Almost forty years have passed since the creation of the first Zork in the bowels of MIT, back in 1979. Certainly not the first textual adventure, but perhaps the most iconic of the time, Zork brought to light a new need in the nascent "videogame medium. "Alongside pure and healthy fun: that of a story and a narrative that go beyond technical constraints.
Let's jump forward nowadays: the videogame industry is now a giant that feeds itself, a thousand-headed hydra capable of competing for audiences and means with the paternal cinema. Yet one cannot help but think that between 4K, HDR, frame rate and the like, a jargon that has echoed at fairs and events with increasing preponderance for years, perhaps, perhaps, the narrative sector is waning again in a secondary role, dominated and subjected to the "new frontier" of technology and to a market that risks giving more importance to screen resolution and presentation than to substance and quality within the sublime graphic envelope.
Let it be clear that here we do not intend to attack or belittle what is the backbone on which this industry has always stood. Just look at the dates on Wikipedia to note with absolute certainty that, as far as video games are concerned, it has always been technological evolution that has made the fortune of the medium. Here the need for a valid narrative component, unlike cinema, arises belatedly more as a boundary element than as an intrinsic and fundamental feature; and yet, looking back, there is no denying that for many players the most dramatic or depressing moments, those who remain impressed more than a kill or an overtaking, are found within an engaging narrative framework or derive from disconcerting plot solutions.
This does not mean that technology and narrative are mutually exclusive characters, or that the development of one necessarily precludes the quality of the other. Think about The Last of Us, acclaimed by many as one of the best titles ever: you would have immersed yourself and reflected just as easily in the drama of Joel and Ellie without a technical department capable of expressing the emotional load of the characters and their choices far beyond the "mere" lines of dialogue? Maybe yes maybe no. Other examples could be given, de gustobus or not, but the sad truth is that you play like The Last of Us, The Witcher 3 o Journey they are the sublime exception to the above. Whatever the reasons (budget changes, development times, company policies) it is undeniable that technology and fiction are often, too often, the two pans of a scale that cannot find the right measure for balance.
On the other hand, can we blame the producers and creators of video games too much? As with the cinema, the videogame industry also generally follows the demands of the market. Suffice it to observe how open-world games have multiplied in recent years, even when this choice is seriously harmful (did someone say Mafia III?); as well as RPG titles that offer the illusion of choice, or even more recently, sci-fi / space opera works. Of course, as an animal with innumerable heads, the medium diversifies and evolves, often through “trial and error” processes, but like any industry, market projections and the prospect of profit are powerful tools in decision-making processes. It is not a question of criticism here, how much of an observation of a reality with which it is necessary to confront in order to be aware players of their role, power and influence within the gaming landscape.
It may seem like a statement of the obvious - and it is - but on the shelves and online stores comes what we have paid for and for which many will continue to pay. And if on the one hand the effort of one is encouraging and worthy of praise Battlefield 1 and a Titanium case 2 to deepen or even add a markedly story-driven single player component, a choice that the public seems to have appreciated, on the other hand the new trailers of Mass Effect: Andromeda and the awareness that Mac Walters, the lead writer of Mass Effect 2 e 3, is the Creative Director in charge of the new Bioware project. We would have to talk for hours and hours about the "Schizophrenic politics of Bioware", the company choices and the evolution of one of the software houses that has consecrated the RPG genre all over the world with writing masterpieces such as Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter Nights e Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, but this is not the time and place.
Instead, let's ask ourselves, as players and consumers, what products do we want to enter our homes. The first Watch Dogs is Fallout: New Vegas? Dragon Age Inquisition is The Witcher 3? Beyond: Two Souls is Heavy Rain? Games with banal and approximate writing, full of internal contradictions and cardboard characters, or works worthy of the name, able to attract us into stories capable of moving, exalting and thrilling us next to live and memorable characters? To you the choice.
