Are Video Games too violent to appeal to a wider audience?
Let's face it; Video Games have thus far in their short existence been pretty crap at storytelling. Even the most lauded of video game plots are, in the end, simply justifications for shooting and killing things, mcguffins for male-dominated power fantasies and such. It seems like the whole industry has fallen into a rut where they're stuck churning out the same violent game over and over; this one with soldiers, this one with aliens, this one with cowboys, this one with soldiers again. Because of this, there is an understandable snobbery against the medium, the term "Gamer" seems to lack the implicitly sensitive and cultured disposition of the "Reader" or the "Film buff".
One crucial difference between reading and gaming is that gaming is still seen as a hobby rather than an integral part of culture. Everyone reads in one form or another, but games seem to be stuck with the narrow audience of younger kids and older kids. It's a catch 22 for the industry, who assume that kids don't care about innovation or sophisticated storytelling as long as they get to kill something. Killing sells, and companies need a guaranteed return on their investment. Salvation for the medium might come in the form of indie games which are, on average, infinitely more innovative, varied and interesting than triple A games. And a simple mention of Minecraft is enough to evidence their enormous growth in popularity. There are plenty of brilliant indie games out there, many of which tell compelling stories, yet they haven't exactly opened the medium up to non-gamers. This is through no fault of their own, rather more it is a result of their limited media coverage in comparison to larger games, which also happen to make the loudest noise when at the centre of a controversy. As a result, video games can probably seem almost impenetrable to non-gamers, who might only have a passing, vague wariness of the medium and its apparent power to sap juvenile attention spans.
To those people the "walking simulator" would stand at odds with almost everything they know about video games. The name alone gives you a substantial idea of the genre's snailean idiosyncrasies, as well as its divisiveness amongst gamers. Walking simulator is a term indicative of derision as much as innovation, leaving gamers simultaneously baffled, exhilarated, bored, relaxed, awestruck and even annoyed. My own first experiences with the genre were in the form of Dear Esther and Proteus, both of which blew me away. Like the Dark Souls games, they required the player to re-think the way they interact with virtual worlds. The challenge they presented wasn't physical like most games, nor mental, but psychological. To really get the most out of the experience, one had to immerse themselves in the worlds they were presented with, and the narrative they garnered from it was unlike anything they could get from a film or a book. This is where the true innovation of the genre lies, making full use of the medium. By stripping it back to its core elements, player and world, one has to find the story for themselves. Most video games have imitated films when it comes to storytelling, implementing bits of explanatory cutscene between gameplay to give the whole thing a sense of momentum, but for walking simulators, the story was in the gameplay.
I was moved to write about the subject after recently playing Everybody's Gone to the Rapture, The Chinese Room's follow up and spiritual successor to the aforementioned, Dear Esther. As stated above, Dear Esther was my first experience of the genre; the sheer poetry of it completely reinvigorated my understanding of the medium. Yet, the graphical capabilities of the time still left more to be desired from the genre. A key element of the walking simulator is immersion, and coming up against the physical boundaries of the world sometimes burst my bubble of reverie. The Hebredian landscape, though stunning for the time, was never quite realistic enough. I'd be wandering along a bleak, jagged coastal path only to be reminded of its artifice by a pixellated surface, a minor glitch or a sense of irritation at having to plod through less interesting parts of the world. I wondered if non-gamers, who needed to be convinced of the medium's worth, would make those allowances necessary for enjoyment.
With EGTTR, those allowances are completely vanquished. Throughout the several hours I played of it, not once did I feel like I had to compensate for any shortcomings. And not once did I feel like I was trapped in an empty, soulless world, despite it being set in a village which is devoid of all human life. Set during the 1980s in the fictional Yaughton, in Shropshire, the player has to uncover the truth of what has happened to its vanished population. The only thing close to characters are a series of wandering orbs of light that enigmatically move between places. Approaching certain areas will trigger fragmentary pieces of exposition, acted out by ghostly figures composed of light. These scenes are rarely in any sort of chronological order, and the characters are often hard to tell apart. But this is a central part of the game's appeal, the player's hand is never held throughout the entire experience, rather they have to make whatever they can of the elusive plot. And after one play through, I feel like I've barely scratched the surface of Yaughton.
The game manages to evoke simultaneous senses of immensity and compactness, noise and tranquillity, fleeting moments and perpetual existence. The story feels like it extends to every inch of Yaughton, with wisps of exposition giving the player glimpses of something much bigger than them, reflected in the virtual space. As for the village itself, it is perhaps the most hauntingly beautiful ever conceived in a game. For a place so seemingly devoid of life, it's never quiet. The wind whistles, the trees sway and whisper, birds sing in the distance. Clouds pass in front of the sun, dimming and brightening the world. A delicate, mysterious haze punctuated by points of light hang around specific places. It gives a vision of a bucolic apocalypse, one at once both idyllic and eerie. Such a complex set of feelings wrought from seemingly so little is what catapults EGTTR beyond Dear Esther. The player is constantly moving towards some sort of conclusion, but it never feels like the conclusion is the actual goal, rather more it is about being able to exist in the world, and as such the more you put into it the more you get out. This is helped by superb voice acting and an awe-inspiring score that shifts from Vaughn Williams-esque orchestral to ambient and to choral. Unlike Dear Esther, the player can carve their own route through the village, making every second of play time feel unique. Discoveries made feel personal, the ambiguity of the world and the story leaves plenty of room for interpretation and revelation.
This is a type of storytelling wholly unique to the medium, and it is achieved with a nuance and delicacy unseen in other games which often slip into caricature and crass, comic-book sensibility. Those who have derided the game as pretentious and boring have simply not understood the challenge it presents. Like the film making of Andrei Tarkovsky or the music of Brian Eno, it demands something of its audience, and in return they can enter into a dialogue much more profound, meditative and insightful than at first expected. The world and the story seem one and the same, resulting in a powerful atmosphere which draws attention to the continuities of time and place. As the player moves through it, they realise they are only another element of it, both affecting and affected by it.
This type of game is a million miles away from the linear, quick-hit-dopamine dependency of other games. EGTTR's quaint, chocolate box setting and at times almost Archers-esque dialogue are completely different to the usual rotation of video game environments. With all these elements in mind, I can completely envision it opening up the medium to non-gamers. It just about slays every pre-conceived notion I had about video games, and perhaps might do for the uninitiated. The game's critics should consider whether it's a game that's even meant for them, they all seem to be too concerned with the lack of a "sprint button" so they can get the thing over with.
