Every work of art is, in one way or another, a story, one that’s told through the language of the medium it belongs to. A portrait is just someone’s face until the artist’s choice of color, and detail makes you see a person. A script is just a sequence of words until someone figures out how to capture those words in motion with a camera. What makes games different from almost all other entertainment and art forms is that the experience is about direct interaction, not observation. You, as the player, are experiencing a story more intensely by having agency within it. In theory, gaming extrapolates our feelings of identification with the characters we see on the theatre screen, or read about on the written page, by putting us in their shoes, and letting us control their actions.
That’s the theory, anyway. In practice, the uphill battle video games have faced in gaining recognition as art has been made all the more difficult by the restrictions interactivity poses storytelling. When placing even a modicum of control in the hands of the observer, the artist enhances the audience’s sense of physical engagement, but has made achieving intellectual and emotional engagement exponentially more difficult. Participant control, the thing that makes video games, well, video games, causes traditionally hardlocked elements of storytelling to become fluid. Like a couple of kids at their first high school dance, story and gameplay have been awkwardly circling each other for the better part of a half century, never embracing each other in a way that leaves both parties satisfied.
Bioshock: Infinite offers up a simpler, less under-age-sex-implying analogy for the disconnect: constants, and variables. In most video games, the story is a constant. We all watch the same cinematics, we all hear the same dialogue, and we all check off the same plot points. Gameplay is the variable: where you go left, I might go right. Where you wield a broadsword, I might fancy a bow. You choose Charmander, I choose Squirtle. Through those choices, the user begins constructing a narrative for their experience unlike anyone else’s. Endless permutations become possible within even very simple systems, so from a gameplay perspective, the journey from left to right in Super Mario Bros. is every bit as unique to each individual player as 100 hours of Skyrim.
It’s that freedom that makes accountability for things like pacing, and characterization nearly impossible. “Linearity” has become a dirty word in the industry, and developers often try to give the player as many options as possible for their gameplay experience. But with each new system and layer of customization added, the variables stack up higher and higher, while the constants remain roughly the same. Cutscenes, the most widely used form of video game plot delivery, act like train stations that funnel all players to the same point. The rail the player has ridden on will loop and swerve according to their whims, but everyone will make stops at the same stations eventually.
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