Ian Bogost made a point similar to the one I made in my recent post about why walking simulators shouldn’t be thought of as movies with buttons. (Or rather, my point was similar to his, since he published his a year ago.) But from similar observations we came to different conclusions.
First, the same question:
The whole way through, I found myself wondering why I couldn’t experience Edith Finch as a traditional time-based narrative. Real-time rendering tools are as good as pre-rendered computer graphics these days, and little would have been compromised visually had the game been an animated film. Or even a live-action film. After all, most films are shot with green screens, the details added in postproduction. The story is entirely linear, and interacting with the environment only gets in the way, such as when a particularly dark hallway makes it unclear that the next scene is right around the corner.
Then, his observation:
The gag of a game with no gameplay might seem political at first, but it quickly devolves into conceptualism. What Remains of Edith Finch picks up the baton and designs a different race for it. At stake is not whether a game can tell a good story or even a better story than books or films or television. Rather, what it looks like when a game uses the materials of games to make those materials visible, operable, and beautiful.
[…]
What are games good for, then? Players and creators have been mistaken in merely hoping that they might someday share the stage with books, films, and television, let alone to unseat them. To use games to tell stories is a fine goal, I suppose, but it’s also an unambitious one. Games are not a new, interactive medium for stories. Instead, games are the aesthetic form of everyday objects. Of ordinary life. Take a ball and a field: you get soccer. Take property-based wealth and the Depression: you get Monopoly. Take patterns of four contiguous squares and gravity: you get Tetris. Take ray tracing and reverse it to track projectiles: you get Doom. Games show players the unseen uses of ordinary materials.
To this point we largely agree. But then our conclusions diverge. He thinks that games should “abandon the dream of becoming narrative media and pursue the one they are already so good at: taking the tidy, ordinary world apart and putting it back together again in surprising, ghastly new ways.” But this ignores the fact that a story can be the basis of a game without being the only, or even the most important, thing about it. Put another way, story can be a useful and enjoyable pretext without being the point.
To see this is the case, look to film. Story isn’t the point of many films: It’s the skeleton they hang on, giving them their shape, serving as an organizing principle. Most people find it hard to watch a movie without a story, but what those same people carry with them when they walk out of the theater are the impressions of individual shots, a single phrase spoken by a beautiful person, snippets of music—the essence of cinema, made digestible by virtue of the framework a story provides. They might also carry with them a feeling of catharsis, but ask them about the twists and turns of the plot that led to it, and you’ll likely get some embarrassed mumblings as people realize they have trouble remembering the supposed point of the past two hours.
Novels provide another example. True, the point of a Dan Brown book is indeed the story, and you race through it as quickly as you can to get to the payoff. But in literary fiction, the story is once again the pretext—it’s not unimportant, but if there is a “point,” it is found at the level of the sentence, or the phrase.
Games can be, and are, as a much a narrative medium as films and novels—which is to say, only partially, but that part is important.
William Comfort Anderson 