The game is the story
When people talk about the ideal “video game story,” they’re usually talking about something like Final Fantasy VI or Metal Gear Solid. A “good story” in a video game is usually a coherent narrative with characters and events, ideally one that’s augmented or enhanced by gameplay. On occasion, folks will point to something like Dwarf Fortress, a game that uses the foundations of interactivity to generate elaborate narratives.
Image via Kitfox Games
I think there’s another, more interesting type of video game narrative, though. It’s a kind that only exists in games and one that exists in every game. It’s not always written deliberately, and it often comes into view only after the game has been played.
The automatic story
Human beings are really good at projecting stories onto blank canvases. When we recount times in our lives, we’re very bad at viewing them discreetly. They’re always a sequence of events that feed into one another, a little story whose only author is experience. Video games, very often, are an almost-blank canvas. Where life is a story we write, defined by our experiences, games are stories we come to, and stories we supplement with those experiences. They are experiences built by other humans, who have laid the groundwork for a new story.
I think that, by virtue of being an active experience, every game accidentally tells a story. I like to think of it as an “automatic story.” It’s not something anyone has written, and it’s not something anyone is presenting, but it’s something that springs up simply because of the way the human brain works. It’s the detail we automatically fill in when we see broad brush strokes. It looks different for everyone, because everyone is both the author and the protagonist. I’ve talked through this theory with friends before, and they’ll often scoff. Usually, the conversation circles around to Tetris. After all, everyone has played Tetris, but nobody can tell you the plot of Tetris. I think that’s because the “plot” of a game like Tetris (or Pong, or Breakout, or whatever other arcade title you prefer) is entirely unique to the medium of games.
Image via The Tetris Company
Games do something very interesting without even trying: they invite you to co-author a story. Back in 1984, Alexey Pajitnov wrote the barest skeleton of a narrative without thinking. He put a bunch of bricks on a screen, he offered up the opportunity to move those bricks, and, without realizing, he wrote the first line every Tetris story. Every single Tetris player for the last thirty-odd years has come away from the game finishing Pajitnov’s tale. The moving bricks, consciously or otherwise, become characters, or structures, or cargo. The ratcheting tension and increased speed connect with everyone for one reason or another. For Pajitnov, things get faster to keep the game from getting boring, but for the player, it’s impossible to avoid imagining a reason, some kind of narrative rationale. We are humans, connecting with the work of other humans, and without realizing, we have turned that experience into a story. One that’s very difficult to tell, and one that can only really be felt.
Okay, but what about “real” stories?
Obviously, not all video games exist in such an abstract state. Sure, it’s hard to describe the plot of Tetris, but you can explain …….