Why I Can't Shut My Mouth About Video Games

If you talk to me for longer than ten minutes, it becomes painfully obvious that I am really interested in video games. I kind of always have been. There are plenty of reasons for this, among them the fact that I have no depth perception, meaning sports are pretty much out of the question, and when you're growing up in Ohio in the nineties and early 2000's, that rules out a lot of other options.

At least, that was the excuse I used for a long time. But then I thought about it and realized that could only account for a part of it. There are plenty of people who follow sports but have little to no athletic ability, and I'm not one of them, either. I can't say for sure what initially attracted me to video games, but I knew that from my earliest exposure to them (watching someone play Doom, renting an N64 from Blockbuster), I was hooked. I found them fun, and still do, but I think there's still more to it, because that alone doesn't explain why I list them as an interest as opposed to just something I do in my leisure time.

One of the earliest things I realized about video games is that they let the player take on the role of the protagonist, rather than just watching events unfold. You get to be the guy who defuses the bomb with 2 seconds to spare or scores the winning touchdown. When you think about why video games were widely considered toys or children's games when they first emerged, it's not hard to see why so many of the plots (for the games that had them) boiled down to "kill all the bad guys and/or save the princess."

But video games have matured, or at least they're trying to. They're trying to tell stories that resonate more deeply, with more complex themes. What's more, they're also trying to tell these stories in a completely new way, one unique to the format. In the past decade, video games have started to assert themselves as not just a multimillion dollar entertainment industry, but also a new artistic medium.

For instance, consider this. That moment comes in the middle of Call of Duty 4, an excellent shooter that before that point had nothing deeper to say than "Bad guys pew pew pew!" (But done very well, of course.) Then, out of nowhere, that happens. Even though you've saved the pilot with seconds to spare, the nuke went off and you were in the radius. And then it teases you, saying "Look, you aren't dead! You survived the crash!" And earlier in the game you survived a downed chopper, so hey, it's not that far-fetched right? In fact, the first time I played this level, I moved towards the highway ramp right behind the chopper wreck, because I figured there was no point in moving towards the mushroom cloud. If I was gonna get help, I'd have to move away from ground zero.

But then I died. And you die no matter what you do, whereas previously if you got killed in a firefight, the screen would go blurry, you'd get a quote from some prominent figure, and then be thrust right back into the action. An inconvenience of at most ten seconds. But this moment tells you that actually, when you die in war, you stay dead, and it can be for really stupid reasons and it doesn't matter if you're the main character. That right there was the moment I realized that not only could video games have something meaningful to offer, but that could do it in a thoroughly unique manner. And let's just not talk about how Michael Bay apparently took the helm of the Modern Warfare franchise after the multiplayer made the game way more successful than anyone anticipated.

The point is, video games are a very new, innovative field, most especially where story is concerned. Giving control to the player not only intensifies their emotional investment, it can also be used to shape the outcome of the story. Some games have only the barest semblance of a plot and are basically excuses for you to explore and interact with a huge, fabricated world. My dream game, the one I'd want to make, would be one where everything in the plot is up to the player. The first level is the only thing set in stone, and all the choices you make after that are valid. They advance the plot, and they don't do so in terms of some sort of hackneyed "Jesus/Satan" moral choice system, but would instead lead to completely different character interactions, plot developments, and locales. It would all be set in the same world, but the story would be completely different each time.

The reason I can't shut up about video games and why I spend so much time on them is because they're still in a fairly early stage of development, and they offer a quite unique experience. They tell stories in a way no one has before, and it really works for someone like me who's been brought up in the emerging era of user-generated content, where the audience is a participant and not just a consumer.

...Okay, and they're also ridiculously fun and awesome.