A somewhat vague statement, but let me go into it.
Story telling has been largely stagnate for quite some time, several hundred years in fact. Ever since the days of Beowulf and old tales passed down through songs and vocal tales, stories have followed a fairly predictable route. Meet hero, hero faces challenge, hero overcomes challenge or is defeated, the end. But while the formula works, and has been tried and true for centuries. Certainly there must be another way for people to experience a story?
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| The Legend of Zelda. Breath of the Wild. 2017 |
Enter the world of gaming, well the story telling world that is.
Ever since it's inception gaming has been looked down upon as a inferior form of entertainment. Instead of being it's own medium it has been constantly compared to older art forms, such as movies, books, or even paintings. While this isn't necessarily a bad thing, it stifles creativity. Forcing expectations on it, while it was still growing as it's own art. I would like to show you some examples of games that follow the forms of conventional mediums, and those that forged ahead a new path of there own.
The Legend of Zelda.
A title so influential to the world, it's hard to think of a time before it existed. In 1986, a small team of people including, Takashi Tezuka, and Shigeru Miyamoto, released The Legend of Zelda. In the game you played as a young boy, you were given no directions and the world was yours to explore. This was incredibly ground breaking. Instead of the voice of a narrator telling you a story, it was the world that had a story to tell. There was no, go to point A, do objective B, get item C, to accomplish D. It was more free flowing than that. You could explore at your leisure, finding secrets, defeating monsters, and just overall feeling like an adventurer. People would get together to talk about the game and share stories of their adventures. Finding a hidden room felt like an accomplishment, not some mundane task put forth for you to do by some Deus Ex Machina convention for plot reasons. If it sounds like i'm gushing it's because I am. Did it have it's flaws? Sure, but this game did so much to change the landscape of the gaming community and was so far ahead of it's time that the full vision of the game wouldn't be realized until 2017. More on that later.
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| To the Moon, 2011 |
So you may be thinking that I hate traditional story telling but I don't.
In fact if anything I absolutely love it. Let me prove it. To the Moon, this game brought me to tears. While the graphics and sprites aren't anything to write home about, and the gameplay is basic puzzles and simple point and click mechanics. It's all about the writing in this game. It tells a tale of a mans life through his memories, the catch? The memories can only be accessed backwards from the most recent memory. What follows is a heartfelt tale that tackles, love, loss, and extreme moral questions. Even after it's over, you can't help but ponder the choices it presents you and whether or not what you did as the main character was right. But it's all told through dialogue and narration. Player discovery is kept to a minimum, as you are told where to go and what to do. However, this is the only way a story of this nature.
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| The Legend of Zelda, 2017. |
Alright, back on the open world train.
The Legend of Zelda, Breath of the Wild, came out and collectively blew peoples minds this year. Not only that but changed how people think of the Open World concept as a whole. The game starts you out in a small area that exposes you to most of the game mechanics and then let's you loose on the world. The original vision for The Legend of Zelda came from Shigeru Miyamoto when he was a young boy and the adventures he had exploring a forest and mountain near his home. And while the original came close to encapsulating that feeling, Breath of the Wild knocked it out of the park. The world, while not the biggest in overall land mass, is overflowing with things to discover, vista's to see, caves to explore, mountains to climb, all while rewarding you and making sure like you never feel like you are wasting your time. And while there is a story to go and follow, the best character is the world itself. The environments tell there own tale, there are ruins to look at, snow capped mountains, and scorching deserts. It's as intimidating as it is intriguing, and every second of it feels fulfilling and satisfying.
So what does it all mean?
Gaming has the unique opportunity of letting the player create their own story lines. Giving control back to the consumer of the art. It fills you with a sense of, "I did this" instead of, "Well that story was cool." I'm not saying one is better than the other, but it's nice to see that gaming has the opportunity to change peoples views on how a story should be told. Hopefully in the future we can start to see more creative ways on how to come to a, "Happily Ever After."
