Video game | Scribblings

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#StoryMOOC, Games, Jacobite Risings, Monopoly, The Future of Storytelling, Video game

No, not Lana Del Rey.

Sooner said than done…

Last week, our creative task for The Future of Storytelling, was to discuss the storytelling in our favourite videogame.

And guess what? I don’t have a favourite videogame.

Actually, I have played very few videogames in my life, and none of them with anything like a real narrative structure. Which is rather odd, come to think of it, because I am the one who needs a story in everything she does. Why, I never could play a game of Monopoly without adding a story to it. In my College years, I used to attach stories to every game of pinochle: sometimes it was the Vandean Wars, sometimes the Jacobite Risings, sometimes the Anglo-Boer Wars, but mostly the Revolt in the Desert*. You’ll laugh, but even while playing solitaire on my laptop – a dreadful procrastinating strategy – I tell myself stories to go with it.

My cup of tea…

So, I guess that for me the trouble comes with the mechanics of videogames themselves? My eye-hand coordination isn’t too terrible, usually – but, for some reason, when it comes to moving around with a mouse, a keyboard or a joystick, I suddenly grow ten thumbs and a lot of cottonwool in my brain. It’s not that I never tried, I’m just unbelievably bad at it.

I remember playing I don’t know what fantasy videogame with friends, when I was fifteen or so. My elf was a walking danger, because I would mix up my keys and start shooting arrows with wild abandon at the wrongest moment… After I killed all my team-mates for the fifth time, we went out for icecream, and never played again… Not that I minded too much: when I’m too busy minding my keys to enjoy the story, I bore very, very easily.

And so, I stuck to paper-and-pencil RPG, and the occasional very easy single-player game in which I could click and point, and tell myself stories as I went – because yes: the short and the long of it seems to be that games are all very well, but woe to the game that comes between me and my story.

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* I’m told that, as a result, in my College jokers went under the name of vickers for years…