The State of Game Storytelling

At GDC, I asked a prominent game designer/blogger when she thought we’d reach a point when games can tell any kind of story without encountering the “think of the children” pitfall. Specifically, I asked how long before games can produce something on the order of “Lolita.” Her answer came instantly. Though I can’t remember the exact number of years, it was a bigg’un.

Suffice to say, I won’t live to see it.

Photo by ak37

Conversations like these usually revolve around sexual content, but occasionally, the outer bounds of the subjects games are “allowed” to put forth are defined by other taboos. Like, say, the Holocaust. This week comes this tidbit about the in-development DS game, Imagination is the Only Escape. Though the article’s headline is a bit premature (no actual decision has been made), there’s obviously a problem brewing for this game. And, sadly, no amount of certainty from its tragically optimistic auteur will likely produce a different result. It’s impossible to tell if the finished product will be as interesting as it appears on first blush, but that’s not why we’ll never play it.

Games, even adult games, are still seen (as comic books were and still, to a lesser extent, are) as toys. Games on the DS, doubly so. Games with child protagonists, trebly so. So, what you have at the end of all this doubling and trebling is a made-to-order demonstration of the glass ceiling for game content. Game + DS + Kids in Peril = NFW.

It’s understandable, of course. Children could get their hands on this game and misunderstand its dark and nuanced message. Parents might thoughtlessly buy it without reading the back of the box or consulting the rating. What, really, do you expect about a story of a child caught in the maelstrom of a brutal 20th century dictatorship and a consuming war who escapes into a fantasy world that funhouse-mirrors the stark moral, ethical, and philosophical issues that he isn’t equipped to comprehend in real life? Remember the massive outcry when parents mistakenly took their kids to see the film Pan’s Labyrinth? Remember the calls to kill the movie before it was released? To ban it from the theaters? To prevent its release on home video?

No. Of course you don’t. Because it wasn’t a game. Now, obviously, the Holocaust is more of a button-pusher than the Spanish Civil War, but I think that’s an extraneous factor. This is about how the pigeonholing of a new medium limits the stories the medium can tell. By limiting the subject matter spectrum of a medium, we retard its growth and force it to take decades longer to develop the vocabulary it needs to deftly handle harder subjects in its own unique way. During this delay, there’s always the chance the poor medium will just wither away or resignedly stay in its infantile state. It’s like killing a tree under the pretense of making it into a bonsai.

Someday, games will be able to make us think about and experience the hard and heavy subjects in a way no other medium can (not better, mind you, just different), but the hysterical exercise of walling them into their long-past childhood smacks of forcing your teenager to wear his Blue’s Clues romper to high school. He’ll never learn how to talk to girls, won’t learn a thing, and will come home bloody every night. And maybe, just maybe, he’ll grow into a fine serial killer instead of the world-changing visionary (the line is a fine one, you know) he could have been.