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2014. The game, with its simple shapes and forms, seeks to connect players to
the journey of this one family through treatment, suffering, and hope. As Ryan
Green describes on the game’s website, “It is a video game composed of pain
and hope. It is a story of my son. It is a script written day by day. It is life that
moves us space by space propelled by a mystery we call grace” (n.p.). The game
does not have huge action set pieces or deep thematic plot elements. Instead, the
player, controlling the parents, is responsible for the daily care of Joel. This can
mean something as simple as holding him during chemotherapy treatments. The
game itself, as it is unfolding during development, seeks to use the video game
medium, as opposed to autobiography or documentary, to tell one personal and
human story. The video game form allows for the player to have direct
investment in the characters and story due to actions he or she performs. The
experience of the game derives solely from its ability to share the experience of
one family seeking to save the life of one child.
The second example. This War o f Mine, is completely different in
storyline, while sharing the idea of a deeply intimate experience of what it
means to be human under the most trying of circumstances. This game, also in
development, appears poised for release in the latter part of 2014 or perhaps the
first quarter of 2015. On the official website for the game, the premise is simply
described as “a group of citizens trying to survive in a besieged city”
(www.l lbitstudios.com). The gamer has to make decisions that affect the entire
group of survivors, including whether or not and where to scavenge for supplies,
and whether or not to allow a new member into the group, or to leave that
individual to fend for him or herself Survivors die from lack of simple
medicines, as they would in real life. The screencaps of the game on 11 Bit
Studios’s website speak to the horror of war as waged upon everyday citizens.
Dazed survivors, some seriously injured, try to eke out survival in the bumt-out
husks of buildings. The gamer is thus thrown into a different world than that
found in many war-based video game titles. He or she is not a super soldier who
dispatches the enemy left and right. Instead, the gamer is a survivor, barely
holding on, who must make life or death decisions that cannot be taken back.
Stories of war in faraway places permeate Western news outlets. This game
personalizes those accounts and asks the gamer, especially the gamer far
removed from war, to consider the human faces behind all of those news stories.
The video game genre, as technology expands, continues to find
innovative new inroads in the creation of narratives, from big-budget AAA
titles, to small, personally felt, independent games. As video game developers
continue to create involved, immersive, and expansive narratives, “text” expands
to incorporate the digital as well as the written. What if great stories could just
be that — great stories — without the politics and power plays between various
branches of academic study? Professors of English might team up, for example,
with professors of Computer Science or Game Design. A resulting course could
explore video games from two critical fronts: their narratological importance
and the technological skills needed to create them. Such a collaboration, alone,
might ensure that video game designers and developers enter the creative world