I find most game stories extremely obnoxious. Beyond the irritations with craftsmanship and cliche, beyond being merely bored and annoyed, there are patterns I see over and over again in intros and cutscenes and store pages that are distastefully tedious and tediously distasteful. Here’s the format of a game intro: This is our world, and it’s great – it better be, we paid a bunch of artists to make this shit! But there’s also some sort of encroaching darkness, some kind of ancient evil, some kind of corruption. It’s made bunch of guys show up to start shit, and they look basically human but, trust me, they are huge jerks in an irrevocably genetically ingrained way; or maybe they’re just magical constructs that look like guys; maybe they’re skeletons or something. In any case, it’s completely fine to kill all of them, and is actually a good thing to do.
This is all obviously at its worst in fantasy titles, though it’s a loose enough archetype that it could be easily applied to a lot of games even outside that domain. There’s often some good and kind king who has been dethroned in the process, some kind of sacred order being profaned, some sort of holy war, whatever. This is all obviously, when examined critically for half a second, an absurdly reactionary framing – one could use the (bad) excuse that it’s all a riff on Tolkien, but even his works had more nuance, and he was willing to admit that the definition of certain races and creatures as constitutionally evil was probably not ideal. Yet this is what a lot of games hew back to: Stories of dark external corruption staining a natural brilliant beauty – a bunch of Make Faeryland Great Again bullshit. Another aspect of this that is very frustrating is how often it seems to crop up in games inspired by Dark Souls, since that game in particular avoided these cliches very adroitly. There is an old god-king – but his and other gods’ senseless clinging to power is a big part of why that world is so fucked up in the first place. There is a “darkness”, a “corruption”, but this is more of a powerful primordial force that can change things for better or for worse. Dark Souls takes so many of these cliches and plays with them in such clever ways, it’s rather revolting to see so many supposed successors play every cliché straight in the most boring possible ways. In addition to being pretty gross, these sorts of stories are extremely boring. Why are we on the side of the king? Why is the corruption evil? Why do we have a better claim to the land than that “corruption” does? We just do, that’s why. It’s bad, we’re not, and you can tell because our UI markings are blue and theirs are red.
Every time I notice something like this, I want to tear it to pieces. This is actually proving to be something of an issue for me on my current project: Part of what I want to do with Bound City is to tackle the ideas of nostalgia and retro-fetishism and the reactionary ideas baked into them, but there are so many little stupid cliches like this that I get overwhelmed. The unstoppable crime waves, the good kings who give quests and whose lives are inseparable from the well-being of the land, the oozing corruption, the untamed wilderness, the pure language of violence, the destruction of beast and environment to harvest resources, the weirdly absolutist moral judgments – it’s wild how many of these often contradictory ideas manage to simultaneously permeate the overall narrative space of games, and it doesn’t feel right to not try to skewer them wherever I have an opportunity.
All too often, though, the games that take aim at the cliches of game narrative and design simply do so by restating them in plain language and rely on that absurdity to appear humorous and insightful. Most of the time it’s pretty superficial stuff like isn’t it weird how many games have you kleptomaniacally steal anything that isn’t bolted down? Almost never are the narrative precepts of good kings and halcyon pasts and corrupting darkness questioned, almost never is it posited as not obvious where a just hero would stand on these things. But who are we, the game players? Do we not have more in common with a “corruption”, something alive and desperate and shifting and evolving, than the royalty, something tyrannical and wealthy and stagnant? Why are we enemies of random animals and creatures? Who gets defined as intractably evil and therefore worthy of massacre? Where are we placed in the narrative, and where do we want to be?
These are the sorts of questions I want to ask – not merely to invoke nostalgia, not merely to poke fun at the occasional silly contradictions, but to ask what lusts and justifications are fed by these sorts of narratives, to ask why we crave them – and to ask what, should we choose to reject them, happens next?