The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt – CD Projekt RED

In this week, the central theme seems to be mediums and the affordances and drawbacks of each of them. And thus, another reason for me to talk about gaming once again – and no, this will not be the last gaming related post.

Gaming as a medium has existed as far back as the early 50’s, where games were created for the purpose of academic research. But nowadays, its has bloomed into one of the largest forms of mediums out there today. But as a way of telling a story, what kind of affordances does gaming have that some of the other forms do not?

Gaming achieves a form of story telling that no novel or movie could ever replicate – and that is, the level of immersion. Now before I piss some people off, I’m not saying you can’t get immersed in a movie or a novel and feel like your living and breathing within it’s context. What I am saying is that the characters in a novel or movie – are only characters. But in a game, you – the player, become the character. You choose which path to go down, which weapons to upgrade, and with which characters you interact with. Novels or movies – when compared to games, are relatively linear. No matter how many times you watch a movie, you can never change the way the character behaves or reaches their goals. But in a game – such as mass effect or infamous, you choose whether to be the hero that saves everyone, or the villain that causes pain and destruction. In a massive open world such as Grand Theft Auto, you can choose to modify your vehicle, play sport, shoot up a strip club, follow the main storyline, complete side-missions, kill bigfoot – the choices are endless.

As opposed to movies or novels, you choose your level of immersion. Whether you just want to finish the main storyline of a game, or whether you want to 100% a game – and collect all the collectibles, find all the weapons, and unlock all the achievements/trophies associated with your game – it’s all up to the player.

Gaming has also reached a point where it can induce the same emotions that a movie could. Take The Last of Us for example. This game – developed by Naughty Dog, created a cinematic experience within a game. In fact, Naughty Dog is known for making cinematic experiences within their games – including all four of the Uncharted games.

But, like all things, gaming does have downsides to it as a story-telling medium as well. First of all – bugs. Programming a game is extremely hard, and as a result, all games will have bugs in them – regardless as to whether they are big or small.  Now a bug refers to a coding error in the programming of software. As a result, games with a large number of bugs can ruin the immersion of games and take the player out of the immersion.

Gaming is also costly. Some games don’t demand too much from the player, but a large majority of games require the player to have a console or PC to enjoy them to their potential. Some games (such as Crisis) could never be played on a low-spec PC due to its high demand of resources (RAM, CPU cores etc) to run the game optimally. Triple A titles also cost upwards of $70AUD, where as a movie ticket is about $15-$20. 

Gaming also demands a bit of skill to be experienced. Older people or infants would find it very difficult to experience a game the way it was meant to be experienced, due to the lack of ability to use the controller or mouse/keyboard. And finally (there’s probably more but I’m getting tired), gaming demands A LOT of time. A movie will take a bout 1-3 hours to watch. A novel – a few weeks or more, depending on the speed the reader can read at. But games (not all of them), can cost the players upwards of 200+ hours to complete and 100%. I’m talking about games such as Skyrim, Grand Theft Auto, Fallout and The Witcher.

As such, gaming – like all story-telling mediums, does have its pros and cons. So if you think gaming is something that only kids do – well, think again. DUN DUN DUNNNN. (Man that ending was cheesy)