Elves Are Out, Aliens In
Written on 9:48 AM by waratxe
October 16, 2007
Video Games
Elves Are Out, Aliens In
By SETH SCHIESEL
Where have all the elves gone?
That’s the question gamers and the people who love them are bound to ask this fall as they take in the latest crop of big-budget video games. Since the 1970s, dragons, orcs, wizards and dwarfs have been staples of interactive entertainment, yet this holiday season there are hardly any top new games in the traditional fantasy mode.
Instead 2007 has been dominated by perhaps the deepest lineup of science fiction games ever.
It started in August with the sleeper hit BioShock, which can best be described as intelligent sci-fi noir (genetic engineering in 1940s big-band style). Then last month came the pop culture juggernaut Halo 3, the epitome of mainstream action sci-fi (men with huge guns saving the galaxy from an interstellar menace). Between now and Thanksgiving gamers will see gothic sci-fi in Hellgate: London (demons invade post-apocalyptic London); the first major science-fiction online game in years in Richard Garriott’s Tabula Rasa; and the magnum opus-cum-space opera Mass Effect.
Not floating in space yet? In a mash-up of gaming trends, the most anticipated PC shooter this fall, Crysis, lets players take aim at both aliens and North Koreans. Even many of the fall’s top child-friendly console games, like the latest Metroid, the new Ratchet & Clank and the coming Super Mario Galaxy, are set in a fanciful future.
The most obvious question is, Why the shift? But it may be more salient to ask why most video games are set in so few genres to begin with, and whether that’s changing. After all, most forms of entertainment draw consumers into an experience they could not actually have in life. That is as true of “Days of Our Lives,” the National Football League or “The Godfather” as it is of any video game.
The difference is that books, films and television shows are more often set in some approximation of the real, contemporary world. Yet many of the best video games take place in fantasy and science-fiction worlds meant to have as little in common with reality as possible. That may reflect games’ strengths and weaknesses as a storytelling medium.
The one thing that makes electronic games unique among entertainment media is choice, or agency. In a game the star of the show is the consumer, not a celebrity on a screen, stage or playing field. A gamer does not have merely to identify with the protagonist of someone’s else story; the gamer actually gets to become that alternative identity, if just for a while.
So, the thinking goes, that identity ought to be as alternative as possible.
“When you’re making a video game, you’re trying to give the player special experiences and abilities that go beyond the everyday as much as possible,” said Casey Hudson, project director for Mass Effect, a new science-fiction role-playing game to be released next month. “You want to be able to give somebody an experience where they can leave behind their everyday life.”
Or as put by Bill Roper, chief executive of Flagship Studios, which plans to release Hellgate: London later this month, “No one wants to play a game where they are a C.P.A. trying to figure out a deduction.”
Mr. Roper added: “As a John Grisham novel, the C.P.A. thing could work. His novels are intriguing, they’re great. But I don’t know if a John Grisham story could be a fun game.”
And that, quite neatly, is what video games have been so bad at. All the snazzy technology that has done so much to make gamers feel as if they are somewhere else has also done little to populate those fantastic virtual realities with the believable, nuanced story lines and characters that have been the lifeblood of linear drama since Homer.
In that sense, outlandish settings have long distracted players from noticing a dearth of old-fashioned storytelling.
“What we have not really gotten in games,” Mr. Hudson said, “which you do get when you watch a great television drama, is that as exciting as the setting may be, what’s really interesting are the people, the personal, human stories.” Naturally, Mr. Hudson and the rest of his team at BioWare hope to change that with Mass Effect.
Game makers have been employing more writers recently, hoping to improve storytelling. But perhaps even more interesting is how technology can allow stories to emerge where a game’s makers wrote none.
Consider the Sims, the family simulation series that has become wildly popular among elementary school and middle school girls. In the Sims, as with traditional dolls like Barbie, girls (mostly) create a virtual household and populate and furnish it to their liking. Then, using a combination of visual props and imagination, millions of Sims-playing girls, like their doll-playing mothers and grandmothers, set their own story on the “family” they have created.
As for the wave of science-fiction games this year, that is probably just cyclical. It generally takes at least three years to make a top-notch game. Look back at 2004: Elves were everywhere. The “Lord of the Rings” film trilogy had just concluded, and in gaming the very popular World of Warcraft fantasy was sweeping away the competition.
“There are a lot of ways in which World of Warcraft has influenced the game-making community, not just the game-playing community,” said Mr. Roper, who was formerly a senior developer at the company behind that game, Blizzard Entertainment. “It’s suicide to try to go head to head with World of Warcraft.”
So now instead of a gaggle of goblins, gamers this fall are being confronted with an army of aliens. Thanks to the latest graphics technology, almost all of those spacelings will be ready for their close-ups. Some may even come armed with more sophisticated, compelling stories than their ancestors.
And if you really love elves, don’t despair. With the way the game industry works, they will surely be back soon.
