It’ll follow a regular pattern if you are me; carnage up to the value of four stars and then a state-wide escape attempt, before death by either cops or speed-running an already ruined car down Mt Chiliad; classic hero’s journey stuff with each word represented by a press of a button or roll of the analogue thing.
It is fair to say that we do not ordinarily think of the moment-to-moment moments of gaming as narrative, but then we sure do remember them like they were after a good one; Evo moment 37, the time that guy played two Virtua Cop 2 machines at once on GamesMaster. Playing is story time and I have been wondering, what are my favourite stories to make?
I will always head to the hills for an escape in Grand Theft Auto for instance. I know that getting a plane down at the airport would be a better escape option, but I prefer the story of getting out of town and the button words that get me there. It is explosive storytelling over a wide area of map, but you can go bigger. I think about games like Command and Conquer and the tense stories of building and expansion. Conflict was inevitable, but how you get there was your own narrative. It was Command and Conquer so the end would almost always be your death, but it was a tense story leading up to it.
God games always have delivered that strong sense of personal narrative and they do so across a canvas which gives the player time and space enough to appreciate it. Some stories are smaller and altogether faster in the telling though. Getting a perfect round in a fighting game and finishing it off with a Hurricane Kick for instance. Actually, perhaps that is closer to poetry than straight storytelling, but who wants to discuss poetry? Exactly, so let us move on before someone breaks out a Panatela cigar and gets lofty about things.
Let’s think smaller and more complicated; multiplayer stories. Not just two-player Street Fighter (though the Ryu/Ken vs Bison special stage on Street Fighter Alpha is cannon videogame storytelling) but four-player single-screen gaming, like Goldeneye 007. What a game; four players sharing at least four frames per second gameplay. Ideal story-making stuff, except that inviting three others to join in with a counter story will inevitably end in a row and the dissolution of friendship. Well done Rare.
The multiplayer stories that do work though are when players are telling them from the same side of the coin. Streets of Rage 2, Fifa International Soccer, Guardian Heroes, that sort of thing. Maybe Streets of Rage is pushing its luck when it lets you grapple player two but we shan’t go criticising those games on my watch. They were a great time with each player’s story weaving in and out of the other player. Separate words for the common cause of the narrative. You might have thought Streets of Rage was just a bitch-em-up but your mind knew better.
We can’t escape the stories and we only persist in making new wheels within the Wheel when we do. All those seasons of same-side, two player games I played through with my brother on Fifa International, all the stories of each game, each half that made the game, each foul I committed that upset my brother; all the smallest wheels, in turn, making new, larger ones that gathered outward regularly until we inevitably won the season. We had long since figured out that trick isometric kick outside the eighteen-yard line. Safe as.
But that is the thing about good stories: it’s not the ending but the words and the telling that you enjoy. I knew I was going to get us red cards in Fifa, of course I was, but the manner in which they were divvied was always fresh and forwards toward the common end.
So I think it best we don’t mix the methods of our media. It is why if I should find myself in the position of a casting vote on Electronic Arts making an RPG of Anna Karenina I am going to slide out the card which reads No, no thank you. I don’t care how interactive they think they can make the harvesting chapter, it will lower the esteem of both media.
Go make a farming RPG instead and call it Big Farmer or Flock and Field 2023.
The End.
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