What We Think We Want

Freedom, baby. Ya feel me? More than just a word for the type of radiation given off by the American flag, "freedom" is the greatest thing that a video game can offer you. In real life, we're trapped in stupid human society, with stupid "laws" and petty "physical consequences for our squishy human bodies" preventing us from fulfilling our deranged fantasies. But in video games, anything is possible. That's why the best games are stuff like Grand Theft Auto and Minecraft -- ones that don't even tell you what to do. They just point at the world and say, "All yours, my child. All yours. Also, here's a machine gun."

And hey, did you hear about this No Man's Sky game? It's like that, but with an entire universe! There's so much goddamn freedom in that game that anyone who goes near it becomes riddled with malignant patriotic tumors. That much freedom guarantees it'll be awesome, right?

The Reality

Not to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but "freedom" in a video game is a lie, man. You're only ever doing what the video game was programmed to allow you to do, man. And that's always how it is.

For example, take Grand Theft Auto. You can't do "anything" -- you can do the violent, hyper-masculine activities the designers remembered to program. That may be fun as hell, but it's still not "freedom." Even Minecraft, which seems like the purest sandbox game possible, still only lets you mine and repurpose materials into your own creations. You can't, say, try to sustainably coexist with nature. There's no granola-munching hippie lifestyle in Minecraft. And these limitations, it turns out, are what make the game fun. If you don't give us direction, we get sorta lost.

For proof, look at the saga of No Man's Sky. It's a game about exploring space, and when they debuted a trailer at E3, everyone lost their goddamn minds over it, as I did above, because of all that sweet, intoxicating freedom. The main hook was that there were nine quintillion planets to explore, and you could go anywhere and do anything. It seemed pretty damn neat. But then it came out, and everyone was so horribly disappointed that fans dubbed it "No Man's Lie," and demanded refunds (and in many cases, received them). What was the problem? Were there only two quintillion planets? Were all the planets the same? Did the game just straight up not work?

Hello Games
Was it this guy?

No, nothing like that. The problem was that multiplayer didn't work, and a lot of the aliens you met were kinda boring. The nine quintillion planets, the space travel, that was all there. In fact, No Man's Sky does absolutely everything it promised from the beginning; everything that made us excited to play it in the first place. It's just that exploring an infinite video game universe -- the very thing that we got so excited about in the first place -- is super boring if there isn't anything to do. This is why we defunded NASA in real life, it turns out. Exploring is boring. Freedom, it turns out, isn't enough. Gamers need tasks. We need you to tell us to do something. We want you to make us think we're free, when we're actually doing exactly what you want. That was the message of Bioshock, right?

The Reality

The reason video games don't have great stories is that they're games. Games are different from stories. The first goal of a video game is always to be fun, but somewhere along the line, we decided that the only way to have games be taken seriously is to give them Serious Stories. So we decided to splice in cutscenes -- whole chunks of the game in which instead of "playing," we're watching a CGI movie. This is the equivalent of playing chess with your friends, but taking five minutes before your turn to explain the motivation of your rook, and the tragic injury in his youth that prevents him from moving diagonally.

Getty Images
"My father looked up at me, and with his dying breath, whispered, 'Never move diagonally.' I am a talking parapet."

I remember loving The Last Of Us's story, but when I think back on it, I realize that the story kept being hurt by the fact that it also had to be a game. In the beginning, Joel and his buddy ruthlessly murder like 50 dudes in the middle of a town, but we're still supposed to see him as a relatable hero. We're also supposed to be worried about Ellie, even though she's invincible through all the gameplay, because otherwise that'd be irritating. The game I played and the story I was following were happening in two totally different worlds, so I kept having to switch.

That's when I realizes that there are the three types of "great video game stories."

1. Thesis statements on the nature of video games (Bioshock, Spec Ops: The Line)
2. Several dozen cool, loosely related ideas, scattered around a map for you to discover on your own (Fallout, Oblivion, Dark Souls)
3. Something that would work better as a movie (The Last Of Us)

Calling this stuff "stories" is the same simplistic, reductive thinking that leads game designers to throw in random references to sexual violence because they think it's mature. Games don't need to be movies. They can be games. They are games! Stop trying to make them something else! Why am I shouting at myself!?

The Reality

Graphics don't matter! To anybody! And I know this is true, because as I covered in 2012, games use stereotypes as gameplay mechanics.

Again, it's not because gamers are racist. (You get in trouble if you don't say this every few sentences when discussing video games. Nobody really knows why.) It's because racism just happens to sync up with good game design really well. When we're playing a shooter, for example, we need to be able to immediately identify our enemies or our friends or power-ups at a glance. That's why a well-designed game has monsters that have immediately identifiable silhouettes:

Bethesda

And why power-ups are always in friendly colors:

Bethesda

The important part of game design isn't "rich, evocative details" or "realistic sweat stain mechanics." We're only noticing that stuff if we stop playing the game for a few seconds, sit right next to our TV, and consciously pick it out. That has nothing to do with gameplay, and gameplay is why we bought the game, and not a Jackson Pollock print to stare at while scarfing pizza bagels and energy drinks.

So sure, the technology is important, and the leaps forward in technology have made more types of games possible. But the fine detail? The "sweet graphics?" We all stopped noticing them five minutes after we picked up the shotgun.

The Reality

The weird thing is that in both those cases, we're excited that the game developers aren't involved in their own goddamn game.

I'm not going to get into whether or not Deus Ex is racist for giving us the opportunity to support apartheid. Instead, I want to ask a simpler question: Why would I, or anyone, want that? Why would I want a game to just stick a parable for racism up on my TV screen, then pull back and say, "Hey, I'm not saying if it's good or bad. That's for you to decide." What? Why the fuck did you bring up Black Lives Matter if you don't have anything to say about it? Imagine how weird that would be if, at a party, your buddy Chaz was like, "Hey, Black Lives Matter, huh? I mean, I'm not gonna tell you my opinion. Just 'Black Lives Matter.' It exists." That'd be weird. Stop being weird, Chaz. Stop being weird, Deus Ex: Mankind Divided.

Eidos Montreal
I'll believe that this banner is just a "coincidence" right after I believe the next thing Peter Molyneux says.

It's the same with No Man's Sky. Why were we so excited to hear that a computer designed every planet and every spaceship that we'd see in the game? Design is hard, man. I can't do it. That's what I'm paying the game developers for: Something they made. Something that has the marks of human effort on it. If I'm going to spend my gaming time exploring a planet, I want someone to have spent the time and effort to make that planet cool and fun to explore. And if I'm going to play a video game about freaking racism, I want the game to say something about it instead of just stating that it exists. Because otherwise, man, this is all just a bunch of malarkey.

JF Sargent is a senior editor and columnist for Cracked. Follow him on Twitter and Facebook.

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