How
video games trace their origins to ancient storytellers
Also, the road leading
up to video gaming as a mass phenomenon
Part 2 of the 4
Part series on Gaming
Part 1: Why
do we need Gaming?
The global gaming industry is pegged to rake in over $80 Bn1
globally this year, making it a little more than double the size of the global
box office, including Hollywood, Bollywood, and any other local cinema. You
read that correctly, the stereotypical nerd industry which has typically been
relegated to the side of our attention and been the maligned poster boy for
escapism will earn more than the global cinema earnings of every movie launched
this year. I’m not kidding2. If that thought doesn’t make you think
twice about the power of video games then this is not the right blog for you.
We are on the verge of seeing a wave of social acceptance for
gaming, with the coming workforce and yes, even many of our politicians3,
having grown up gaming and for a nice change, being proud of it. This will be a
brave new time for the medium of video games, with more people being engaged,
more stories being told, more subject matters and wider demographics being
covered, and more lessons being learnt. In this context, it would be
interesting to look back and the trace the steps that led to the creation of
this industry as it is.
The journey through the evolution of gaming will be long
and winding, starting from the need for gaming, and stopping near the doorstep
of video games as we know them today. For anyone about to write TL:DR and move
on, here’s the abridged version:
Gaming
Rooted in: The human need for a story
Adapted: As per the tools available
Expressed through: Various media
Provided: A diversity of unique stories
The Future: A platform for creating your own stories
Those who would like to read on and share their comments on
what lies below are most welcome. Now we begin:
The importance of storytelling, and games as a unique
medium of storytelling
As a species, we transcended our biological limitations
through creativity, specifically through the creativity that allowed us to form
and follow languages and the ability to believe in the unreal4. While
our hardware – our bodies – haven’t changed much in the small evolutionary window
of the past 3,000 years during which civilization kicked off in a big way (we’ve
existed for more than 70,000 years), we’ve been able to become the dominant
sentient creature on the planet through rewriting our ‘software’ – how we programmed
our brains with social guidelines and followed them for the betterment of the
many.
Our ‘software’ gave us the ability to communicate, to
coordinate, to codify and pass on our knowledge. Common languages gifted us the
adaptability to store vast resources of knowledge that would be of use to
future generations – knowledge would no longer be lost with the passing of the
thinker. Among the stickiest ways to transfer information, stories have had a
profound and lasting impact on us. Their utility in transferring information is
strongly linked to our overall evolutionary advantage, allowing us to reach the
top of the food change and into positions of power in many natural systems. At
the same time, our ability to believe in the non-real, allowed the set up of
interlinking systems including money, governments, corporations, and religions –
the inter-subjective systems that drive and guide us today. These systems are fuelled
by stories: the story that paper is tradable and worth something other than
paper, the story of an elected leader being better for the people than
alternate forms of social guidance, the story that limited liability for large
companies is the best interest of the economy, the story of god and how people
can improve themselves by following His or Her guidelines.
Seeing how many of our fundamental human systems are built
on the bedrock of stories, the creation of a form of media that allowed for interactive
story telling was inevitable. Two way story telling most likely saw its
inception with wise people trying to explain important concepts through sharing
stories. If the audience members were sceptical of the original story, a crafty
storyteller would have listened to the audience, gathered their thoughts, and
woven their thoughts into the storyteller’s larger narrative while preserving the
core message behind the original story. Seeing their own thoughts enmeshed
together in the revised story would create something both novel and familiar to
the audience, something new yet acceptable.
In this manner, pantheistic followings such as the Greek
mythic pantheon ended up with many wives for Zeus- whenever a new set of
followers were absorbed into the religion, the male god would be re-identified
as Zeus, and his wife would now be added to the long line of wives of Zeus. In
this case, the game the storyteller played was of communicating a new framework
of social structures to the converts through a common language (the belief in a
god who set systems to follow), and storyteller’s success lay in convincing the
participating audience of the verity of Zeus’s power.
Stories grow through the telling and combining with others,
with the underlying ideas growing stronger across the lifetime of iterations. Interactivity
is the essence of improving stories, a unique feature video games are rich in.
What does a game require?
A few characteristics of games we can abstract are that they
involve voluntary participation,
involve rules with at least a minimum
level of consistency, they tend to have a goal in mind, and they react
to the inputs you provide. There are a few requirements for playing a game,
and many forms of gaming have emerged using different combinations of these.
- Time. Being a voluntary activity, gaming can thrive in the time available either by design (sports/hobby hour in schools) or intention (a kid rushing home to play games after school)
- Commonly understood language: For communication and coordination of the rules and decisions among the players. Need not be written or verbal, simple signs can also work
- Intellect: The ability to understanding and implement rules. Different games require different minimum levels of intellect, ranging from the basic (Visual, audio, and motor skills- Punch Buggy Red!) to the extreme (Complex - understanding and exploiting compound probabilities requiring external calculation power along with interlocking systems - advanced D&D)
- Requiring the presence of players: Games need at least one player, a box of monopoly is not a game of monopoly if there are no players. Alone, a player is restricted in the number of games that can be played, unless artificial intelligence/machines are involved. The addition of more players opens up a vast range of possibilities. From two player chess to four player doubles badminton (with different court zones than one on one) to vast MMOs, the addition of players enables to deeper levels of gameplay and different and hard to replicate experiences. Most early games would have required the physical presence of the players. This requirement grew looser over time as new systems developed to bridge the physical gap between players (the rise of postal services allowed chess to be played over mail), and today technology allows people from all around the world to play the same game simultaneously.
- Additional/Prepared Resources: Games can have unique requirements – a standard ball, field, and goals for soccer. A computer with adequate hardware and compatible software for PC games, add a great graphics card and peripherals for VR. Same shaped, sized, and weighted blocks for Jenga. Each requirement limits the potential of the game (you can’t play soccer without a ball) and while flexibility is allowed (half field soccer), the resources on hand constrain the gamut of possibilities.
On the whole, we can simplify to say that the simpler the
requirements, the larger number of potential players.
Different games,
different requirements, different experiences
With these requirements in mind, games have evolved through
various forms through varying the formula again and again. In recent times, we
have witnessed increases in complexity of games, as well as increases in levels
of player and viewer engagement:
- Verbal – Puzzles, find the odd one out, singing competitions
- Mental – Politics, finances
- Sports – Swimming, Running, Wrestling, MMA, table tennis, and many, many more
- Board games – structured board defining rules to force decision making down certain paths. Chess, Monopoly, Risk, Checkers.
- Prop games: Hula Hooping, three legged races, Tangram, Jigsaw puzzles
- Card Games – Standard deck (Blackjack, Solitaire) or customized (Yu-Gi-Oh, Uno, Magic the Gathering, Pokemon)
- Pen & Paper – List five things, simple RPGs, tic-tac-toe
- Book based – Where’s Waldo? Spot the differences
- Mechanical Machine dependent – Pinball, Test your strength, Physical Car Racing, Slot machines
- Freeform Construction Sets- Lego, K’Nex, Capsula
- Text Based MUD games, Choose your own adventure
- Electronic Games: Frogger, LCD pre-programmed games
- Alternate Reality Games: I Love Bees
- Video Games – Tetris to Mario to Call of Duty to This War of Mine to Minecraft and everything in between
Each game tells a different tale, a game of Golf played by
Tiger Woods is a different story than finding Waldo after pages, different from
making a Death Star (or anything, really) with Lego. The point of the earlier
list is to point out that creativity has driven us to develop different many
different forms of expression and through them, many ways of storytelling. That
time you beat your rival at tennis in college will be a story that lasts for
years, the time you got a very rare item in Destiny may as well. The point is
that are many ways to have fun, and video games are a subset of the larger gaming
world.
Video games are a
uniquely interactive form of storytelling, putting the reins in the player’s
hand by design
The uniqueness of video games lies in their ability to
create their own virtual worlds, distinct from the real one. Video games have
even inspired their own canon and lore, the visceral experience of Borderlands
could not have been created through any other media. The outcomes of your choices
in Telltale’s Game of Thrones is that much more personal than the outcomes of
the events in the TV series, which are beyond our control.
Games work with three different systems: Our inherent
abilities (twitch reactions in shooters), our trained abilities (getting better
at FTL through learnings from your previous attempts), and a seasoning of
chance (random high level loot drops). This diversity in requirements and
levers differentiate games from static media (TV, Books). To be fair, there are
scenarios where a linear story is the best at making a certain point, or at
allowing common discussion of a topic. The smart post-modern Sci Fi thriller Black
Mirror is able to show exactly the parts of the future that will make you
question the present, through directing the exact order of events you see. This
structured sequence makes it easy for viewers to talk to other viewers about
their opinions on the episode.
Video games find ways to give players more options, breaking
the narrative to its advantage, increasing intimacy with the subject matter and
the investment in understanding its resolution. The recently released Her Story
finds a way to take a linear narrative (a series of police interviews), break
it into tantalizing bits (individual clips, think Nolan’s Memento), let you
know how much you don’t know (videos seen vs. unseen tracker), and creates a
whole new self-driven experience (the order in which you pieced together what
happened through the order in which you saw the videos, the syuzhet5). Shadow of Mordor
has the Nemesis system, which creates a unique story each playthrough, with every
player experiencing a similar framework but a different individual story (A: Remember
the time three orc captains caught up to me in that massive fight? B: No, I
never faced more than one in my game). In our future, as the focus on the
individual and their value of their individuality goes up, self-driven experiences
that adapt to our decisions may be the way forward, led by the video game
format.
Video games are
evolving into a platform for creating your own stories, Rashomon at an
industrial scale
Gently we are seeing a shift, with game designers starting
to think of themselves as party planners instead of authors. Shadow of Mordor’s
emergent gameplay was major achievement in making video games more of a system
to make unique memories, instead of a clockwork mechanism that plays the same
tune every time.
Games already have the ability to adapt the experience
based on the number of players, Guild Wars 2 bosses become more powerful dynamically
if there are more players fighting them, creating unique experiences on the
basis of the number of players. In the future, we can look forward to games
that themselves are a set of rules, defining what experiences to show to the
player, where there is no one canon story, where only what you believe to be
true is, Rashomon at an industrial scale.
Games are strong in providing self-learning opportunities, and
self-learning is among the most powerful forms of learning. The voluntary nature of playing games means
that the player plays intentionally to learn, and that is a powerful tool for a
society. I believe that we are at a thrilling point today, with a medium that
has come so far from a single storyteller trying to share their wisdom to a
self-learning system that encourages the player to make a beautiful and
precious memory.
The present landscape of video gaming and long term future
of video games respectively will be covered in the two remaining articles in
this four part series on gaming
4)
Thoughts well detailed
in the excellent book: Sapiens, by Harari
Excellent grasp on the subject. Nicely portrayed. Keep it up.
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