Recently some members of the video-game community were enraged by news that FromSoftware’s oblique open-world adventure Elden Ring has been nominated in the best narrative category at the forthcoming Game Awards. Like the developer’s other titles (the Dark Souls series and Bloodborne, for instance), this complex game tells its story through short snippets of dialogue rather than long cinematic cutscenes, and via objects in the world, rather than endless scrolls, audio messages or emails. The player has to do most of the work in assembling a cogent narrative, which suited me fine, because, through the 200-hours I’ve spent with the game, I simply do not care about the plot – I have my own. I wander the dangerous lands of Caelid and Dragonbarrow as an existential assassin, like Clint Eastwood in High Plains Drifter or Mad Max, not bothering to try and make sense of the world, just keen to explore and fight and survive. I like this story better – especially when my son joins me and we take on foes together, revelling in the story that builds of is own accord as we play.
There have always been titles that have allowed a lot of what we call player agency: the ability to do what you like, to some degree, in a digital environment. Elite was a defining example, and Skool Daze, SimCity, Civilization and Ultima III were other early progenitors. Then came the open-world genre, ushered in by Grand Theft Auto 3, and games were for ever altered as story-delivery mechanisms. Yet traditional notions of narrative form and structure still pervade. From The Witcher 3 and Horizon Zero Dawn to Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, if you want a story experience, you need to do the story missions, you need to interact with computer-controlled story agents, you need to cede agency to the story god. I’m sort of done with that now, and maybe I’m not alone.
