I, like most people, love a good story. I think there's something intrinsic to storytelling and listening to stories that's an integral part of the human condition. We have a rich history, dating back millennia, of telling stories, or being told stories. George RR Martin, author of the A Song of Ice and Fire novels, also known as them 'Game of Thrones books', said in one of his tomes, "words are wind". So much of our past is lost to the wind, as words floated away on the wind, never written down, in the eons before the written word.
It's something we still do today. I did it over the weekend with some friends, sitting around a fire on the shore of a frozen lake in the heart of British Columbia. Just talking, telling each other stories from our daily lives. It's a very human thing to do. There's something deeply cathartic about telling a story.
We crave stories. We crave narrative. It's why I read books. It's why some people watch soap operas, or movies. It's also why I play video games.
Video games offer an opportunity for storytellers unlike anything presented by film, novels or any oral tradition. Video games give the player the opportunity to become someone else. To live someone else's life, to experience their story through their eyes. The best games are ones with rich, deep narratives, and immersive worlds that draw the player in, allowing the player to forget that they're hunched over a mouse and keyboard, or slouched on a couch with a controller.
Recently I finished playing through the third game in a massive series, based on a series of novels written by Polish author Andrzej Sapkowski. The game I just finished is The Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt, the final game in a trilogy, telling the story of a witcher named Geralt of Rivia.
The Witcher 3 (known from here as TW3) is an absolute masterwork of a game. Everything was pretty much damn near perfect. The graphics, as seen above, were incredible, detailed and lifelike. The gameplay was fun and engaging, the combat fluid and challenging. There was even a minigame, a cardgame called gwent that was surprisingly addictive and fun. But the best part of the game was the story.
TW3 tells an incredible story, one full of amazing, very human characters, with their own motives and desires, flaws and personalities. It's a fantastic story, about saving the world from certain destruction at the hands of an evil army, rescuing a young woman in distress (who almost certainly doesn't need rescuing as you come to find out, shes's a total badass), wielding magic and swords to defeat monsters ranging from trolls and wyverns to rogue knights and simple bandits.
It tells a story woven throughout with complex choices, full of twists and turns, with unique experiences and viewpoints. I love that the game rarely presents people as being purely good or evil. Almost everyone occupies a sort of moral grey-area, a very human area. Here's a quote from one of the books:
All of this is set against the backdrop of a massive, world engulfing war between a powerful empire and an alliance of small kingdoms for control over the great free city of Novigrad, for the icy, rocky isles of Skellige, a background that creates a living, breathing world that, well, feels alive. There's countless people in this world, going about their daily lives, children playing, adults chopping wood and selling their wares, dealing with the tragedies of a world ravaged by war, and the realities of a world inhabited by fantastic beasts.
TW3 tells the story of Geralt in a way that the novels of Sapkowski never could. Just as the Lord of The Rings movies tell the story of Frodo and the fellowship in a way that the novels of Tolkien never could. But as near-perfect as The Lord of Rings films were, they cannot touch the depth that a videogame gives it's creators to tell a story, to weave the player/viewer into the world, to make them feel like they're a part of that world.
There's many other games that do this as well, that present a story so engaging that you can forget about the real world as you live in the world created by the game designers.
I remember growing up and spending countless hours in the world of Hyrule, living the story of Link as he seeks to rescue Princess Zelda from the grasp of the evil Ganondorf in the Legend of Zelda games.
I was Gordon Freeman as he fought fight back the forces of the Combine at the side of Alyx Vance and struggled to take down the Citadel in Half-Life 2, or as he desperately raced to escape the destruction of City 17 in Half-Life 2: Episode 1.
I slogged through the snow and the rain in the shoes and leather jacket of Max Payne, as I tried to avenge the murder of my wife and child at the hands of corrupt cops and drug lords in Max Payne.
There are countless games with rich, engaging stories I could name. These are just a few that came to mind as I wrote this blogpost. Some of you may have played games that touched you, or that drew you in so deep that you forget about feeding the cat, or leaving for work on time. It's a special feeling, one that I've only ever encountered while playing a great game, or reading an especially good book, one you can't put down, the kind that leaves you in a emotional stupor when you finish it.
The Witcher 3, The Legend of Zelda, Half-Life 2, Max Payne, these are games that left me a wreck when I finished them. A certain sense of accomplishment comes from finishing a game, but there's nothing quite like that melancholy itch that comes from saying goodbye to a character and story for the first time.
I said it before in an earlier blog post, and I'll reiterate it again here. My generation was born too late to explore the Earth, and too early to explore the stars. But we were born at just the right time to explore the imaginations of each other. Movies, books, television, all of these mediums lend themselves wonderfully to storytelling, but none of them can put all the elements together in quite the same way that a good game can. A good game lets a game developer put you in the shoes of a character, and live in their world, even if just for a short while.