Ontology talk:9k/RD/Q65,63/narrative

I don't think it's actually that games have a worse grasp of narrative now.
I think what's actually happened is that _players_ have gotten increasingly bad at understanding narratives over time, and games have adapted themselves to that to still get recommended by players. Game developers probably have a reasonable grasp of what a narrative is. I mean, Hollow Knight contains a lot of buried narrative, all the worldbuilding actually relies a lot on fictional history timelines and thematic antagonisms as they would appear in any narrative. But the difference is probably that developers realize that the average person is unbelievably bad at narrative analysis and sees all stories as essentially unpredictable, and so whenever there is narrative in a game they have to feed it to you through this explicit retelling of background stories as if you were picking up and reading a book inside Minecraft. They may take the "explicit" story and then drop out a bunch of details to make it feel more mysterious and open to interpretation but either way it's still like stories are tossed into a game as easter eggs and you go around picking them up, and then the game is picked clean and has no more story to offer any more. I get what your actual point is about classic games — it's not that the story in Mario 64 is a masterpiece as a story, or Hollow Knight's story is literally worse "as a book", it's that the medium of the game is not treated as a story and the story is tacked on. Spyro the Dragon would be my favorite example of a game that actually allows its game world to roleplay its story. The way realms are physically connected through portals allows going between levels to be a diegetic event. The act of entering the levels and looking around becomes a diegetic depiction of the story of a protagonist exploring an entire world he probably hasn't been to every corner of before. Has Spyro ever _been_ to the Dream Weavers world before now? We may never know, but the intro cutscene showing things being normal and then the act of showing an absurd number of levels on the screen one by one certainly does bring up the question. It isn't really about the quality of the narrative "as a book", it's just about the fact developers have forgotten to make use of the power of intuition in making the experience of narrative antagonisms in a game "immediate", like the character's first person experience is telling part of the story. Video games as a whole are amazing. A video game can flat out create a "lived experience" of a fictional character standing in the world as if that character was conscious, although the only consciousness is the player. (This concept is really simple at its core, not inherently 'complex' or 'advanced', really hard to describe to someone who doesn't already get it, and much easier to understand if you've ever tried to read Heidegger's work Being and Time where he uses all sorts of weird terms like "process of Being" and "being-in-the-world" and that goes on for hundreds and hundreds of pages.)

By that standard I'd say Deltarune is actually doing really well at using the medium of games itself to tell a narrative, through things like the Shadow Crystals and egg man and the Friend faces, etc. A lot of indie games and games period don't really achieve that, like, maybe OneShot would genuinely qualify here as a subtle failure because if I remember right there are a lot of cases of "storybook easter eggs" just being thrown into dialogue. Pokémon might be another halfway example in the way it puts down a mandatory evil organization plot in the middle of everything that will mess with replayability after billing itself as the best and most popular game about simply exploring a new world; in a way you could say OneShot has 'Team Rocket syndrome'. But there might also be other games like OFF that are indie games but don't fail the Team Rocket test. OFF is a linear narrative with limited replayability but at the same time, every single object and interaction in the game serves _as the narrative_ . Every single interaction in OFF actually feels like the game is roleplaying the story, or the game objects and player are roleplaying the story, instead of the game just feeding you stories in a dialogue box or throwing in the equivalent of an anime episode into the main plot that takes center stage but functions like an easter-egg storybook, being self-contained in all the wrong ways.