As computer games inch beyond shoot-‘em-ups into the narrative territory of books and movies I wonder how far the medium can actually go. I wonder if a more interactive and involving version of narrative might emerge that will replace, at least partly, those traditional ones.
I believe that narrative — the story, the myth — is something we have a deep psychological attachment to, and sharpening one’s carnage skills or doing a treasure hunt are not acceptable or satisfying substitutes. They are exciting and fun, but they don’t serve the same needs and don’t have the deep and lasting resonance with us as individuals and as a social group. Stories, however fragmented or disjointed, do that.
Games are edging closer, though. Characters have back stories and sort of personalities, but they don’t really change, evolve or “grow” — the popular Hollywood term. They remain the same person at the end as they were at the beginning, but maybe with more stuff or accumulated points. The primal hierarchical struggle for power and status is there, something males have found ways to practice in thousands of forms — from childhood games to office politics — but not much in the way of development. Something else males have been accused of more than once. Women, for the most part, are just not genetically programmed to find any of this of much interest.
We don’t much identify with the characters in videogames either, except to the extent that they are avatars of ourselves. They don’t exist apart from our own decision-making. In books and movies the characters have their own motivations and personalities, we may love or hate them, but they are not us. Somehow the fact that they are not exactly the same as us allows us to invest more emotionally in them and their future. The distance allows us to see part of ourselves — a problem, an issue or a relationship — being acted out to some unknown conclusion. Or even to a known conclusion — many myths and stories don’t lose power even though we know the ending. So it’s not about the surprise of the change, it’s about the resonance and thrill of observing it happen
The imagination fills in the holes when we read, we imagine the places and faces, and movies are mostly photographed, so the people and places resemble our world more or less as we see it. But in games the CG lands and characters are not quite rendered realistically enough to be real — though we can see this barrier being crossed over very soon. Gollum did, in LoTR, but that CG actor was following the motion capture of a live actor most of the time. But eventually that umbilical cord will be cut and the CG actor will have their own personality and be able show expression and emotion that corresponds to invisible interior states.
Another feature of games is multiple ending possibilities and decision trees that can go to more than one place. I believe that open-ended narratives and multiple endings are not what we are really after. Myths and fairy tales, the ur-narratives, gain so much of their power by their construction, their endings and conclusions, that to offer multiple ending options is to sap them of their resonance and power.
Games are getting pretty clever at this — they often appear to be offering multiple scenarios, but somehow they all end up at the same place. The detour brings you back to the main road. This may have been designed for pragmatic reasons — to keep the branching from getting out of control, and therefore taking up more storage space than is available, but it also serves to bring the structure closer to a narrative.
Maybe this “false” interaction will be how the gap is bridged?
I can imagine a time when there are games that do have involving characters that learn, have realizations and change over the course of the story. And because it is a game there would be some (simulated?) player involvement and, most significantly, it would take longer to play than a movie. It might take a week to get to the ending, which is typical for a game, by which time you the player have become so invested in the people and the story that it has the power and depth of a novel, plus the visual impact of a film. Wow.
