Day 17: Yet Another Guest Writer!!!

During each of the two previous years I’ve done this “write a blog post every day in May” marathon, I had a guest writer take on one of the posts for me. The first year was my cousin Paul, who is a very good writer even if he doesn’t have any real interests or ambitions in that direction, other than putting together the occasional amusing or head-scratching Facebook post. Last year it was my friend Betsy, who keeps a blog of her own called Literary Pathways (and don't you just love that name??) about her ideas and experiences as a Language Arts teacher. (Click here if you haven’t seen it before and have any interest in finding out what an elementary reading and writing teacher at the top of her game has to say about the profession.) For this May, even though I have met several writers in the past year and I know many of them would be more than happy to step in and take on a guest post, I immediately thought of my cousin Alejandro.

Alejandro is fifteen and lives in San Antonio. I like that he’s fifteen right now, because I can enjoy living in a time when I’m a better writer than he is; I promise you that will not always be the case. He started writing in elementary school just like I did, but while I sat back and did little more than watch MTV in my early teens, he began to find his stride as a writer. He’s had some impressive successes in regional academic writing competitions, as well as some at his school, and spent a year as the editor of his school’s award-winning literary magazine in eighth grade. His proud mother (my cousin Kelly) sent me a quote from one of his writing teachers: “He has such a strong vocabulary that I often have to look up the words myself to see what they mean.” Now finishing his sophomore year of high school, he’s still working on his craft and has signed up for science fiction and fantasy summer writing courses through the Gotham Writers Workshop. His passion is horror (as you’ll see from his post).

When I asked if he was interested in doing a guest post, I said he could write about anything he wanted to. He pitched me a few ideas, and we agreed on one that had to do with storytelling elements in video games. I thought this was perfect. I’m not afraid to admit that even with my busy adult life I still fire up my XBox 360 from time to time, and storytelling is always the element that makes a difference in whether I think a game is worth my time or not. Anyone who thinks big-time console video games are little more than violent and cartoonish exercises in time-wasting...well, a lot are. But not all of them. I feel myself getting a little fired up on the topic right now, so it might be better if I just pull back and let Alejandro, who knows so much more about the subject than I do, take over.

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I play a lot of video games. Like, a lot. I did some calculations the other day and found that I've played almost 1,700 hours on my computer alone. So with that kind of devotion to the hobby, it should come as no surprise that I see video games as a storytelling medium equal to films or books.


But that doesn't mean all game stories are good. Really, most of them aren't. And they don't need to be, because unlike books or movies, games can stand just on how fun they are to play. The perfect game, however, would be both fun to play and have a story that's interesting to experience and think about. The closest any game has ever come to perfect, at least for me, is Dark Souls. For this post, I mean to look at Dark Souls' story to show just why it's so great, and to better understand what it takes to tell a good story in a video game.



GAMEPLAY/PRESENTATION



In Dark Souls you're a lone warrior exploring a world on its last legs, fighting monsters, and trying to save mankind. This involves a lot of swinging your sword, tricky maneuvering, and dying. The game is infamous for its difficulty, so you'll be dying a great deal, but that all ties into the game's central theme (more on that later). I won't linger much on gameplay, as it's not the focus of this little ramble, but suffice to say it's more than fun enough to support the story.



Now, presentation is extremely important in video games. You could have the best story in the world, but nobody will hear it if they're turned off by the visual design or art style. Dark Souls doesn't really have this problem. Everything in the game is ancient, forgotten, and decrepit, all castles with crumbling walls or decaying underground crypts, and there are very few sane or friendly people around anymore. It instilled an acute sense of loneliness and despair in me, which I'm sure was the intended effect. Melancholy is a good word for the game's visual design, and indeed the game as a whole, so it gets an A+ for capturing the tone perfectly.



EXPOSITION AND STORY DELIVERY



Dark Souls' method of telling a story is rather unorthodox for video games; the details aren't presented to you on a silver platter, but hidden subtly around the world for you to find, and the wording is too ambiguous to find any objective truth in what's going on. If you want to know the story, you have to find it yourself, digging through item descriptions and dialogue to learn about characters, history, and the world. And after you've found all the information, you have to interpret it as well, figuring out what means what and how everything fits together. There's no right answer for anything in this game.



I love that. There was immense satisfaction in hunting down clues and making sense of everything, learning what's up with this evil murderous knight or that deranged fiery spider-witch. It made me feel like I was piecing together a vast, intricate puzzle, and put everything that happened in context. Now I know the spider-witch was actually just killing people to cure her sister's wasting illness, and by killing her I've also condemned her innocent sister to death, and I learned all that out myself. 

When the last piece of that sprawling story fell into place and everything made sense together, it didn't feel as though somebody had given it to me; I'd earned the right to understand, which made understanding all the sweeter.



THEME



Now this is where Dark Souls REALLY shines. The central theme of the game is decay, entropy, the inevitability of death, that kind of thing. The world is going to end and there's nothing you can do about it. And every single aspect of the game reflects that theme in some way.



Some lore you can find pretty much confirms that even if you succeed, you're only delaying the end of mankind for a little while longer. When you're playing, at least one resource (like health, healing items, weapon durability, or stamina) is always dwindling, like a ticking clock counting down to your death. You explore the ruins of other civilizations that thrived long ago, then died and were forgotten, just like yours will. Almost every major character is on the slippery slope to insanity, death, insanity followed by death, or death followed by insanity.



It's a depressing game, sure, but it's depressing with a purpose. There's not a single wasted part of it; everything, from the story, to the gameplay, to the visual design, complements everything else and makes for an experience that feels more cohesive than anything else I've played.



IN CONCLUSION



So, if we take Dark Souls as a shining example of storytelling in video games, what makes a good game story is 1) gameplay that doesn't detract from the experience, 2) a complex, subtly-delivered plot, 3) a sense of player involvement/achievement (fulfilled by Dark Souls' clue-hunting and difficulty, but it doesn't have to be so obscure) in the story, 4) varied and interesting characters (I didn't talk much about them, as this post is running long already, but Dark Souls has them by the dozen if you're willing to dig through the lore) and 5) strong central theming that brings everything together.



Many of the same things that make a good book or movie, you'll find. As different as writing video games can be, it  seems there's a lot of crossover that’s forgotten when it comes to making a story interactive. Thankfully, the developers behind Dark Souls didn't forget, which might be why it tells one of the best stories in any medium.


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Even if video games aren't your thing, you have to admit the kid’s got some chops, doesn’t he?