I love video games. I have loved them since I was a wee writerling with a brick of a Gameboy—yes, the original—playing Bomberman. I’ve had almost every Nintendo console through the years. I’ve played games on all three main console lines and currently own one of each even now. I’ve played across many genres, AAA games and indies, and have formed some opinions in my time.
The first and foremost being: video games are an art form.
Thankfully, modern society seems to be slowly accepting this fact. There are still many stereotypes about dudebros and Mountain Dew fueled gamers and Candy Crush addicted moms and Not Real Gamers. But there have been a lot of high-profile games in years past that have pushed aside the shooter or puzzle stereotypes.
Video games are truly a medium to behold because they are one of the few truly interactable ones. You have a visual element as well as (usually) a written one. You have audio. There is more kinetic feedback in the form of vibrations, button and joystick tension, and more. And that’s to say nothing of VR.
Viewing video games as less shooty shooty bang bang and more as a way to tell a story that your players can actually perform—or, at the very least, experience—should be more of a focus.
Journey really pushed expectations of what a game could be; the game has no dialogue, no combat, no reading, and the only way to get multiplayer with your friend is through determination and luck. You have no account, all player characters look the same, and there is no HUD. It told a story through sheer player exploration and experience. (Those gorgeous graphics also helped!)
Games like The Last Of Us and Ghost of Tsushima had combat, incredible worldbuilding, deep lore, and very human, very poignant characters in amazing plotlines. Did you shoot zombies and cut off the heads of enemy samurai? Yes. But you also saw what it was like to see a giraffe for the first time through a little girl’s eyes post-societal collapse. You got to compose haikus, pet shrine foxes, and define what family meant to you.
Games like Pokemon teach cooperation, strategy, and how to memorize the lore of hundreds of cute little critters. I honestly think Among Us and Town of Salem can be used as teaching tools in psychology or criminal justice courses, or even as an accent in a literature or history class when talking about the witch trials.
And that’s to say nothing of the educational value of video games! (Also, hospitals are still using Just Dance on the Wii to help with physical rehabilitation.) I have learned an embarrassing amount of history from the Assassin’s Creed series. And now that I’m learning Japanese, you can bet your ass I’m understanding more and more of the pun names in the Persona series.
But what other form of storytelling can you say has the reader or viewer experience it? Readers can get lost in words for hours and movies can make viewers jump or gasp or laugh out loud. But you don’t control where the character goes. You don’t get truly optional things like sidequests, lore, or secrets.
You don’t instill fear in a player running from a monster, you don’t get the tension of a player choosing between two characters to save (or romance), and you certainly don’t get hilarious examples of players using in-game logic. Imagine: a reader understands your book’s logic so much that they can change the plot. Writers can only dream of that kind of immersion.
I love video games, and I probably always will. And I will always look forward to the next big story to tell—or play.
