Video Grand

I've been saying for a few years now that video games have the potential to be one of the greatest mediums for storytelling around. With most games taking a minimum of around eight hours to complete, I feel developers are selling consumers short to not only give them an enjoyable time, but also an EXPERIENCE. It's no secret that games are getting more and more cinematic. Games like Halo 4, Grand Theft Auto IV, and the entire Uncharted series, among numerous others, rivaling blockbuster movies for grandiose scenes, are dropping jaws on couches around the world. It makes me wonder if, as more and more games come out with bigger and bigger explosions and larger waves of nameless bad guys, aliens, monsters, zombies, or all at the same time, to shoot through the head, that developers are viewing it as a necessity to make games more gratuitous in their scale to sell copies. Or if it has become the consumer's expectation, and/or desire, to have their senses assaulted by fire and hails of bullets at all times during a game's duration just to be satisfied during their play through.

I'm not here to make some gaudy proclamation that game violence needs to cease and we need to make only games that will pull at the heart strings of players, cough...David Cage...cough. If my aforementioned speculations that developers are seeing that making games more “bad-ass” as a necessity is correct, can you honestly blame them? There has been and will always be a demographic for the over-the-top shooters and insanely violent games out there. I can say that confidently because I am a part of that demographic. Sometimes, I enjoy nothing more than just blowing shit up. One of my favorite gaming moments of all time is in Naughty Dog's Uncharted 2, where you are being chased around by a enemy helicopter, across roofs, through buildings mid-explosion, all culminating in your having to jump from a building mid-collapse before ultimately blowing your bladed adversary to kingdom come. It's pure gaming brilliance and the level still gets my adrenaline going every time I play through it. That was 2009 though, we've all grown up, developers and gamers alike.

We have recently had an influx of games built more on making gamers feel something during game play. thatgamecompany's 2012 release, Journey, is really one of the best examples of this new wave of games built around making a feeling in their players. Journey is maybe two hours long, has no violence and no speaking between characters. It honestly is a journey. An experience. As I played through it I came across other online players that I was not able to chat with or even know their PSN gamertag until after the credits, and based upon our relationship in-game, I really felt a broad array of emotions. Early on in the game I encountered other players that really wanted to help me out on my Journey. We waited on each other when one of us lagged behind and aided each other while trying to accomplish a similar goal. It made me feel a sense of camaraderie and satisfaction. Towards the last third of the game though, I encountered selfish players who would just run off without me and there was hardly any shared experiences and it made me mad. I wanted to know why we couldn't do this together like my earlier buddies and I had. It was beautiful to have a gaming experience that really made me feel something inside. It was amazing to immerse myself in this world and know that the people who made this game made it with the sole purpose of each player having an individual experience and maybe through your interactions and play, you might learn something about yourself.

Since it's release in June, there has been much talk about The Last Of Us. For good reason, it's phenomenal. But that's a conversation for a different time. For this column, Last Of Us brings up an interesting angle. Last Of Us is very violent, possibly the most violent game I have ever played due to the intimacy and brutality of the violence. But it is also one of the only games that has made me care about characters to the point that I was teary-eyed during certain scenes of characters struggling with their own personal problems. Joel and Ellie, the main protagonists, have a relationship unlike any other two video game characters I have ever seen. There's a chemistry there, whether negative or positive, that truly shows their strife and experience of surviving this situation they have been thrust into. The violence and character interactions are meshed together seamlessly at times as Ellie exclaims over some of the more particularly brutal kills you can perform that really, at least for this player, added a sense of weight to each kill and an uncomfortable feeling that made me feel bad for what I had done to this nameless adversary. Putting this relationship alongside the brutality of the violence shows to me that we don't have to have two extreme radicals in gaming: super violent block-buster and emotionally driven games. You can have the two live comfortably alongside each other in a game. It's an interesting concept that I think with the critical and commercial success of The Last Of Us, other developers will take note of and start to explore the idea with their own games. How this will play out into the future of gaming, especially with the dawn of next-gen upon us, has yet to be seen, but I think that there will be more gamers really starting to view games as a medium that can make them feel for these characters and their struggle and possibly learn something from it. This is all speculation at this point, but I am and anxious and excited to see what the future of storytelling in games has to offer.

Side note on The Last Of Us: PBG will be doing a video discussion soon talking more on the themes mentioned above.

Blake Hester

Editor in Chief

parentsbasementgaming@gmail.com