Games
do setting better than any other medium. While novels or films might pay some
attention to their setting, a game is its
setting, just as a novel is its text.
Games communicate everything through
their settings, so the setting has to be strong and memorable. Luckily, they’re
well up to the task. To take advantage of the medium’s natural strength, many
games focus on exploration, which is why Minecraft
works. But exploration isn’t the whole story. Most exploration-heavy games
like Mass Effect or Legend of Zelda still have a clear goal
that gives them a sense of impetus and progression, and marks the boundary
between a sandbox and an adventure.
Adventures
are about how the heroes become the people they need to be, and about the
consequences should they fail. Not all involve travel, but many do, because
travel links the heroes’ development to its impact on the world around them.
Travel both causes and represents change: the process through which the heroes
become the people they need to be. Video games do this fantastically well,
because when players interact with a setting, they empathize with it. When Minas Tirith falls in Return of the King, we mourn the heroes’
loss of their home. When the Citadel falls in Mass Effect 3, it’s the place
itself we mourn. We’ve connected with and protected it for three games, and
when we can’t save it, we feel responsible. We feel like we’ve failed, and we
want to take it back. We want to rebuild it.
We can
talk about how saving the world is important, necessary, but no medium can get
us as personally and emotionally
involved in saving the world as games. Books and movies make us want to save
the people in the world, but only
games make us want to save the world
itself. They make their world our home, and we don’t want to let it break.
But
what if it’s already broken?
In Dark Chronicle (also titled Dark Cloud 2), a 2001 action-RPG for
PS2, you play as a young man named Max, who builds and fixes machines and carries
a mysterious red stone around his neck. Max lives in Palm Brinks, a cozy
industrial-age walled town closed off from the outside world. Though its
railroad once brought in a booming age of exploration and growth, it’s since
been shut down, the town gates sealed. The community is tight-knit and warm,
but static: few residents know or care much about the world outside. Assassins
soon try to take your stone, and you flee the town through the underground
aqueducts.
You
step outside to find a world stripped of civilization. Using the railroad your
mentor helped reestablish, you travel farther and soon meet Monica, a girl who
carries a blue stone to match your red one. Monica is from the future, and grew
up on the losing side of a great war against a figure known as Griffon, who has
been wiping out humanity across time. Only Palm Brinks remains in the present.
The stones have the power of time travel: Monica’s blue stone allows her to
jump a hundred years back in time, while Max’s red one allows him to travel a
hundred years forward. By using both in tandem, you can plant the seeds of
civilization in your time: small settlements that will come into bloom in hers.
Just
because you’ve left Palm Brinks doesn’t mean you’re gone for good. The city is home. It’s a foundation to build on and
a cushion to fall on. It supports you when you need to rise, and it’s there to
catch you when you collapse. Palm Brinks is that world’s heart, and the love
that went into building it oozes from every cobblestone and storefront. No area
exemplifies that like the once-bustling train station. With the railroad line
shut down, no trains go in and out, no passengers line up, and no clerks sell
tickets. Still, the city maintains it like the day it was built. It’s gorgeous
and baroque and empty: a place of
motion, held in place, filled with potential that could break free with the
spark of an engine. Like the world, it’s dormant, not dead. That the developers
put so much effort into one area makes Palm Brinks a place that we, the
players, care about. It’s not just somewhere we have to go back to; it’s a place we want to go back to, a place we want to protect. It’s not just Max’s
home. It’s ours.
Having
a home means you’re not afraid to fall, because there are people who will catch
you. The people there give you a place to come back to, and in return, you give
them a place to go. Your task is to rebuild civilization, and you can’t have
civilization without people – but the only people left are in Palm Brinks!
They’re kind people, good people, but
they’re complacent, and before they’ll venture out with you, you need to
understand them and help them with their problems. You show each of them you
care, and they learn to care as well, not just about the people around them,
but the world as a whole. You’re the one that builds the settlements, but they
live in them and bring them to life. Your adventure becomes everyone’s adventure, and once you’ve
helped them become the people they need to be – helped them care, fixed them – they fix the world themselves.
The
people in your settlements aren’t the only ones making things better. There’s a
beautifully cyclical nature to the way you rebuild the world. Once you’ve built
your friends new homes, you travel to the future to find that over a hundred
years, what you’ve built has blossomed under their care. Their descendants in
turn give you tools and knowledge that you can carry back to the present and
use to help the settlers. Ancestors nourish descendants and descendants nourish
ancestors, building between them a world far better than the one that was lost.
You don’t just rebuild the world; you
don’t just rebuild the world. You unite two groups of people, creating each
other across a hundred years of history, to bring the world through its darkest
hours shining brighter than it ever had before. To fix the world, you fix the
people in it. You teach them to care, but before that, the game makes you care in a way no other medium could.
It shows you a broken place, a beautiful place, a place full of loss but
brimming with potential, a place you fall in love with, a place you can make
better. And like the train, all it needs from you is a spark to come alive. All
it needs for you to do is interact.
And you do. The rest follows.
