A Note from the Author—Oh, Boy, What Have I Done?
Story (N.)
a: An account of incidents or events;
b: the intrigue or plot of a narrative or dramatic work;
c: what happens when a character faces an unavoidable, challenging obstacle, and how they change because of it.
I’ve been writing books for a long time. More than fifteen years, I’d guess. And before that, I designed games and wrote professionally for the video game industry. In one way or another, I’ve been writing or thinking about writing for a quarter of a century. Twenty-five years, at least. That’s a long time. Well, at least it is from my perspective.
And during that entire time, this book or a version of it has been playing in the back of my brain. I’ve written hundreds of thousands of words about story and games that will never be read by another human. I’ve got a filing cabinet full of notes I’ve taken while playing games, capturing everything from the emotional impact to the dialogue to the moments that made my jaw drop. I even have notes on the not-so-great games. I don’t play favorites when I’m capturing my impressions in the privacy of my own game room.
It is an endeavor, or maybe a journey, that I’ve been on for half of my time here on earth.
Story is the creative lifeblood that pumps through my heart. But I think you’ll agree that story isn’t the only thing that makes a game great. There are great games out there that are totally void of story. Not just bad stories, but games without any story whatsoever. Seriously. Games are complex and run the entertainment gamut.
Yet a game with a fantastic, emotional story arc will always hold a special spot in my gamer heart. And a fun game to play, combined with a great story, is a rare gift. It’s a marvel something like this can even exist. They’re so big and so … is complete the right word? Considering all the people and countless hours of work that go into making a knockout, blockbuster title, it’s incredible when a singular vision with impact gets produced. We truly are living in remarkable times.
A second thing I’d like to point out is that while twenty-five years of studying, playing, reading, and creating stories seems like a long time in a single human’s experience, it isn’t even a blip on the time line of storytelling history. This might be the biggest issue with storytelling in games, so I want to get it out of the way early. Games are infants in the storytelling world. And babies make mistakes.
If we examine the lifetime of film, which is widely accepted as one of the best storytelling mediums humans have created, we’re only looking at around 120 years, give or take a decade. And even that is just a blip on the time line of storytelling history. Compared with movies, games have only been telling stories since the 1970s, and in that time, the rules of how games work have changed considerably. And the delivery devices change dramatically about every five or so years as well.
To put this in perspective, while things have certainly changed in the book world over the last five hundred years, you can still read a William Shakespeare sonnet in basically the same format that Ole Willie, as I like to call him, intended. You can even do a side-by-side comparison of his writing to that of a modern-day poet or playwright. But while it isn’t impossible to find a working PDP-10 mainframe computer to play the original version of Colossal Cave Adventure in its purest form, it isn’t the same as playing Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart on your new PlayStation 5. Yeah. To say that things have changed is a monumental understatement.
Screenshot of Will Crowther’s original Colossal Cave Adventure running on a Windows computer, next to a screenshot of the PS5 game Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart © Sony Interactive Entertainment
The speed at which game development and video game storytelling have evolved is unprecedented. In no other time—from prehistoric to modern—have we experienced a change in how we tell and enjoy stories as we have in the last forty years. I don’t want to exaggerate too much, but that is a big deal. Because stories are a big deal to us. And I don’t mean that in the public, universal, objective sense; I mean that stories matter to every individual in a profoundly personal, practical way.
As you might imagine, this type of rapid change can cause a few bumps in the road. Not every game made is going to be a winner, and when a huge portion of the storytelling takes place in a player-controlled environment, there is a lot of room for error. What I’m trying to say is, there’s been some bad games.
But the game industry has created masterpieces. Deep, rich, complex, emotional stories that put you, the gamer, right in the middle of the conflict and ask you to decide your own fate, or, at the very least, experience it.
I’ll fully admit my bias. I love everything about story games. Creating them, playing them, writing about them. And I know I’m preaching to the choir. The majority of people who grab this book are here because they already love story-based games, too. But I’m pretty confident in stating that the most original and innovative storytelling happening now and in the future will take place in the game space.
A foundational element of a great story is that it cries to be shared. That drive to share a story is biological. It was in sharing the stories of man and gods and beasts that ancient societies warned of potential hazards. The cautionary tale. Of course, not all games are cautionary tales, and to show my bias once again, I personally think that video games are the most shareable of media. So much, in fact, that entire platforms like Twitch have staked their future in gamers streaming and talking about how the games we play affect our lives. And they aren’t going anywhere anytime soon (fingers crossed).
I’m willing to bet that all of us who have experienced the power of using a controller to move the story forward rather than turn a page have had that experience where we have to pause, set down the controller, and just think. Or better yet, feel for a moment before we can go on. I know I have. And the wonderful thing is that we all bring our own backgrounds and understandings to the games we play. When we mix that with a medium that requires us to actively participate in how the story unfolds, we get this unique, personal attachment that speaks to us in meaningful ways.
For me, if I’m being really honest, that has only happened about a dozen times. Don’t get me wrong. I’ve enjoyed hundreds of good story games, but that special moment I’m talking about is special for a reason. I remember each of these moments because they don’t happen very often. They left an indelible mark on my life at the time. It happened the first time I joined a group of fellow travelers in Journey, sand-skating peacefully as the setting sun glowed through the massive pillars of an abandoned temple, only to be removed from my new friends and dropped into a lonely, dark abyss. It happened when I struggled through the wrecked interior of a train dangling precariously over a snowy mountain cliff as Nathan Drake in Uncharted 2: Among Thieves. And it happened most recently as I escaped the city of Jackson as Ellie, Dina nearby, as we enjoyed a solemn moment in a lush evergreen forest on horseback.
But there’s a chance that not all these moments will have the same impact on you as they did on me. As I said, we bring our own experiences to the game, and this changes our perception. It’s like if you asked fifty artists to do the same rendition of a hilltop sparsely populated with plant life, no two illustrations would be the same. The term I’m poking around at here is subjective. Games aren’t alone; every story medium shares the subjectivity phenomena. While we can generally agree that some things are better than others, when it comes down to claiming that something is the greatest of all time, the debate will rage. We’ll all be right. We’ll all be wrong.
And, really. Isn’t that what makes it all so compelling? Remarkable art, and I’ll argue that games are exactly that, art, requires a lot from the viewer. It can be both harmonizing and polarizing. It makes us think. It encourages us to share. It makes us disagree. It makes us talk.
Great art makes us feel.
So, gamer, this is where our troubles begin, and it goes like this. You will probably find that at least one, perhaps more, of the games I discuss in this book does not fit your criteria for Greatest Games Ever Played. And I can pretty much promise that you’ll have a few that you’d like to have on the list that I’ve left out. In fact, I have a few more I’d like to be included. There are so many that could have made the cut, but cuts were made. It’s the nature of things. Cuts must always be made.
I did my best to set my personal biases aside and look at the games that we generally agree are the best of the best. But if I’m going to give you the most honest book I can, I have to allow some preferences to soak through. However, this is where you come in.
Copyright © 2022 by Dustin Hansen
