The Biggest Games Are Defined by the Smallest Moments

I stopped playing the The Witcher 3 a while ago, and every week I tell myself that I’ll get back to it. Yet, every week I put it off for other games or other forms of entertainment. It’s not that I didn’t enjoy it, and this post isn’t about the difficulty of going back to old games, but about why I still want to go back. This same thing happened to me with Dragon Age: Inquisition. I stopped playing just after the end of Act 1, but when I stopped, I didn’t tell myself I’d go back to it. I didn’t want to go back, and I still don’t.

When I think on these two games, I don’t think about the central story. By the time that I stopped, the main plot hadn’t developed very far and remained a side-note in my overall experience. I don’t think about the characters. They too hadn’t developed much since their personal arcs were meant to stretch over the entire game. I do think about the side-quests in all their various forms and about the satisfaction, completion, and closure that they provided in each small instance. These quests form the basis of my critical opinion of each game, and as such, how they are remembered by me: fondly or negatively.

A good side quest is essentially a short story, a narrative with a beginning, middle, and ending, not just busy work for gaining experience or levels. This is what The Witcher 3 gets right. Each quest, even the minor ones that just involve discovering treasure, have a story attached to them. Every treasure in the game has a history.

The quest that stuck with me most was one in which two dead men and a kid appear by a boat that is surrounded by Drowners. There were a couple of letters strewn about in the near vicinity. The first was from the boy’s family and was written to one of the men, apparently the boy’s uncle. The family wanted the uncle to smuggle the boy out of war-torn Novigrad to take him someplace safer. With this letter, the scene became a tragedy, not just because of the the loss of life, but the loss of hope that it represented.

Then I read the second letter. The kid had been given money to help him live on his own. The men knew of this and were plotting to kill him when they landed safely. The scene now became a mystery. Who killed who and when? It has been a while since I encountered this quest and I’m describing it mostly from memory, so I’m sure some of the details are wrong. However, the point is that I remember it. This scene was more than just filler or means of grinding out levels, it was a piece of compelling flash fiction.

And it was easy to consume, another aspect of short storytelling that The Witcher 3 gets right. For the most part when looking for missing persons, you just have to run a little bit outside of a town to find the body (because there’s always a body, they’re always dead). You don’t have to run across the entire map or search the whole world, finding what you were looking for only after forgetting why you were looking for it. The story is confined to a small location. You’re meant to consume it all in a single sitting.

Meanwhile, I can remember a few of the side quests from Inquisition, but I can’t remember why I completed them. At one point, I was fighting bad mages or looking for missing people or something, but I forget why those things mattered to me beyond the rewards taht these side-quests offered. Quests and goals were often spread too far apart in the game, so by the time that I found what I was looking for, I’d lost the emotional throughline and no longer cared about the quest’s conclusion. The pacing of the short story had been stretched so thin that it broke.

The longer that a game is, the more it becomes defined by its bite-sized chunks. It’s hard to look back over the whole of a 50-hour experience and remember the entire thing.

I played Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag over the course of a month and enjoyed it immensely, but when I saw the game’s ending, I was a little disappointed because I thought the story lacked a strong thematic core. Then, in preparation for a Moving Pixels podcast on the game, I watched all of the story bits on YouTube and was surprised by its thematic richness.

Chances are that I’m not going to see the end of your epic story, and even if I do, it will probably have taken me so long to get to that end that I’ll have forgotten about the important plot points that led me there. The main story doesn’t matter as much as the smaller narratives that we digest along the way because of the expansiveness of some games.

These virtual worlds may be big, their stories epic, but in truth, that just means that the narrative is slow and takes its sweet time getting to its point. It’s the little moments that keep us playing, not the end goal.