What gaming has only hinted at
Some time ago I wrote about the use of epic, far-reaching stories in video games to create a truely unique and lasting experience. How it is the inclusion of a good and well thought-out story that makes a game really stand out and shine. But after giving the matter some more thought I realized that I was only touching on half of the equation. A story is all well and good, but it's empty and meaningless unless it is given the proper context, a believable and interesting world for it to reside in. I even alluded to this bit with one of my last sentences referring to what Tolkien would do with today's technology. Lord of the Rings is an amazing and epic story that epitomizes the struggle between good, evil and our own human nature. But that story has been told countless times over many generations, but what gives this particular telling so much more power is that it is set within a fully fleshed out world with it's own history, languages, races, hatreds and prejudices. He crafted a world within which to set his story.
Now, you don't have to flesh out an entire planet with centuries upon centuries of history, complete and functional languages and a political structure that could rival medieval Europe in order to have a good foundation upon which to build your story. All it takes is the setting within which you place your game to be at least moderately believable, or detailed enough that even if it's fantastic, the player can still lose themselves in it. Half Life is once again a perfect example of how everything was done just right to give us a stunning experience. Black Mesa Research Facility. Most of the game takes place within the halls and labs of this top-secret government facility that probably rivals Area-51 for sinister doings. Through attention to detail in the architecture, to little art touches here and there to the limited dialogue from the characters (and later through the different perspectives provided by Opposing Force and Blue Shift), a living breathing facility was created. For the purpose of the game, that was the entire universe that needed to be crafted, and it was that foundation that gave the developers the launching point for their excellent story.
Any good book you've ever read depends upon a foundation from which to build up the events of the story, or history to refer back to in order to give context to events and character motives. Many books rely upon our own world for that foundation, allowing the author to devote only a small amount of time to covering the essential differences between our reality and the one created between the covers of the book. However, some authors that stray beyond our every-day world have to spend a good bit of time establishing their universe. If you think about it, the really good sci-fi and fantasy books all have very well drawn-out worlds and universes. It's the mediocre ones who just skip all that and use the basic elves/dwarves/dragons/humans formula to tell their story. Lord of the Rings, Wheel of Time, Discworld, The Dark Tower Series... all devote a great deal of time to establishing their base world, it makes the stories much more interesting to imagine that what's happening may be impacting countless nations and could change the face of an entire world or series of worlds. It makes the stories seem more epic, more important.
Computer games, in their most basic form, are meant to transport us for a short period of time into an alternate reality. Be it one as simple as being a white 2D triangle floating in a black void shooting little dots at vaguely asteroid-like things that float past you. For the brief period of time you're playing, you're not just that triangle shooting dots at odd blobs, you're piloting a space ship shooting down asteroids before something really bad happens. Like the rare instances where a game exhibits a truely amazing story, there are rare cases where games build a compelling and enthralling universe that exists in 1s and 0s within your computer. These games transport us into a new world filled with amazing new things to see and experience, and in some way we're changed by playing them. We've glimpsed a piece of the infinite expanse that is our imagination. These games set the tone for what we hope to see in all games that come out after that. Sadly, with many of these games, so much development time is spent building the world, that they never get around to really putting together the story to tie it all together.
There are 3 games in my mind that stand out as the greatest achievements in realizing how games can craft entire worlds, and not just short-lived adventures, games that required a certain kind of imagination that is seldom glimpsed in any form of art or entertainment.
1. MUD (Multi User Dungeon)
This is more of a game category I know, but as far back as MUD/1 waaay back in the day, this was the first entry into the larger realm of using a computer to create a complete world that was bigger than the scope of any set of quests or tasks. MUDs were entire worlds described in short bursts of text, with small scripts running to respond to player actions in the world. There is nothing technologically amazing about MUDs really, as they're just text on a screen. But these games opened people up to the idea that you could hide an entire world, set of worlds or hell entire universes within the confines of a computer hard drive. You ventured from the Tree of Eom to the Elemental Valley, and along the way stopped off at the City of Light for a restock of torches and supplies. You met up with fellow adventurers and you treked across wilderness and mountains, encountering all sorts of monsters, animals, citizens and other players. You were but one piece of a very large puzzle that you could spend countless hours trying to explore and piece together.
2. Myst (Cyan Worlds... 1994 I believe)
The game that ushered in the CD-ROM era. This is a game that gave us the first visual glimpse of the kinds of places we could visit from the comforts of our office chair or basement computer lair. We clicked through a set of finely detailed worlds that were so breathtakingly beautiful we couldn't quite grasp it at the time. The puzzles, the way the world reacted to your actions, and how everything, no matter how bizarre compared to our world, seemed to fit in just right and be completely believeable. The story involved in this game was almost non-existant. You start as a nameless person who finds the Myst linking book by accident after it has finished it's journey through the Star Fissure. You don't know where you are, why you're there, and for a while it looks like there is no one else there, and that there's nothing for you to do. However after exploring a bit and clicking on random stuff you realize that it's a very complex and carefully designed world. The story never really gets all that in-depth as most of it is simply hinted at in bits and pieces over the course of a very long game. However, that didn't detract from the wonder of the game. Cyan built a new world for us to explore and worked so hard to define and etch out each and every little detail that it seemed almost plausable that something like this had to exist somewhere. Because they were able to work on a small scale (the entire series always takes place on a series of very small islands), they were able to give things a level of detail not normally possible.
3. Ultima Online
This took the strengths of the text-based MUD and gave it some graphics to look at. What makes this interesting is what makes every MMO interesting from a world-building perspective. It introduced something more permenant, but at the same time more changable to the game world. Some MUDs played at economies, player run cities etc, but it was always very difficult to get a handle on the changes to the MUD world. In UO, political systems were established, an economy created (that later collapsed when they clear-cut all the trees in the game for resources)... essentially the structure for a believable world. All MMOs have taken their cues largely from this starting point as they all strive to create a detailed game world within which to play.
MUDs gave us the idea, that we could create a larger world on a computer. Myst showed us that it could be built with visuals and a great amount of detail explaining the underlying physical and biological mechanics. UO showed us that it could be all expanded to a larger scale, creating worlds of a size we can more easily identify with. The influence of these three key games is still felt today, as they all shape and push the direction games are trying to move.
We see it especially with Massively Multiplayer games like EverQuest, Asheron's Call, Star Wars Galaxies, World of WarCraft etc... These games are all recreated worlds, the sandbox from which players can craft their own tales. As they grow technically sophisticated with better graphics, physics and underlying systems to manage things like the economy, or national politics, we are getting nearer and nearer to what the ultimate achievement of computer and video games is... creating alternate realities. We're not there yet though, each game gets a piece of it right, and slowly we incorporate the good bits into later games, so they just get better and better, getting closer to that ultimate goal. Soon, as both the sophistication of our computer generated worlds progresses and our ability to tell more effective stories within this new medium, we'll see gaming transform from a fringe hobby to a truely mainstream method of expression, art and entertainment.
We have glimpsed but a tiny bit of an infinite number of worlds, and we are stunned and awed by the potential we see.