We’ve all heard stories at some point in our lives have we not? Some have appealed to us and some have not.
Every year for my birthday I buy books and have books gifted to me. My entire family have been readers and most of my close friends are readers. This would be interesting, I know but so far it is nothing you haven’t heard before, especially if you’re a library mouse like me.
Stories can be told in many ways. As Neil Gaiman said, “We owe it to ourselves to tell stories”. And with that let me come to a medium of story telling that allows the person the ability to interact with the story.
I’m talking about video games. I recently started playing again, and I found so much of growth in how the story of the game has changed. I’ve grown up playing Age of Empires and then along came Assassin’s Creed which led me around the world, sometimes dropping me in Italy, other times in the Caribbean as a pirate and rendering gorgeous worlds to explore, to dig up secrets and to make the most of what I had on my plate or in my toolkit.
I’ve been allowed to live the lives of assassins, of Jedi Knights, of archaeologists and of wizards and elves to name just a fistful. The plots have been sci fi, fantasy, military, some borrowed from anime, some games inspired by anime and most of the games I’ve been playing are brilliant.
I wonder what would happen if Neil Gaiman wrote a game. George RR Martin has written Elden Ring and that is a fantastic game.
I can only wonder what new adventure awaits me every time I boot up a game and start moving my mouse around or holding down the walk forward key.
And not just that, I have found that sometimes you need to relax your mind after a long day when all you’ve wanted to do was kill your boss, so kill a drug dealer in a game instead. As long as you don’t allow the lines to be blurred or crossed, you’re fine.
Anyway, this is me saying that video games have meant and continue to mean a lot to me. As a writer, some of the stories I’ve witnessed in a game have ended up as a Chekov’s gun somewhere in an article or a poem or something. I can only hope that games come up with more worlds to explore and more stories to witness.
And I’d like to close with a very favourite quote of mine:
“Video games are bad for you? That’s what they said about rock and roll” ~ Shigeru Miyamoto
The Bilge Master