The earliest video games can almost always be summed up in a single sentence. Eat dots while avoiding ghosts. Use your spaceship's laser to blow up asteroids. Climb a tower to rescue a damsel from a giant ape. When gaming was in its infancy, these pioneering concepts thrived on a similar guiding principle: pick-up-and-play appeal with easily comprehended mechanics and goals. Frogger first arrived 35 years ago, but it's just as playable today.
That commitment to accessibility led to another natural assumption: Video games had to be fun — or, at least, appear to be fun. Sometimes, the solution was as simple as dressing up a game with a familiar license, like a popular movie or TV show. Sometimes it was cutting-edge technology — like 1983's Dragon's Lair, which doubled down on movie-like heroics with gorgeous hand-drawn animations. And sometimes, a game stood out simply for being good, achieving loyal fans through repetition and word-of-mouth.
But as games evolved, so did their aims — and the definition of "fun" became a little more complicated. Accessibility took a backseat to depth in '90s strategy games like Civilization and Age of Empires, which put players in positions of military oversight to command armies, with every action contributing to long-term consequences. The increased technological possibilities led forward-thinking developers to tackle more complex ideas, broadening the traditional understanding of video games.
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And that brings us to today, when an increasing number of developers are releasing games that aren't interested in "fun" — and, their detractors argue, might not even be games. It's a climate where realism takes precedence over fantasy, and where conflicts that were once mainly external are now happening within the mind of the player.
Take, for example, last year's Her Story. The award-winning title presents a renewed take on the full-motion video genre more commonly associated with the '80s, essentially modernizing the Dragon's Lair of yesterday. In Her Story, players navigate a police database with recorded testimony of a single suspect from a murder case, entering keywords in the search field to retrieve jumbled footage. Your only goal is to piece them together in sequential order.
Does that make Her Story a game, a movie, a hybrid of both — or maybe something totally new that we don't even have a name for yet? It's a debate that raged following Her Story's release last summer, and it only intensified as respected publications like IGN gave Her Story its coveted PC Game of the Year Award.
Her Story is unique, but it's not quite alone. Recent trends toward atmospheric experiences have also paved the way for "walking simulators" — a name for the genre that includes titles like Gone Home, Dear Esther, and Everybody's Gone to the Rapture. In these first-person experiences, you're either partially or completely stripped of the ability to interact, putting the emphasis on sensory input over mechanical actions. Developers are only beginning to experiment with the storytelling possibilities of the new style, but the goals vary wildly in style and tone; 9.03m, for example, was created to give a face to those lost in the devastating natural disaster that hit Japan in 2011. And if that's not "challenging" in the conventional sense for a video game, it's only because the challenges are intellectual or emotional instead.
The title that best exemplifies this trend is That Dragon, Cancer, which is an entry in the burgeoning subgenre called the "emotional game." Though its based-on-a-true story narrative superficially resembles a more conventional goal-based video game, That Dragon, Cancer is ultimately more concerned with locking you in the empathic mindset of a family watching their young son suffer after being diagnosed with terminal cancer. The experience is ultimately defined by your emotional engagement with the material.
In some ways, this shift is a return to the accessibility that characterized the medium's beginning. Just as simplicity provided an easy point-of-entry for games like Pac-Man and Donkey Kong, empathy is the currency by which some modern games attract a loyal following. And the expansion of technology is pushing this unconventional approach to storytelling even further: with virtual reality on the way, these experiences will only get more immersive.
As that happens, you can also expect more pushback from gamers who feel that these kinds of titles aren't video games at all. For those who have spent decades on more conventional games, the frustration may be understandable, but it's misguided; if gamers refuse to treat these boundary-pushing titles with the same respect, they'll push the medium itself back.
Just like in the early days of gaming, it will take the combined efforts of creative developers and open-minded gamers before these approaches gain widespread acceptance. But until that time, we can appreciate the medium's growth as it expands to new levels.
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