It is possible that I will be the only person to pick up Colin Harvey’s book When Worlds Collide: How Video Games Reinvent Storytelling and Why It Matters because of the word “storytelling” and not the phrase “video games”. My gameplay experience mostly leaves off with a certain side-scrolling plumber leaping over turtles, not counting my current foray into the phone puzzle “Best Fiends” (level 8740!).
Harvey, a veteran video-game designer and writer (who is also published in PopMatters), however, opens with the assertion that today’s games are closer to the narratively intricate worlds I associate more with the Great American Novel than with Grand Theft Auto. Aside from non-narrative games like Tetris, Harvey writes,
…most have stories, or at least fictional scenarios. Some stories are tightly woven into gameplay like The Last of Us games…. Some, like the satirical Fallout series, utilise narrative systems to help build the fictional world and enable immersion. Some are sprawling sandboxes in which the player can explore and experiment to their heart’s content… Some are designed around choices the player makes… Many are collaborative and connected…. As well as connecting players, these games are increasingly part of wider connected universes that stretch into other media like novels, films, television shows and comics.
Harvey’s goal, then, is to demonstrate how video games are “fundamentally changing how we tell stories.” On the one hand, games and stories have features in common: conflicts or challenges; characters and arcs; beginnings, middles, and ends—although Harvey notes that games don’t necessarily even require characters. Whereas the novel specializes in psychological interiority, however, games allow players to explore and experiment outwardly.
The direct involvement of the player leads to “narrative design”, distinct from “writing”, where time and space, to say nothing of player interactivity, must work differently on a screen than on a page—and differently from a movie screen, as well. Game narratives may be constructed to account for branching—different story paths leading to different story outcomes—or spatial placement in ways that writers or screenwriters need not consider. Game designers think beyond the verbal and even visual and into the virtual: the relationship between the player, the game objects, and the environment, over time, and with the game’s ability to remember previous encounters.
Novels and films are generally understood as moving forward in their overall storytelling, even as they shift in time and place. [Harvey nicely acknowledges the many fictional and film examples of nonlinear narrative—not just flashbacks, but stories that do not move forward in the conventional sense, like Pulp Fiction (1994) and Groundhog Day (1993)—as well as stories that utilize multiple perspectives, like Rashomon (1950).] For our purposes, that I can even use the familiar metaphor of reading as “moving”—you’re probably sitting still as you read this, for example—already suggests the possibility that games can capitalize on figurative narrative movement and render it literally. Like the reader of English, Mario progresses by moving from left to right, and other games and characters must account for far more directions.
Yet, Harvey suggests, “there’s a huge difference between those stories designed for sequential media that employ jumps in time as part of the narrative but which remain fundamentally sequential.” Indeed, even with movement in time throughout a story, the viewer or reader comes closer to the end with every scene or page, regardless of whether what we’re seeing is supposed to be in the past or not.
Where the Worlds Collide in Video Game Storytelling
The “worlds” of When Worlds Collide are not, or not just, the planetary wars of sci-fi video games, but the seemingly competing spheres of age-old traditional storytelling versus the historically recent advent of video game storytelling. Yet at the same time, the destructive impact is far from imminent. Ultimately, Harvey aims to establish two seemingly, but not necessarily, opposite points. On the one hand, video games are a part of the universal, millennia-stretching human impulse toward narrative, prefigured by and in keeping with forms as different as the ancient oral tradition, Aristotle’s Poetics, Hamlet, novels like Tristam Shandy, Hero with a Thousand Faces, and many contemporary films.
On the other hand, video games are attempting something different and audacious: to move readers and viewers into the position of active engagement and interactivity, allowing the player to be part of the story and for the story to be a part of the player. Furthermore, for the game to account for many creators and many players, sometimes playing together, even “together” becomes a subjective term.
It turns out I was the target audience for this book after all. Harvey discusses Russian Formalist Vladimir Propp and semiotician Roland Barthes, among many others, who might be obscure to gamers but would be familiar to literary critics. Relying more than I imagined on a critical-theoretical framework, When Worlds Collide provides an interesting and fine series of comparisons, along with a focused compendium of narratology, genre theory, media studies, and literary history, packed with references and diverse examples, especially, but certainly not limited to, video games.
The reader comes to understand how video games work on narrative, historical, and theoretical levels. That’s a lot considering that I grew up believing video games revolved around avoiding turtle shells.
In a chapter about precursors to video-game narrative, Harvey singles out the Choose Your Own Adventure books, which were popular in the 1980s, during, Harvey notes, “the height of the arcade boom.” “As the title suggests,” Harvey continues, “readers would be given options as to which path to travel through the book… [They required] the reader to work at solving the plot, with the protagonist’s fate often in the balance. For this reason, young readers like me would often keep our finger on the page where the decision point occurred, then change our minds if the outcome wasn’t to our liking.”
Harvey then connects the Choose Your Own Adventure books to the more recent speculative fiction series Black Mirror and the film Bandersnatch (2018), an interactive film that, like the Choose Your Own Adventures, is a branching story. The fate of the main character, Stefan, a young game programmer, “is, of course, decided by you [the viewer], in true branching narrative fashion.”
Except, however, that it is not. Not really. As I wrote when the episode was released, Bandersnatch is, ultimately, an exercise in the illusion and futility of choice, rather than an exercise of the viewer’s will. The more we play, the more we discover that the options are limited and even futile. It puts the viewer into the increasingly uncomfortable position of torturing the main character.
At the end of Bandersnatch, we have only two real choices: ending the story and Stefan’s misery, which is dissatisfying and short, or prolonging both, which feels frustrating at best and cruel at worst. Keeping one’s finger on the page where the decision point occurrs does not help when the decision does not matter.
While Harvey does not analyze Bandersnatch in this way, the example leads to one of the book’s crucial points about video-game narrative: the idea of agency. Quoting Storycentral’s Alison Norrington, Harvey writes that agency is “‘about giving players the sense that their choices, actions, and decisions have a meaningful impact on the world, the characters, and ultimately, the narrative. When players feel like their actions truly matter, they become emotionally invested, and that’s when the game experience transcends simple gameplay and becomes something memorable and deeply engaging.’”
When Worlds Collide moves on, but the point is remarkable, worth prolonging, and worth concluding on here, not for what it says about video games, but what it suggests about the human condition and our very existence. This kind of agency—that our choices and actions matter, that we matter—is what so many people feel is missing in the world and has become the basis of the existential and ontological crises we find ourselves in today.
A light revision of Norrington’s quotation, from player agency to human agency, may help explain why video games are so powerful, and so enjoyable, for so many people. When people—not players—feel like their actions matter, they become emotionally invested, and that’s when life transcends simple survival and becomes something deeply fulfilling. It is arguably far easier to achieve agency in video games than in life.
Life does not provide power-ups, resets, save points, or one-ups. Unlike video games, life must be lived sequentially. Life has only one inevitable outcome. If only we could keep our finger on the page where the decision point occurs, then change our minds if the outcome isn’t to our liking. If only we could play until we die and then come back and try again, and again, and again.