It May Even Be In Our Time

I’m back from GDX, which was somewhat disappointing but yet very inspiring. It’s helped me decide on a lot of things about my future, and what I choose to pursue. But on to other interesting things, because I’m not as important.

The other day Shadow of the Colossus came up again. I love SotC. It’s a beautiful game. Most people agree with me. But then there’s some people who keep prying, nagging, demanding justification as to why it is good. So let’s recap here.

Music, great. Visuals, great. Gameplay –repetitive but refreshing, with the grip system and holding on to dear life from flailing stone beasts’ backs, driving a sword into their weak spots–so yeah, it’s great. Replay value,–I’m still playing it over and over because it’s so short and sweet–great. Story.

Here is where the controversy comes, and what most bothers me. Shadow of the Colossus is done by the absolutely incomparable Ico team, masters of weaving story and lore into gameplay. Every time I sit down to delve into SotC, I feel awed by the grandeur of the universe before me, and mesmerized by the stalking giants though which conquering I may be vindicated. In my eyes, Shadow of the Colossus has a tremendous amount of story. But people keep bringing up to me, what is the theme? What’s the premise? What’s the catch? Why is this story being told?

If you’d stop nattering, I’d tell you.

There’s plenty of themes in Shadow. I’ll get into them later, but they’re there. There’s a premise, too. Someone goes around and kills large stone giants. Simple, right? Themes don’t make a story, however.

The thing about a game is that, unlike a book or a movie or any other experience in which the director guides the viewer by the hand through their mystical, otherworldy vision, in games it’s usually the player taking rein and whipping the director to go faster, to turn, to stop. This makes it an entirely different kind of sensation, and by definition a true experience as opposed to a bystanding observation of the events taking place. In Shadow of the Colossus, Team Ico shed light on something amazing by setting the game up for the player to fill every hole. Nothing about the protagonist’s past is explained, and even the murky details that arise are guesswork at best. But the actions that the protagonist executes throughout the actual body of the game are as clear, concise and blaringly obvious–he goes from one rock titan to the next and brings each down. The scale of each of those actions puts the experience the player actually engages in (as opposed to backstory, which the player will only hear about in the game) on a massive pedestal, and highlights it as most important. So important, in fact, that it’s the premise of the entire game.

Basically, Team Ico wanted the player to make a story him or her self, in order to explain these phenomenally epic events. Whwther the player considers the protagonist a valiant knight, sacrificing him for his princess, or whether he thinks of the hero as a remorseful assassin, regretting his kill when it is too late and doing everything he can to receive pardon once more, or even as a dedicated, fierce lover, fighting to bring back his only with tooth and claw, the action is still the same. In other forms of storytelling, action is usually caused by the elements of the story. In Shadow of the Colossus, the story is sprouted from the action.

This is the magnificent thing about games. We try so very hard to make games that follow a set storyline like a movie, trying to lead the player from event to event and finally to the end, where we culminate the whole tale and explain our cleverness in setting things up the way they are. I, as a writer, am guilty of that, and so are most other game writers (do not lie). We love our story. It’s our baby. We want the player to discover it, and learn to appreciate it.

But what we forget is that, through play, we make our own stories. I remember countless of imaginary characters my friends and I would invent and adopt in roleplay, running around in empty soccer fields and calling out attacks, chasing each other, trying to escape the nonexistent hordes behind us with nothing but our fighting skill and nerve. That was what play was for me, story. Clearly, it’s resulted in me loving to write and read stories–but I have to remember the player wants that indulging ability to create their own universe, too. It’s the reason games like Morrowind, Oblivion, SPORE, World of Warcraft and Shadow of the Colossus appeal so much to me–they don’t force me into a story, they just give me a universe and invite me to go play. Granted, sometimes it’s not as free as one might think–you can’t avoid the Oblivion main quest forever, World of Warcraft is boring and absurdly slow if you’re not doing quests and there’s nothing to do in Shadow of the Colossus other than run around like a dolt in an empty environment and take down stone giants. But we’re getting there–someday we may make an entirely free universe, where anything is possible within the rules of the world, and people will be free to truly “roleplay”.

Then again, we tried that with Second Life in a way, and it didn’t work out all that well. Maybe we still need more time.

To conclude with Shadow of the Colossus, it’s a game that’s designed with the player’s story in mind, with themes supporting the player’s interpretation of his or her own actions. In the end, the real theme is Sacrifice. You, as a player, give up your six hours to crush these creatures for reasons of your choosing, losing bits of yourself along the way, becoming corrupted, tainted and yet pushing on, even to the point of losing your horse, Arrow–the only other living creature with any sort of unique identity to it in this forgotten world, and the only named character you know, leaving you completely and utterly alone to face the price of your Sacrifice. And in the end, you are cripplingly betrayed, and all seems to have been for nothing.

…But then your sacrifice gives birth to hope.

In the end, it doesn’t matter what you were fighting for. They were your reasons. It was your fight. The game was just a means to achieve it. And that’s what makes a game so much different, and so uniquely beautiful. The fact that the story was strong, well thought out, on purpose–down to dropping you in an abandoned, empty world with nothing but stone giants to remind you of how alone and unsupported you are in your great sacrifice–only a game can do something this amazing.

Only in playing do we truly experience. Watching is never enough. Don’t make a player watch.