STORY IS MEMORY. VIDEO GAMES ARE PLAY.
A few weeks ago a friend who runs a creative agency asked me to go into her office and speak to her staff about storytelling. It’s a thing they do in their office.
Sure. No worries. I can do that.
I’d be coming in a few days after returning from the E3 video gaming convention in LA- where I’d be producing some short videos for gaming companies- and a few weeks after the deadline for the first draft of my book Born to Fight. She and I vaguely agreed that I would to speak about how story telling conventions span across short-form videos, video games and books.
Anyway, one 90,000-word copy edit and some jet lag later I’d forgotten, until my Google Calendar the night before reminded me about ‘Cath- storytelling thingy.’
As I walked to my friend’s office, I had the cold realisation that if corporate videos, video games and books had anything in common, I certainly didn’t know what it was and I quickly got myself into a nice, panicky lather, no longer convinced that I had any understanding of what ‘story’ was at all.
Then I started to build it back up again from the ground up.
Story has to be strongly related to memory, right? If there are archetypes and tropes that exist in many cultures that never had the opportunity to interact with each other, then story must somehow relate to our biology, right? And if that’s the case, perhaps stories and how we tell them relates to how we order stimuli to create meaning and sense?
This is the point where I recognised that I could have spent five minutes on Google to find out that I’m either wrong, or creating an ersatz and truncated version of some semiotics standard here, but I didn’t as that would have left me with nothing to talk about.
The theory that story is an emulation of how we perceive and regurgitate memory does make sense though. Think about how you may remember a significant interaction from a few years ago; no matter how important the memory, you only remember a handful of the literally thousands of visions, smells, sounds, and words that you perceived, with most of what you remember bringing meaning to your experience.
I had stroke a decade or so ago, and my memory in the months before and after the event are scorched earth, but I remember vividly the first muddled conversation with a panicked workmate after it had happened. I remember the ambulance driver’s calm, reassuring, goateed face. I remember the t-shirt a friend was wearing when he visited me, because the shirt had the word ‘Vancouver’ on it behind snow-dusted mountains. With that landscape context and the blood slowly coming back to Wernicke’s area in my brain, it became the first written word I’d manage to correctly identify since the stroke.
Memory is incredibly streamlined and efficient, and when we create a story regardless of medium, I think we’re trying to replicate that efficiency.
Editing is story telling. Which took me to thinking about video games. Video game creation (especially the more commercially powerful games) is not about efficiency and omission, but largess- huge worlds, and myriad ways to interact with them, thousands of game styles, guns, foes, and objectives. Video games are also about finding a game mechanic that can be happily repeated many thousands of times until it is mastered.
I love my vidya gamez, but I think they’re usually more about play than storytelling, as abundance and repetition are kinda an anathema to storytelling .
There are, of course excellent, emotional stories have been told in video games- Uncharted and Last of Us developers Naughty Dog are damned good at it- but I think they probably manage it in spite of the medium limitations (or lack of).
Anyway, when I got my friend’s office, I was pretty confident I’d have something to say. Of course I said almost none of what’s written above. I ended up mostly talking about my book, which is about an ex-con Samoan street fighter from South Auckland, who ended up becoming a household name in Japan because of his involvement in two huge martial arts organisations run by the yakuza.
It was good choice.
