The journey is where we find meaning.
Yet the journey, in games, is one of shooting first and never asking questions. What that means, in short, is that games are far too oriented on the goal. The next time the dudebro in your Doom clone tells you where to go or which corridor to run down, think about whether or not you, as the player, have any actual impetus to take action. The journey in videogames is something sorely overlooked. There's been a lot of recent complaining about Final Fantasy XIII being "too linear," but honestly, if you think about it, it's actually just every other game. The only actual problem is that the direction is just so poor that that player is consciously aware that they're being told to run down a corridor. If there were a map of Modern Warfare 2, or F.E.A.R., or Lost Planet, or almost any game that is a first-person(ish) game, to say that you aren't running in a straight line for a long time would be an outright lie. That isn't to say that running in a line can't be a journey. Earthbound is certainly one of those games in which the game attempts to make you explicitly aware that the game is a journey, but you're often walking down long, straight corridors. So often, what the player is given is a series of set pieces that they merely encounter in a given order and are then told to solve. That can represent depth if there's enough variety, but more often what it represents is the developer trying to make sure the product is "worth sixty dollars." That's another silly conundrum in the current games industry, but that's an article for another time. Developers need to figure out that the worth of a game is in the journey itself. The end and the beginning are not everything.
An article I've already written about the Coffee Break in Earthbound is a great way to show that there is a purpose to the journey, and that the journey, not the goal, is important. As far as Earthbound is concerned, it takes a unique place in the pantheon of games because it shouts at you. It asks, quite frankly, "do you give a shit?" The journey is not just about who's involved, which planet a character's from, or other nerd-related information that fan fiction sites ape into the black abyss that is the internet. It's about asking you where you came from, and where you want to be going. That might seem trite, but in games, even in Earthbound, where so much of the experience is directed, it's an important question to ask. To be perfectly honest, the coffee break is goading the personal ego and asking questions that are both obvious and quizzically oblivious. After all, the story about a boy saving the world is touted as ridiculous by the game itself, yet that's the point. The purpose of the journey is to evolve from a boy to a hero. Not a superhero, mind, but just a hero. The good guys and the bad guys ultimately both lose because of that character flaw. The superhero motif is one in which there is genuine evil and genuine good (though recent superhero fair is mostly of the anti-hero variety), but the water in Earthbound is muddy and also hazardous to your health. While Earthbound takes such a theme and impresses upon it a sense of genuine loss of innocence via the loss of a physical childhood body, more commonly the theme is that innocence never existed in the first place. Here's where we segue into every FPS with a story.
If you look at the FPS genre in general, the water is physically muddy. Everything was just brown to begin with, from the uniforms to the language to the environments to the moral code. The result is that deriving enjoyment can only be obtained by agreeing with the personal journey model that has been set up by the game from the start, or forever being disconnected, shooting stuff because there's stuff to shoot, the game just becomes a puzzle to solve rather than an experience to remember. Here, there's no progression of morality, the idea of a kill or be killed environment is established to simply remove all that pesky "thought." Maybe that's enough though. It has been argued that any attempt to actually have a story in an FPS is just being flippantly ignorant of a situation where every set piece is kill or be killed, but to me that comes off as half-hearted. The idea that no questions are being asked or should be asked dismisses games like the Marathon series or Half-Life, which are games that clearly have a world-view assigned. The problem perhaps is that much of that world view is either vague or skippable, the result of which means the player is given little reason to relate to the presentation. In other words, the journey itself is not being slowly assigned over these set pieces, instead it already exists and is almost being sold to the player. The game's asking the player to buy the product of thought they're selling, rather than introduce them to it and allow them to analyze through the voice of the game experience.
Which iconically leads back to the RPG genre, the genre that's got a physical "experience" bar. What is it about Final Fantasy XIII that got players so flustered? Frankly, it's that the journey is one that has no pretense. The characters aren't muddy, they're pure as the driven, retarded Snow (yes, that is a pun), the environments are laughably uninspired, and there is no game world, just art that is made to look like one. If you imagined a game that had backgrounds but no characters, or characters but no backgrounds, you get Final Fantasy XIII. A player can't really explore a straight line, and in an FPS the set pieces are meant to give the player impetus to continue. I'm of the opinion that RPGs don't have set pieces, but are rather contiguous stories that the player experiences through interaction with the game world. The journey itself, the exploration of a strange, imagined world is the impetus to continue in an RPG. The RPG, mostly in the last ten or so years, has become less about the journey, and either more about outlining a specific character, or selling the story to the players. But that's the problem. Stories are what happen when a player plays a game, not what the game forces you through. You can't sell a story, and before you say books are about selling stories, they're not. Since few can read a book in the time that they sit down at their local Barnes & Noble, what you're being sold is the idea of a story–a fantasy story, a steampunk story, a story of lost youth–these are ideas of some appealing aspect of human thought. The same is true of an RPG. You're being sold the idea of a story. The ideas that appear in the stories over the long term are the impetus to continue.
That's where we come to what I see as the bastions of storytelling–open-world games, platformers, and roguelikes. In these games, Mario isn't telling you a story. Mario's an avatar, an image onto which you assign yourself and some set of beliefs. Wander in Shadow of the Colossus is someone you might like to be. An anti-hero who wants to take down giants, the physical manifestations or connections of darkness in your heart, to save the one you love. Mario is a timeless storyteller, because every player has a story to tell about Mario. Demon's Souls, for anyone who's played it, remembers the first time that knight speared them in the chest, brimming up within them a feeling of vengeance and vainglorious justice when you felled them with Soul Blasts. In Psychonauts we take on the persona of a queer kid who resembles us, or at least our thoughts, in our formative years. We are connected with these characters because they connect to some part of us and we want to share in that collective experience. When you play Flower, you want to be a part of the beauty of the world that surrounds you, because a world without color seems unfathomable to you, because the color of that world embraces a warmth within you. The journey takes on a life that brims with that color, with the energy that you were not sure you had, and it energizes you after a long day. In some cases it might fill you with hope, in others with anger, but what's important is that it's giving something back, rather than demanding that you cede to it.
At the end of the day, that's what the journey's all about. It's about the developer realizing that they can let go. They don't need to tell us where to go, as the child, or the manchild, is naturally curious and wants to unravel the world they're given. But the darkness that lies within the idea of authorial control is unlikely to be successful in the next generation of games–the player is the author of their own stories, the player wants a palette onto which they can weave their own tales. Part of the reason the silent protagonist has become such a popular motif in the new generation of gaming is because somewhere, developers already realize that. The problem however is that they also want to cling onto the idea that if they have ultimate control, then their message will get across to the player. The journey is not a one way street and developers will have to let players access thoughts that might not be theirs alone. A process of adaptation is what is required here, active acclimation, where the player slowly warms to the thoughts of these creative, hidden minds. Messages have to be coded in such a way that they are shown first with a purity of vision and later with the mud that is inevitable of both genre conventions and confines of story. Developers at large aren't there yet. There will be many more Modern Warfare 2 games, no doubt, with more poorly realized "No Russian" sequences. But perhaps there will also be more Flowers, more Colossi, and maybe, ironically, Journey will point the way.