Fiction in videogames vs other media.

I feel protagonists in videogames are very different from protagonists in other media. And as a result, the kind of fictions that fit well are different too.

In a film, a novel, or a comic, protagonists are other people. You can empathize with them and enjoy observing the fiction they live in. But you never imagine being in their shoes, not really. A videogame very often puts you firmly in the shoes of the protagonist. You control where they go, you control what they do.

As a result, to be enjoyable (for me, at least) the fiction of the videogame needs to be one that you can imagine being in yourself. Not one that you simply enjoy looking at. There’s many situations that are amusing in movies or books, that I wouldn’t want to find myself in. As such these situations are plain intolerable for me in games. For example, the moments where the fiction makes the protagonist responsible for something grave (the death of a friend, killing innocents, self-mutilation, etc). In a film, you sympathize with the protagonist, and given their context, their life, their story, you understand their choice, or it cements your disgust with the character. In a videogame this doesn’t work. There’s a conflict between the fictional reality and the reality of the player in such moments. The game is making the player responsible for something bad that happens in the story. This shatters the fourth wall and breaks the fiction and the believability of the protagonist.

For the same reason, books and film can get away with clichés much more easily. There is a certain distance that allows us to accept yet another zombie apocalypse in a film. But in a videogame that puts us in the middle of such a situation, we cannot take it seriously.

I think to the player, the fiction of the videogame is more real than the fiction of a film is to the viewer. Because you have power in the game world. You can change things in it. You affect things. And because it feels more real, it is much harder for people to accept certain fictions. The amount of stories you want to be a part of is always smaller than the amount of stories you can tolerate reading or watching.

The only reason why videogames have been getting away with so many trite and cliché stories is the prominence of gameplay. If the attention of the player is sufficiently moved to the mechanical level of the game, they will just accept the characters and world as backdrops, as mood. But as videogame stories are becoming more prominent, it becomes painfully clear that what works in movies and books, does not work when players have control.