prokopetz:

quinncyblue:

prokopetz:

Okay, here’s one that’s been bothering me for a while.

The epistolary novel is a mode of storytelling in which the story is communicated in the form of a series of fabricated documents ostensibly authored by the characters who inhabit that story. Letters, diary entries, and newspaper articles are traditional, but contemporary examples of the type may also include emails, chat logs, social media threads, and video transcripts.

If we switch from literature to cinema, one popular equivalent is the found footage film. The framing is usually a little more immediate, and the plots tend to be constrained by the need to restrict the action to situations where one or more of the characters involved would plausibly be recording video, but it’s the same basic idea.

So here’s the question: what would the video game equivalent of the epistolary novel be?

It can’t be a game where you read letters or watch videos authored by characters in the game – that’s just using the gameplay as a framing device for conventional epistolary storytelling. It’d have to be something where the gameplay itself constitutes a found document.

I’ve run into attempts at the form where the game is presented as having been coded by a fictional character, so there’s a metatextual layer where the game you’re playing is part of the fiction, but that’s not quite there, I think.

a heavily story-based game, the kind with lots of story choices that get saved and significantly affect the plot, where you start with a savefile that’s already in the postgame. you can go back and speak to old NPCs and study their reactions to the player character to determine what story choices the old player made.

You know, I think you’ve hit upon it precisely: the video game equivalent of the found document is someone else’s save file.
You could even have multiple save files, each ostensibly belonging to a
different person in the same social group (a family sharing a game
console, perhaps?) and work in something of their relationships that
way.

Building a game in which the postgame is all there is and the game proper leading up to it is merely implicit in the choices whose consequences you’re now able to examine sounds like a fascinating writing challenge – and not one I’m sure I’d be up to! – but at least I’m not going to be bothered wondering how it would work.

I think the real difficulty there would be framing it so that the information you’re given tells you useful things about the hypothetical player whose save file you’re creeping, rather than the fictional character they portrayed.