Storytelling machine

While there can be reasonable difference in opinion about games and stories, in light of the popularity of streaming and the Let’s Play genre online, it seems clear that video games are powerful storytelling machines. As such it is important to look critically at the sorts of stories they allow players to tell.

Last semester I asked my game design students: Be honest. If you were asked in 2019 to design a pandemic simulation game, how would you have represented economic and scientific powers such as the UK and the USA? Most admitted that the advantages they would have designed for these nations would have made outcomes like we see in our current reality, where such nations are world-leading in deaths, very unlikely.

The popular boardgame Pandemic tasks players with dealing with runaway disease. They can play as one of a number of characters: dispatcher, medic, scientist, researcher, operations expert, contingency planner, or quarantine specialist. These roles all have a technical bent, with the implication that the key to winning against a pandemic is the effective deployment of technical and scientific resources. This design from 2008 misses major aspects of the current ‘infodemic’, such as the misinformation that has been spread through high-tech social media platforms, with sources that included high executive authority, and the uneven distribution of resources that has seen certain populations disproportionately affected by COVID-19. Pandemic imagines viruses as primarily biological phenomena, to be dealt with as such: as is highly evident in the real-world pandemic we face, it is also a cultural, economic and political phenomenon.

As noted above, narrative-led games have been important in expanding the generic, tonal and thematic range of video games as a whole. This is partly because of the rise of accessible middleware tools (including the major Unity and Unreal platforms, but also lightweight programs such as Inkle, Twine and bitsy) to help with developing narrative designs. Such games can thus often have shorter, more agile development cycles, and take risks with aesthetics and subject matter that would be rarer in games oriented to return on investment.

Like the pandemic, climate change may also be a case where system-heavy games reveal issues with the stories they allow players to tell. One example is Civilisation VI: Gathering Storm (GS), a major recent attempt by digital games to reckon with the reality of playing with climate change. The well-known Civilisation games see players leading the development of a civilisation from prehistory to modern times. Players decide on how to disburse resources, discover technologies, expand cities and engage in diplomacy or warfare with other civilisations. They offer players a vastly diachronic possibility space to explore thousands of years of history, with a large number of variables and systems to track. GS tackles climate change in part by adding the future: play can continue into the ‘Future’ era which succeeds the current ‘Information’ era. While Gathering Storm does add valuable climate change dynamics to Civilisation VI, its view of managing the climate crisis is largely technocratic as players seek to develop carbon sequestration and other speculative technological fixes.

GS renders climate change through a vast range of systemic calculations, but much like Pandemic’s treatment of contagion, some things remain outside of its possibility space. In spite of all the diachronic possibilities that GS offers, climate change reveals a strange synchrony: no matter the past, the future will be technocratic. There is no real system for representing the role of technology and industry in exacerbating the climate crisis, nor for reckoning with the power of multinational corporations that are as powerful as ‘civilisations’: as laid bare as a conscious project by a recent Channel 4 undercover sting on ExxonMobil executive Keith McCoy.