I'm fifty hours in to my latest Mass Effect 2 playthrough.
Technically, this marks my fifth playthrough, my second on PC. The nature of the game, indeed, the nature of
most of Bioware's releases, is so massive, so sprawling and epic, that I find
myself coming back to it more out of comfort than anything else. I come searching for a familiar something
that permits me to let my brain rest, more than I come to it to understand
something new about myself. It dawned on
me, while I was helping Garrus not shoot his buddy in the face for the humpteenth
time, that this truly was the nature of epic narratives.
To expand this beyond video games and into books, I recently
read a relatively massive and sprawling book by a friend and teacher. It wasn't terribly good, wasn't terribly bad,
but it was, in many ways, an epic work: it attempted to engage with the history
and culture of a nation, the notion of mythology and colonialism and the myths
that accompany colonialism and the myth-figures colonialism leaves in its
wake. It was, in that regard, a truly
epic creation, a book that grappled with many broad themes through many
perspectives and, in doing so, managed to present a great deal of information
while making me feel relatively little.
This wasn't the first time I've had this experience reading
an epic book. The Lord of the Rings
series had the same effect on me, Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicron, George R.R. Martin's Game of Thrones, Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time before that.
Even strange, somewhat unconventional epics, epics like Gravity's Rainbow, epics with a deeply
personal, psychological focus, don't leave me feeling touched or scarred or
changed. They leave me with a sense of
scope, a sense of a world, perhaps, but they don't make me rethink my life, the
way I live it, the way I consider people every day.
The stories that manage to instill this kind of feeling for
me are far more intense, quiet personal narratives, narratives with a singular
focus ad purpose. In video games, these
are often hard to come by. While there
are some sprawling epics that present a great deal of personal input, such as
the most recent Fallout games, these aren't quite the sort of games I
mean. No, the games I'm talking about
are monomaniacal in their focus, specific in their storytelling, and profoundly
limited in their scope.
When I first played Zen
Bound 2, a game where I tied string around wooden animals using mouse
gestures, I felt high. I felt absolutely
blown away, floating delicately in my own body.
I felt astonished at what I'd uncovered: this thing, a very specific
thing, about the nature of Zen, about the nature of focusing intently on a
specific task that drives one inward.
That inward gaze made my mind feel plant and, in some ways, complete in
a way that it did not. It made me let go
of things and accept the nature of being.
By tying a string around a block of wood.
Narratives seem to work best this way as well. The
Path, Tale of Tales masterpiece which I perennially bring up here, was
another quiet, simple story about six very specific characters in a very small
place. I played through it in a matter
of hours, not days, and the way it made me consider gender, identity,
sexuality, growth, childhood, and death were all profound. I can't readily articulate them, despite
having practiced at doing so so many times before in this very framework. The
Path is a brilliant little game with a delightfully specific focus, and it
will never leave me.
There are games that get this, and games that don't get
this. The Halo games, for example, form a set of points and counterpoints,
particularly if we expand that coda to include I Love Bees/The Haunted Apiary (which, if we're discussing
narrative in games, is perhaps one of the most well constructed narratives in
the medium's history). When you look at
the strength of narrative within the Halo
series, there's a constant conflict between backdrop (galactic war) and
character (usually one specific person).
In the first title, that's mitigated through a few factors: the main
character is isolated from the war, and from people in general. His big, sprawling epic journey becomes a
very, very personal one. Instead of
interacting with events of scope and scale, he's left picking up the half-dead
pieces of those who came before him and, in so doing, burying himself deeper
and deeper in someone else's narrative.
The personal, specific narrative, then, becomes a means of exploration
and, in the process, becomes something of a narrative on isolation.
In I Love Bees,
the narrative focuses entirely on a small group of characters dealing with the
minutia of daily life during wartime, and the mundane story evokes far greater
themes, beyond itself, than a wandering, bleak epic might: by making a story
about war personal, the war becomes about people. Compare this to the game that I Love Bees was intended to
promote. Halo 2, which picks up where I
Love Bees finishes, is epic in every sense of the word. It hops back and forth between perspectives,
introducing characters willy nilly and asking players not only to invest
themselves in a narrative that, when all is said and done, is baffling in its
density and only half finished. The game
ends with a sentient zombie plant bantering with a supercomputer, and it
manages to make that final image, which sounds incredible, banal. There's no payoff, no sense of who these
characters are, merely a sense of their scope.
Halo 3 continued
that tradition, and then ODST ratcheted
it back down. This queer dichotomy, so
well illustrated by the tidal shifts of Halo
titles between personal narrative and sprawling epic scope, is only
occasionally manifested in games. Even
then, only, it would seem, by some of our most adept storytellers. Ken Levine is particularly keen on weaving
this sort of thing into his games, placing very specific people at the heart of
grand stories and then spending most of the game running around the edges of
said grand story, listening to other people on the fringes of it talk around
it. The end result is breathtaking: a
game that embraces epic scope without losing that personal touch, that personal
engagement.
The epic story can be tremendously satisfying. There's a reason we come back to it again and
again. In many ways, it lets us shut
down our brains and embrace believing in the unbelievable. That's a great feeling, and a great place to
be in more often than not. But there's a
downside to the epic, one video game developers seem particularly bad at
addressing. In creating an epic story,
it's easy to lose track of the human element, to lose track of human engagement,
and doing so sacrifices far more than the massive scope and scale of epic tales
can ever hope to attain on their own.
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