When a new art medium is formed, it is a historical trend for it to draw from the previous popular medium; movies were influenced by photography, just as games are now influenced by cinema. When a new medium peaks in terms of what it can borrow and learn from its parent medium, the new medium will start to develop its own unique traits. At their relatively young age, games continue to mature as an entertainment medium. They are closing in on how long they will need to borrow from cinema. If games wants to fully distance themselves from derived narrative structures and progress into its own golden age, games have to further realize the medium’s potential.
Even from the earliest days of Electronic Arts and Trip Hawkins, game developers have strived to create interactive experiences that could make people cry. It’s a valiant goal that aims to enrich the possibilities of video games on an emotional level.
“Stop trying to imitate cinema and start utilizing the most basic aspect of games”
Unfortunately, the approach commonly taken by popular games is to rely on cutscenes. Titles like Heavy Rain and Metal Gear Solid are classic examples of games that are able to invoke emotion, but at the same time they are also two of the most cutscene filled games to have been released. Too many games use the cutscene crutch to hobble their way through their epic narrative. Storytelling in video games needs to stop imitating cinema and start utilizing the most basic aspect of games: interactivity.
Games as an art form have the unique trait of being able to create meaning through the player’s participation. An emergent meaning is the differentiating factor between games and movies. The marriage of gameplay and narrative needs to be ubiquitous in the future of games before the medium can reach it’s golden age.
Indie games are currently at the front of discovering how to get games to this point. Arguably the most important game that aims to forward the progress of game narrative is Jason Roherer’s Passage. This short five minute experience provides no formal narrative structure, but instead relies only on its simple mechanics to create meaning. The player starts as a nameless character in an open world and scores points by traveling to the right of the screen and finding treasures along the way. Early in the adventure, the player may find another character to be their partner to travel side-by-side with. The married movement doubles the amount of points scored for traveling right, but also makes it impossible for the couple to reach certain treasures that are between one-character wide gaps. As the game continues, the characters show signs of aging with gray hairs and slower movement. The game’s most powerful moment comes in the form of death, when the player’s partner passes away and is replaced with a tombstone. Players then have to make the decision to either travel further past the tombstone to score a few more points or to spend their last few seconds by the grave waiting for their own death.
The experience of playing Passage resonates long after the player dies. Within its 5 minute span, Passage can provide an emotionally profound view of life, mortality and marriage. The game uses rudimentary systems inherent in all games to serve as the catalysts for the game’s narrative. There are no cutscenes needed to convey the game’s messages, because the use of the games’ basic mechanics creates the messages. Passage cannot be translated into a book or movie, the game’s meanings can only be gotten by playing it.
It’s time for games to take their final steps away from cinema. The path has already been laid out. Passage, created by one man with no budget, is a boiled down example of what the medium is capable of. Bigger triple-A titles need to break the mold of relying on movies to hold any emotional value. The golden age of games requires masterpieces that manage to be meaningful because they can only be games.