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Narrative in Video Games
- Thread starter DoubleTake
- Start date
Finally getting round to this 🙂
I like the way she outlined how a narrative is the delivery system of a story, and not the story itself. I think that's something a lot of people don't realise which is why there's an assumption that certain games aren't narratively driven.
In essence, every game has a narrative to a degree. Some (like sports/racing games) are very basic, but there's still something there to latch on to. The ludonarrative aspect of games is near universal; any game with a defined goal has some form of narrative element, even if it's not explicitly spelled out for us. In an extreme scenario, the Wikis of games also form part of its narrative to a degree, as the game then serves as a tool for others to build and share their own narrative experience, where the game forms part of the player's real-world story and experience.
Maybe I should post my thesis as a thread, just dump all 8,000 words in here 😅 It's from 2010 but may still have relevance to this discussion.
Honestly, this is a perfect example of people giving way too much credit to From (I guess you could argue this is a part of their desire) in the process of thinking about the lore in the game and making sense of it. Yeah, the frenzied flame is symbolism for some concepts, not entirely original nor are they remotely unique to ER in terms of video games. The video goes on to delve into literary works connected to these concepts and this gives the impressions that ER itself is somehow connected to this work and it is easy to come away thinking what a great piece of literature ER's own writing is. If you actually look at the stuff that happens in the game, I would say it is much more mundane version of what you end up with doing deep dives into the concepts themselves (because there is no shortage of absolutely encaptivating work done on concepts like nihilism outside of ER). Nearly every From lore is guilty of this, tying ER to other literary works outside the game leading to an elevation of the game's perceived writing/ art.The flame of frenzy for example.
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To me that's a sign of deep and well thought out piece of art. I think it is a massive success when a video game forces/invites people to take a deeper look into the message it's trying to convey. In most games it's so easy to consume and move on due to how closely the narrative style of Film is followed (tons of exposition, little ambiguity, poor use of diegetic gameplay and ludo narrative harmony).
This would be the same as quoting Plate, aristotle and other peoples' works on the common good to explain the ending of TLOU while implying these philosophical works are directly part of the game instead of ND's own narrative derived from these philosophical concepts. The reason this is mostly unique to From is precisely because the in-game depictions of these concepts and plot devices are so obscure. No one was confused about the choice at the end of TLOU's ethical dilemma, while I really really doubt many people playing through ER and even interacting with the frenzied flame quest line were completely aware of the underlying concepts (yeah I know its not nihlism specifically, but it'll do here) like nihilism that inspired it to the level of linking it to Dostoevsky's work.