The Literature of Video Games

Originally posted by me on Gamers Affinity - http://gamersaffinity.com/2011/08/the-literature-of-video-games/

Writing can make or break a game. It isn’t by any means vital - I’ve plowed through plenty of games with downright painful storylines for their rewarding gameplay, my go-to example being the late Megaman: Battle Network series. When a story hits the mark, however, it can easily surpass or even eclipse a game’s actually gameplay: I never touched a Grand Theft Auto game before GTA IV, and honestly, I can’t stand the shooting in that game - but the story is the closest I’ve ever seen a game come to literature.

And that’s just it: games should be literature, in my opinion. Not all of them, obviously, but a lot of them. I’ve spent many an after-class debating this with English teachers, some of which thought “damn, if this game is like what you say it’s like, screw Shakespeare” and some of which thought Dante’s Inferno was an insult to Alighieri’s masterpiece.

Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “There is creative reading as well as creative writing.” Now, being that he died in 1887 and the closest thing to a video game at that time was watching French people get beheaded during their weekly Revolution, he definitely wasn’t talking about video games - but I’m pretty sure they fit the bill.

"I tend to like a little wiggle room in my narratives.
I don’t like to know absolutely everything, and often what I come up with on my own I like better than what is offered, so for me the best kinds of stories feature defined regions of white space." -Tycho Brahe, Penny Arcade, June 2, 2010

Now, for games to be regarded at such high standards, the industry is going to have to step it up a notch. A few gems here and there isn’t enough to turn nay-sayers, especially when those nay-sayers are literary types armed to the teeth with all the best ways to say-nay.

The first question is “what is literature?” But, as the Paton Saint of Video Games, Roger Ebert, thankfully and painstakingly proved, defining an abstract concept such as “literature” or “art” is a waste of time. So instead I’m just going to assume that video games can be literature, if they have a profound enough intellectual or emotional impact, which is most definitely possible.

After recently playing Bastion, a game widely renowned for it’s storytelling prowess, I noticed something: whenever discussing a game, people always mention the game’s “story,” not it’s “writing” - or if they do what they really mean is “story.” People wrongfully attribute the effect a game’s narrative has to it’s storyline, that is to say, what happens and when. Sometimes, they mention the characters as well, but still, this focus on the what of the story takes from the how.

This seems to be reflected on the developer’s side, as well: as Robert Louis Stevenson, author of Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, said, “The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean; not to affect your reader, but to affect him precisely as you wish.” Sometimes I feel that games miss that second mark: they affect their players, sure, but it seems almost accidental or, at the very least, not well-targeted.

As part of the fallout, this morning the writing team refused to do their work for the month, which was to write today's blog post and name some hats. At first we weren't terribly concerned—partly because most of the team wasn't even aware the game had writing in it, but mostly because everybody here, unlike the writers, knows how to perform a skill AND write words. (Here's a pro-tip for you youngsters: Build your career on a skill that isn't something five-year-olds can do.) -Team Fortress 2 Blog

Take, for example, Gears of War 2. None can deny that the story of this game is secondary to the shooting, and that’s fine, except that the story is exceptional. Many set pieces - most notably when Dom finally finds Maria - have definitely affected me, but the question is, how? They upset me, and that’s about it. Plenty of books have upset me, too, but that doesn’t make them literature, either. The game didn’t really get me to thinking about anything, the way literature should. It didn’t mean anything. Sure, I tossed around a few ideas that I won’t describe for spoilers' sake, but they didn’t amount to much.

I read the first few Gears of War comics, and they filled that void for me. The comics picked one motif: heaven and hell, and stuck with it, for the larger part of what I read. Religion is a tough topic to tackle, especially when the gamer audience is dominated by young’uns who probably err on the liberal side of things, for the most part. However, it kept it simple: heaven is above, hell is below. I’m not religious myself, but I think that’s a pretty universal concept, and one that fit perfectly with the Locust war, what with the Locust coming from below and helicopters being nigh-untouchable. Perhaps the comics were a bit too straightforward for my tastes, blatantly stating “There was no damn way we were every gonna put our people in the ground again. Beneath us was hell. Heaven’s above...and that’s where we all deserve to be.” As Ernest Hemingway said, “If a writer knows enough about what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one ninth of it being above water.”

The game that comes closest is Grand Theft Auto IV for unrelenting satire that would make Johnathan Swift proud, but satire, while definitely held in as high a regard as more “traditional” satire, requires a completely different skill set to orchestrate, and, especially in the realm of video games, is applicable to a very select few types of games, and should be applied to less still. Satire certainly isn’t the remedy to the poor storytelling of games overall.

Hilary Clinton was one of many major political figures denouncing Grand Theft Auto after the "Hot Coffee" incident. This is Rockstar's thank-you. Her torch is a coffee cup.

The solution lies in the words themselves more than the story they tell. A common misconception stipulates that in order to make “person saves world” more interesting is to add in “person does ___ to save world” and then “person does ___ and ___ to save world” and “person does ___ and ___ in spite of ___ and then ___ happens but person still saves world.” The truth is, a story can be complex and interesting, but if it isn’t told well, it might as well be “person saves world.”

World of Warcraft is the perfect example of how not to tell a story. Long-winded, generic quest descriptions are how that game tries to get you interested when, let’s be real, nobody reads those things. I’ve played my fair share of WoW and I almost never read quest descriptions, save for the occasional instance where the basic objective wasn’t enough to get by. The few I have read were of such grade-school caliber it was painful. Why would anybody read:

Quest: The Bait
I'm sure of it...our ancient aquatic nemesis, Tu'u'gwar, "He Who Plays With Food", has returned. We must lay a trap for him, you and I.
If Tu'u'gwar has one weakness it's his stomach. There's one meat for certain that he'd never be able to pass up.

"Two Huge Pincers", the mother of all crabs, Kili'ua, paces upon her island out in the waters to the southwest. You must pay her a visit and return with her meat.

When they could just read “The flesh of 'Two Huge Pincers' (0/1)”? Nobody in their right mind. Maybe there are some decent quest descriptions in there, somewhere, but honestly, imagine yourself a WoW quest writer: would you put your all into each one? I wouldn’t. Then again, I’d never take that job.

Bastion, on the other hand, is the polar opposite: it utilizes all that is available to the video game medium to it’s full potential, all for the purpose of telling a story. Auditory and visual elements are obvious, but Bastion even taps the gameplay itself to help craft it’s story, narrating your actions as you play, taking “creative reading” to an entire new level. (Check out my full Bastion review here.)

A more traditional, text-heavy example would be Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney. Consider the following:

Edgeworth: Please state your full name.
White: You wish to know the title of my personage?
Edgeworth: Er... your name?
White: Yes! That is what I said! Oh dear, do my locutions confuse?
Edgeworth: Name!
Phoenix: (These two are great together...)

or:

Edgeworth: I can't shake this feeling that I know this girl from somewhere!
Gumshoe: Well, everyone knows you're quite popular with the ladies, sir...Maybe she's an old girlfriend you dumped along the way?
Edgeworth: D-Detective! Where did you hear such nonsense from?!
Gumshoe: I didn't hear it from anyone. It's just sort of how I picture you to be...sir.
Edgeworth: (...D-Do I really inspire this sort of frothing desire from the female masses?)

It’s silly and tongue-in-cheek to be sure, but that’s only the lure: the culmination of each case in Phoenix Wright, all of which are murder trials, is just as, if not more, powerful because of it.