Nowa Fantastyka May 2014
Blog Jan 8 2019
I’ve been writing video games for almost as long as I’ve been publishing novels. You can be forgiven for not knowing that; nothing written in my gaming capacity has ever made it to production. The usual course of events goes something like this: I work with a talented development team to serve up a kick-ass proposal. Over the following few months, the rest of the team disappears, one by one, under mysterious circumstances. Finally I get an email from some new Executive Producer I’ve never heard of, who praises my “terrific” work and tells me he’ll be in touch if they ever need my services again.
They never do. Nothing I’ve worked on has ever made it to market unmutilated; characters flattened to cardboard, innovative aliens reduced to evil yoghurt, all subtlety and nuance and interpersonal conflict flensed away before, ultimately, being jettisoned altogether.
And yet, after nearly two decades of false starts and dashed hopes, I still maintained that the future of fiction was interactive. Language, after all, is a workaround; one can marvel at the eloquence with which words might evoke the beauty of the setting sun, but no abstract scribbles of pixels-on-plasma could ever compete with the direct sensory perception of an actual sunset. This is what’s on offer by visual media of all stripes: the ability to convey exactlybe them—and how could any mere novel compete? Written fiction was always a compromise, an artifact of the state of the art. Now that art has advanced to an immersive state that invites its aficionados to help invent the narrative instead of just observing it.
Of course, for all the brilliance of games like Half-Life and Bioshock, the flexibility of the narrative is an illusion. You don’t really invent the story; you just find your way through a preprogrammed maze, shooting aliens and mutants along the way. And while sandbox worlds like Skyrim and Fallout certainly deliver the feel of an open-ended, off-the-rails environment, isn’t it a bit unrealistic that people you were supposed to meet outside the castle at midnight are still waiting there to pick up the story, uncomplaining, even after you’ve ignored them for six in-game months? Doesn’t Lydia’s conversational range look a bit limited after, oh, five minutes?
Just bumps in the road, thought I. They’d be smoothed out soon enough. For now it wasn’t possible to code realistic narrative complexity into a game that fit into the average PlayStation, but surely all those constraints would recede further towards the horizon with every iteration of Moore’s Law. In another ten or fifteen years we’d have games that you could really play instead of just solve; characters who’d live and breathe and evolve dynamically, in meaningful response to the actions of the player.
It took a game in which characters actually did live and breathe and evolve to make me see the folly of that belief. I’m talking about The Last of Us.
On first glance, The Last of Us looks like just another generic post-apocalyptic survival shooter. Civilization has collapsed. There are zombies. Mortal injuries are magically patched up in mere seconds by “health kits” cobbled together from rags and bottles of alcohol. You scavenge a variety of weapons during your travels across a shattered landscape; if something moves, you shoot it. Yawn.
On second glance, it’s fucking brilliant.
To start with, the zombies aren’t zombies: they’re victims of a mutated strain of Cordyceps, a real-world fungus that does, in fact, rewire the behavioral pathways of its victims. Good people turn out to be bad; bad people turn out to be ambivalent. Cannibals and child-killers and sociopaths all have their reasons. The moral dilemmas are real and profound, and the relationship between the two protagonists is so nuanced, so beautifully realized in the voice-acting and the mo-cap, that it literally brought me to tears a time or two. And nothing brings me to tears, except the death of a cat.
Only a video game so perfectly balanced, so emotionally involving, could convince me that video games will never be so perfectly balanced and so emotionally involving.
All that wonderful character development, you see—all those jeweled moments that exposed the depth of Ellie’s soul, of Joel’s torment—aren’t part of the game. They’re cut-scenes, unplayable, noninteractive. I don’t think I’ve ever played a game with such extended cinematic interludes. Sometimes it takes control in the middle of fight, to ensure it plays out the way it’s supposed to. Sometimes the whole damn fight is a spectator sport, start to finish. (Sometimes I think they go overboard. At one point you lose the game if a secondary character gets killed—even though that character dies anyway, during the cinematic that immediately follows.)
These are human beings, you see, not Gordon-Freeman one-size-fits-all templates into which any player might pour themselves. They’re damaged creatures with their own personalities and their own demons. And because they’re fully-realized characters, we can’t be trusted to inhabit them. Oh, sometimes we’re granted a token nod to participation at vital moments—a prompt to trigger a bit of preprogrammed dialog, or the choice of whether to walk or run during the course of a conversation—but all that really does is rub our noses in how irrelevant our participation really is to the story being told. We can’t touch their souls; all we can do is move their arms and legs during those shoot-and-sneak intervals that come down to basic animal-instinct survival.
And how else could it be? How could anyone entrust such complex creations to any doofus who slaps down forty bucks at the local games counter? How many players would be able to conjure up, on the fly, dialog worthy of these protagonists—even when Moore’s Law makes that a feasible option? How many could be trusted to keep their actions consistent with motives and memories that have twenty years of tortured history behind them?
It’s not the technology, it’s the player. We’re the weak link. We always will be.
Video games can be art. The Last of Us proves it better than any other title in recent memory; but the only way it could do that was to stop being a game. It had to turn back into a mere story.
And that’s why I’ve changed my mind. Interactive may be the future of pop culture, but it’s not the future of fiction. Dungeons & Dragons is fun to play, but a bunch of role-players making shit up as they go along are never going to craft the kind of intricately-plotted stories, the nuanced characters, the careful foreshadowing and layers of meaning that characterize the best fiction. I actually feel kind of stupid for not having realized that all along. The tech may get magical. The tech might get self-aware, for all I know. But until someone upgrades the players, we old-school novelists will still have jobs.
They just won’t pay very well.
