Do you believe in the users?
Looking at who you are in the world of a game.
The ending of The Last of Us snuck up on me. I didn’t see it coming. I sat there thinking to myself, “self, wtf just happened?” Some games tickle a fancy, and others kick you in the feels. The Last of Us was a kicker.
This isn’t about The Last of Us, though. It’s about questions it raised poignantly: who are you in a game? Are you the hero? Is this your story?
Books and Movies
Back in the dark ages — before video games — there were these inanimate bags of words called books. A book was basically a story that you would experience without any influence on how it was told. If you wanted to, you could read slower or faster, and you could pause at any time or even jump to a later or earlier part of the story. That was the entire feature set. People lived like this.
Storytellers could speak in first person as if they were a part of the story, or in third as if they saw everything happening like a fly on the wall. They could know the thoughts of all characters, or maybe of just a single one. Narrators could lie to us or withhold information. Stories could happen in the past, or they could be happening right now.
Stories could be told through letters, so a reader can be a creepy stalker peering into somone’s personal life.
Being the storyteller gives you an incredible power over what that story means.
Tron danced well around how players and games might live together. At one point, a program in The Grid asks, “Do you believe in the users?” Our reality is a mythology to them. It breaks down the usual asymmetry between the lives on either side of the screen.
Does it sting to think that a world may know about us, but not believe in us?
Games
Games can tell stories the way books do. You can be Mario in third person or Master Chief in first.
But games can expand on how you fit in. A book written in second person — talking to the reader as you — would feel strange to me. Yet Zork, one of the first text adventures, pulled this off beautifully in 1980.
Can games do more?
The game Civilization puts you in the role of the leader of, well, of a civilization. You can control every character individually, yet your character never appears directly. It’s an interesting hybrid where the player fits into the story, but doesn’t appear directly.
Dwarf Fortress gives you a strong leader-like role, but this time — as far as I know — there’s no storyline explanation of how the player controls things. The dwarves have their own lives, and their own gods. You are not worshipped by them, and in fact you don’t normally tell any individual dwarf exactly what to do. You command in the large, specifying things to be done and generally trusting the dwarves to figure out when and who will do it. Playing this game makes me feel like a dwarven hive mind.
Some games dispense with traditional characters altogether. Tetris immerses you in a world with nothing but falling geometric shapes. Flower lets you play as the wind.
Passage lets us walk through a lifetime in five minutes. It leaves you asking what even counts as a game — and I mean that as a compliment.
Traditional bags of words can do wonders, but they can’t do everything a game can do. What we have is a young medium of expression. An expression that can pull in the player in entirely new ways.
Games can be a story, tell a story, pull you into a story. You can be a part of it, or simply watch it unfold with an unusually keen empathic perspective. I have a feeling that games can do more than we’ve yet imagined.
I can’t wait to see what’s next.
