Spoilers for the games Limbo, Journey, and Braid ahead. You have been warned!
While not all video games have a narrative, or even decide to focus on the narrative, storytelling has become more and more important as the industry has matured. For the most part, video game narratives have been pretty straight-forward. Go to the castle and save the princess. Stop the evil scientist and rescue animals. Kill the aliens trying to destroy Earth. Stop the city from breaking down into anarchy. While all of these stories have been interesting and are complex, they aren’t really experimenting with what it means to be a storyteller.
As games have continued to progress, however, there has been an even deeper focus on the psychology of the characters; either you or the character you are playing. Games like Halo 4, God of War III, Bioshock, and Far Cry 3 are all games that take a deep look in the minds of the people we choose to have as video game protagonists. Games like The Walking Dead: The Game and Heavy Rain take this one step further and ask yourself to look at your own psychology. However, even in these games, the storytelling telling methods still follow a straightforward narrative path that can be equated with similar Hollywood-movie style narratives.
However, in recent years, a new set of narrative games have cropped up with a new idea of storytelling; the circular, never-ending story. Indie games like Braid, Journey, and Limbo and even a few mainstream games like Shadow of the Colossus (though calling SotC mainstream might be stretching a bit) have started to explore the idea of a circular narrative, where time and “cause-and-effect” are not as linear as we thought. It’s an interesting new territory that is ripe for video games to explore.
Games like Limbo explore new narrative styles for video games |
So a circular narrative is something that looks at and explores the idea of time being fluid and circular. For an excellent example of the idea of a circular narrative in literature, listen to this wonderful short story by Neil Gaiman (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-K5p3VrrjQ). The games Limbo and Journey do this most obviously. Both Limbo and Journey put you on a simple quest to achieve a simple goal. In Limbo, you are journeying through Limbo to find your sister while in Journey you are trying to reach the top of a mountain. Both goals set you on a straight path that forces you to constantly walk towards a goal. While Journey may be filled with different ideas, both games end similarly. Once you achieve your goal, both games put you back at the exact same spot you started. From there, you can continue to do the exact same quest again, just constantly stuck in a loop. However, both games put a different spin on the idea. Limbo has a much sadder tone that has this young boy constantly stuck in a cycle looking for his sister, while Journey has a more positive tone in the themes of perseverance and apotheosis. Both games experiment with the idea of a fluid time and space.
The simple goal of Journey helps to underscore its constant cycle |
"Time keeps on slippin'...slippin'...slippin'" |
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