Video games have become the major platform for the epistolary story form. I finished both the main campaign and the Frozen Wilds DLC of Horizon Zero Dawn several days ago. Went back through to see if I could do a few things more elegantly -- craft more of a stealth build (sigh) and this time paid attention to upgrading gear.
It did have one payoff. There's this one side-quest where you deal with a swarmy noble named Zaid. Aloy goes to a remote fort to rescue a captive, and on the way out Zaid pops up in ambush with a bunch of bully-boys and the Horizon-equivalent of a machine gun.
So I vaguely remembered this ambush on my second play-through. Went and mined the courtyard in anticipation and, it turns out, I was able to call the strider I had hacked earlier into the courtyard, too.
So I rescue the captives, Zaid does his big entrance... And his men stumble into the booby traps and the former captives polish them off neatly. Zaid does his big "I have you now, my pretty" speech anyhow while raising the machine gun -- I promptly knocked him over with a concussion arrow and Sparky the Wonder Horse ran over and stomped him to death.
So satisfying!
Anyhow, epistolary material in games is nothing new. Some games, like Bioshock and other Bioware entries, have all sorts of fascinating side-stories that are unfolded through logs and audio tapes. Even overheard NPC chatter can have little side stories. In some, the main plot engine is also explored through these -- often optional -- narrative clips.
And games have an advantage over the novel in that, depending on the style of the game, they can be manuscripts that are read by a voice actor, voice recordings, actual video or holographic displays. So a bit more like those experimental theatre things where you walk around a site getting snippets from the actors.
There are games in which that is more or less the whole point. I think they call them "walking simulators" now. Basically Myst without the puzzles. Interestingly, a growing number of the big AAA games that have an interesting story to them -- like Mass Effect and as it happens Horizon Zero Dawn have a "story" mode that nerfs the difficulty allowing you to progress more easily from story point to story point. And, of course, explore the game world.
If I recall correctly, the original Mass Effect 3 added a third option; to automate all the dialogue for you so you could get back to the fighting!
In any case, I am very impressed by the way Horizon Zero Dawn handles the info-dump. In many games, there is a division between what are clearly side stories and the big background information, and the latter is pushed on you. This does happen somewhat in HZD, but even then the excepts are never "here's how we got here" or "as you know, Bob." They are made by people who are still concerned with the trivia, going about their daily lives and dealing with their own concerns, and the clues to what happened in the past are only read between the lines.
Even when you get a big dialog scene, where someone actually explains things to you (many of these are optional, too!) they are consumed by their own cares and give things their own spin. Nobody is going out of their way to paint a clear picture for the player. In fine epistolic fashion, the reveal of the war machines which wracked such havoc on the old world is in the form of a sales presentation!
(The closest moment I can think of to a "as you know, Bob" is when a Matriarch explains the origin story of the Nora -- Aloy's people -- to a group of children and young mothers during the evening festivities before the Proving. There is a level of euhemerism here as it does capture, however poetically, some of the ground truth of what happened in the past and how the world got the way it is. But you pretty much have to finish the game first in order to understand that!)
Of course HZD has an unfair advantage. Well, Bioshock opens with a complete outsider to the sunken city trying to figure out what is going on. HZD, however, very neatly maps the inner story of young Aloy trying to discover why she was cast out of her tribe and what happened to her mother, to her discovering not just how her tribe works, how their world works, but the quest takes her out into, first, interacting with other civilizations (the game calls them "tribes" but then Aloy is the POV character and that just may be how she views it), and then discovering not just what happened to the old world but that it is still happening -- and the mystery of her birth is of pivotal importance to the greater world.
I am slightly unhappy because of the usual AAA conundrum; for over a hundred bucks pre-paid the gamer is expecting at least forty hours of play. And that means the game has to both change things up to keep it fresh and also, unfortunately, it becomes a set of sequels to itself, each time upping the stakes.
You start the game as a Nora hunter silently stalking herd machines (which only turn hostile if provoked). By mid-game you are carrying a dozen kinds of high explosives and trick arrows and everything is a stand-up fight in a closed arena against a war machine the size of a condominium. But even Aloy realizes this; at some point she bitterly remarks that she went from being called "dirty outcast" by her fellow Nora, to being called "our savior, the Anointed One" and she finds the one fully as isolating as the other.
This is a smart game, in other words. It doesn't hold your hand...well, except literally, as the tutorial section is a very well done and admirably brief section where the child Aloy is instructed in hunting by her guardian and fellow outcast, Rost. And just when you might start to get tired of having everything explained for you, it dumps you into a scary, unarmed, cat-and-mouse against a dozen searching Watchers.
But this isn't a review. This is just me talking about a master class in backgrounding without making an annoying info-dump out of it.
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