Since I’ve been a kid, playing on the Super Nintendo, I’ve loved video games. In my time as a gamer, I’ve been mostly attracted to Platformers, Adventure Games, and Open World Quest-Oriented Games.
My earliest memories of video games center around Donkey Kong Country and Super Mario World. Side scrolling Platformers of this kind were once the quintessential game paradigm in the same way that FPS’s dominate the market today. These games focused on an obvious goal with respect to the player’s path through the world, and scoring based on powerups and items. Both of these games challenge this paradigm to some extent by creating an “overworld”, which is not so much a play area, but increases the integration of the world itself and creates a sense of continuity that was partially missing from earlier iterations of the genre like the original Super Mario Bros.
Adventure Games defined my late childhood years, beginning with Ocarina of time on the N64, and continuing with Majora’s Mask, which remains one of my top 3 favorite games of all time. These games expanded the Platformer into the 3D space, and created an unprecedented level of connectedness and cohesiveness that brought the “overworld” dynamic of Super Nintendo Platformers to a new level. This was one of the first times that gamers were challenged to truly engage themselves in the world of the game and immerse themselves in a mythology and narrative that was once the sole property of novels and video media.
The latest evolution of this type of game, and the genre that is currently closest to my heart, is the Open World Quest-Oriented Game. My first experience with this came with The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind. This game was one of my first experiences engaging with a world where I had little direction, and a massive world, detailed in extremely fine ways, with surprises and charm at every corner. I eventually found my way to the main quest, but found myself enraptured by the ambiguity and lack of direction that gave me freedom to do and be whatever I wanted. This same paradigm was expanded in, what I believe to be the best implementation of it yet, in Fallout: New Vegas. I had the ability to explore a world with complex characters, with complex motivations, and make choices that I felt mattered to the world around me. Surrounded by contemporaries with “morality” systems that positioned players somewhere between a goodie two shoes and someone who eats babies (including its predecessor, Fallout 3), New Vegas allowed you to make choices with pros and cons, in complex and nuanced ways that allowed for a deep, rich experience that expanded even further upon the player’s integration in the game’s narrative, and gave the player an extreme level of control over this narrative.
As gaming today, at least with respect to single player games, is focused around telling a story and exploring the power of gaming media as a storytelling device, I’m excited to see the next stage of this evolution, and what the next innovation will be that will further engage the player in the story and world of a game.