Also known as story telling.
Story telling is one of the few areas of human endeavour I can think of where looking at the duff examples can actually heighten our appreciation of the form.
It’s surely no accident that all the early cultures on earth told the same story with the same archetypes in the same or similar shapes. It is further no accident that there are archetypal settings, characters, icons and situations. Joseph Campbell found something very important but I get the sense from The Hero With A Thousand Faces that he didn’t really even understand how important it was, that monomyth.
Not that I’m making any great claims for my own abilities to tell you why stories are important. All I know is that there isn’t a human being alive who doesn’t have their own self-image which is really no more nor less than the story of their own being. Stories are the great tapestry of causality. A tapestry because a tapestry has patterns woven within it and the patterns are important to people because they help things to make sense.
Don’t we all feel one hell of a lot better when things just make sense? Not only that, but we can feel a range of emotions from unease to betrayal when things stop making sense.
I like video games with narratives. Love them. Some people like shoot ‘em ups, some like sports simulators, some like platform games. I like any game which has an underlying narrative. I absolutely can’t get away from them.
It’s a deceptive quality however, that thing that dictates what a narrative actually is. Until the advent of narrative video games it was a lesson that largely could not be learned. I recently did a cull of my collection and was struck by just how many games seem to have a good narrative milieu and direction but actually are missing vital components. The really important part about it is that it was not possible ever before to experience the story with no story in such a polished form.
What really brought it home to me was playing a duo of games that sought to cash in on the popularity of brainy horror titles such as Silent Hill; The Suffering and its sequel Ties That Bind. Both are prison melodramas in which the main character Torque discovers dark and violent power inside himself that is directed towards acts of virtue by the voice of his dead wife and vice by the voice of a phantomic medical doctor whose image and manner suggests a 30s modernist decadence.
The games attempt to place the player in a position of moral dilemma about what to do but this is never more than an illusory veil to disguise two different “endings” be “good” throughout and receive one ending, “bad” throughout and receive the other.
The problem lies in that we don’t know torque at all, he’s not a character he’s a cipher. In some games this isn’t a problem, in Tomb Raider Lara Croft was never more than a cursor used to solve 3 dimensional puzzles. In a game that bases some of its atmospherics and appeal on a supposed morality it leaves you feeling somewhat empty. I often found myself peforming “good” or “bad” acts by the arbitrary yardstick of which looked more fun. Essentially as Torque had no soul the game became soulless. When the subject matter was the character’s soul this seemed like a pretty silly way to structure the game.
By contrast the main character in the excellent Canis Canem Edit, Jimmy, did have several things going for him that Torque did not. Canis Canem Edit (Bully in the US) is a typical boarding school drama (except somewhat a hybrid between UK and US examples of the genre). It talks about all the usual things, social status, the contrast between the worlds of adults and children and methods of social control. Jimmy himself is ever given the voice of the heroic rebel. He stands up against any form of social injustice whether from his peers, the teachers or the wider world. The addition of a Mental Asylum location into the games map allows commentary on the methods of control society likes to impose on the rebellious or the dangerous intellectual.
Jimmy’s actual lines in the game support this reading of him but the whole game is tuned to reflect it. The scoring mechanisms, the locations, the mission structure and the overarching plot are neatly nested to allow the commentary of school as a microcosm of society to continue. All the characters seem to be defined by how they fall short of or exceed societal values in whatever way and the lines between all the different social groups are integral parts of the game mechanics.
Hence Canis Canem Edit (Dog Eat Dog by the way) has a story by virtue of the fact that all of its elements conspire to tell one. The Suffering tries but fails because many of its mechanics are are merely pedestrian.
But is that all a story is? A collection of archetypes that seeks to communicate a single message or moral? From the point of view of video game mechanics this would very much appear to be the case.
In the aestheitcs of the novel the written word can aspire to things a video game can’t but it can fall short in more or less the same ways. The benefits of separation in media, I suppose.
The really interesting thing about the video game example is in a line of similarity it draws between all narrative.
The fact of the matter is from the moment we are born until the moment we die we live enveloped in a prison of flesh and bone that separates the world into two distinct parts. Internal consciousness and external consciousness. How we interact with the world is dictated by decisions made internally and how they are enacted externally. As the old saw goes “The Road to Hell is paved with good intentions” sometimes people’s internal beliefs and the external expression of those beliefs are mismatched.
People in stories are rarely so encumbered, unless it is deliberately so by the author to make some sort of point. Heros, particularly, always translate their inner attitude into an external action of utmost appropriateness. Of course this is often because the world the story teller has created has been as tailored as the character. Stories seek to represent a literally mythic state of wholeness. Everything in a story fits together like a jigsaw puzzle and all to encapsulate the author’s agenda or sub agenda.
Maybe, the important thing about this process of reviewing circumstances where people and their worlds are so congruent is to help us find our own heroism, our own congruence. When we discover who we are maybe we also should be thinking about where we need to be to be who we are.
After all I’m sure I would have been as bored by Jimmy in the world of The Suffering as I would by Torque in the setting of Canis Canem Edit.
