COMMON THREADS
One of our favorite quotes that we like to use in our teaching is from writer Joan Didion, in her book The White Album. She wrote: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” Telling stories is one of the constants of cultural expression across the mass media. But with digital games, is it still a story—
Books, television, movies, newspapers, magazines, and even musical recordings tell us stories about the human experience. Digital games, especially ones in which we play as a character or an avatar, offer perhaps the most immersive storytelling experience of any medium.
Gamers have already shifted away from traditional media stories to those of video games. The Entertainment Software Association reported that gamers who played more video games than they had three years earlier were spending less time going to the movies (47 percent of respondents), watching TV (48 percent), and watching movies at home (47 percent).50 Clearly, video games are in competition with movies and television for consumers’ attention. But as we move from the kind of storytelling we experience as audience members of TV and movies to the storytelling we experience as players of games, what happens to the story? Is it still a mass mediated story, or is it something else?
Jon Spaihts, screenwriter of the science-
Such was the case in the furor over Mass Effect 3 in 2012. After players spent from 120 to 150 hours advancing through the trilogy, in which they could make hundreds of choices in the sequence of events, the final act took that power away from them with a tightly scripted finish. The players complained loudly, and the cofounder of BioWare, the game’s developer, issued an apology: “Mass Effect 3 concludes a trilogy with so much player control and ownership of the story that it was hard for us to predict the range of emotions players would feel when they finished playing through it. The journey you undertake in Mass Effect provokes an intense range of highly personal emotions in the player; even so, the passionate reaction of some of our most loyal players to the current endings in Mass Effect 3 is something that has genuinely surprised us.” BioWare said that it would create a new ending with “a number of game content initiatives that will help answer the questions, providing more clarity for those seeking further closure to their journey.”52
Certainly the audience of a movie will have a range of interpretations of the movie’s story. But what of the stories we are telling ourselves as players of games like Mass Effect? Is such personally immersive storytelling better, worse, or just different? And who is doing the storytelling?
KEY TERMS
The definitions for the terms listed below can be found in the glossary at the end of the book. The page numbers listed with the terms indicate where the term is highlighted in the chapter.
penny arcade, 76
pinball machine, 76
arcades, 78
avatar, 79
consoles, 79
massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs), 81
online fantasy sports, 82
gameplay, 84
action games, 86
first-person shooter (FPS), 86
adventure games, 88
role-playing games (RPGs), 88
strategy games, 88
simulation games, 88
casual games, 89
PUGs, 90
noobs, 90
ninjas, 90
trolls, 90
guilds or clans, 90
collective intelligence, 91
modding, 91
advergames, 93
in-game advertisements, 93
Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB), 99
cartridge, 100
development, 103
intellectual properties, 103
REVIEW QUESTIONS
The Development of Digital Gaming
The Internet Transforms Gaming
The Media Playground
Trends and Issues in Digital Gaming
The Business of Digital Gaming
Digital Gaming, Free Speech, and Democracy
QUESTIONING THE MEDIA
LAUNCHPAD FOR MEDIA & CULTURE