Tom Chick's top ten games of 2021

So you don’t care about environmental storytelling then, which is just as native, if not more so to the language of video games. As in it is still authored, but isn’t something borrowed from film like a cutscene, or text from books!

But it can still tell a compelling story.

I agree with this. Emergent storytelling is sometimes more explicit (the panicked soldier XCOM example maybe) while other times it is not, only really existing in the mind of a player playing the game, and another player might not have the same experience/interpretation if the exact same thing happened in-game for them.

I guess first off I’d need to know what you mean by environmental story telling in the context of PC games.

Edit: and I’m not asking to just be flippant, I just want to make sure I understand what you’re talking about.

I was hoping we’d get one of these.

I’m glad you finally got into Forza, Tom. It’s dumb, but it’s so relaxing.

The mention of the space amoeba gave me Vietnam flashbacks. On the plus side, I discovered a MOO remake I haven’t played yet, thanks!

It’s telling a story through the environment. So let’s get to some game examples right away shall we.

  • Half-life 2’s dilapidated playground in the prologue, meaning there are no kids here. This is probably when I first realized it.
  • Dark Souls (and Demon’s Souls) does this a lot, All the way from Firelink to Ash Lake.
  • Bethesda RPGs in spite of their terribly written quests and main plot have some sublime storied environments hidden away in pockets (I suspect rogue devs)
  • The entire game that is Outer Wilds. The environment/system is literally the story.
  • Firehose: SOMA. Gone Home. Thief: The Dark Project. System Shock, Dishonored, Prey…

There are tons. Just look around. (Are you blind?)

Thanks for the kind words, Tom, and would definitely enjoy a review if you find time for it. (Next time you dive in, though, you’ve got to play with the music and fog-of-war ON, just as Sid intended!)

OK, I got it, and yeah I get your point.

But for me that’s incidental context for the story I tell from the combination of game mechanics and the outcomes from my interacting with them.

The common thread in massive chalice, xcom 2, imperiums greek wars, hegemony III and AI War 2 isn’t the environment it’s the emergent stories I told myself by playing them.

I’ve not played xcom 2 for 450 hours because it’s set on a dystopian future version of earth. Nor am I 35 hours into a campaign as Syracuse in Hegemony III because I admire ancient Greek vases.

I’ve played the above games because of the stories that emerged out of them from my interaction with them.

So take Hegemony III since that’s what I’m currently playing. I’m engrossed in this campaign because I’ve managed to keep the first Hoplite unit I ever recruited alive for countless engagements and it’s led by my leader of Syracuse. As a result that unit whose story I’m telling includes countless narrow escapes on their way to becoming a hardened highly trained killing machine feared by neighboring city states I’ve yet to conquer. Now that’s a story I want to hear.

I’m not blind to the setting and agree it influences the stories I tell.

But it looks to me like I’m returning to the games I’ve enjoyed the most because of the game mechanics and the stories I made with them. A quick glance at some of the examples I provided doesn’t show setting as the critical element.

Just chalk it up to us enjoying games for different aspects of the experience.

You are giving me the But treatment?

Call it whatever you like. Environmental storytelling is a thing. It’s here, and it is real. (Did I just para-quote a recent hateable movie?)

I’m granting you your point and explaining mine, that’s it.

Yeah, I know. There is more than one way to skin a cat.

All of these look freaking amazing, and I haven’t played a single one. I’m a tangled ball of emotion. Time for a new gaming laptop, I guess.

Excepting for Back 4 Blood, I think all of them will run nicely on aging hardware.
I could play Wildermyth on a 2013 PowerBook devoid of GPU

None of the games you cite do environmental storytelling - they’re all strategy games with (as far as I know) procedurally generated levels. They have broad settings and themes. That’s different. Environmental storytelling is like, in Fallout 4, you walk into a room and there’s three hand-placed skeletons gathered around a table with some cards, cigarettes, pre-war money, and bottles of booze. Hey look, those guys were playing poker when the bombs fell. That is authored narrative. You, the player, have to interpret it, but it is deliberately placed to convey narrative, unlike your surviving hoplite.

I like that kind of environmental narrative archeology too. Some games make that investigation into the past the whole point (Gone Home or Outer Wilds or Obra-Dinn) but for me that always pales in comparison to whatever present-tense storytelling I get up to with my own actions. That’s probably why I petered out in the first 3-5 hours of each of those titles I listed.

Another kind of environmental storytelling device I like is the ‘destination on the horizon’… as you play, your goal is almost always in sight. Half-life 2 and The Last of Us come to mind. When you finally reach that place, it feels like a proper cut to Act 3, beginning of the end / setting the stage for the climax moment.

The thing is, you (and @Juan_Raigada, and @divedivedive) are describing how stories work in traditional forms like books or movies, and those are a fundamentally different animal to a game narrative. The story in a game is never going to work on those terms as well as the movie it’s trying to be, when the cutscene serves the dual role of establishing the player’s emotional connection to a character but also telling them they’re going to spend the next 30 minutes looking for collectibles in the ice level.

So instead, we need to look at story-telling in a game as what it is, a layer of paint over the gameplay to make it more engaging. The scripted “cinematic” stories we see in the Uncharteds and Assassin’s Creeds and the like can work for this purpose and there is room for them, but at the same time they will always be amateurish Hollywood imitations, mixed in with gameplay that clashes with the story.

But when a game has systems that lead to emergent stories, it adds something extra. It isn’t about meaning, or “real” characters as opposed to ones that the player imagines. I don’t imagine XCOM soldiers or Sims are real people. I can’t bring my imagination to bear like Tom talk about (though I would love it if I could). But the emergent events those characters are part of have an impact because those events are “real”- they are part of the gameplay and a result of my actions, and will affect the rest of the game in ways were not planned for.

Here’s a true story about the hardware requirements of some of my favorite games from 2021.

At some point last year, during the summer, I unplugged my computer, carried it out on the back porch, and took a can of compressed air to it. I figure we all do this periodically, literally blowing the dust out of nooks and crannies and fans and heatsinks and whatnot. A sort of spring cleaning to help the air flow. Then I carried it back inside, plugged everything in, and carried on playing many of the games that would end up on this list, but mostly Aliens: Fireteam Elite. I went through an extended period playing the dickens out of that wonderful game.

Then Deathloop came out in September and I couldn’t get it to run. I had some sort of hardware incompatibility. It just wouldn’t boot up. I tried all the usual troubleshooting, reinstalling, and even driver rollbacks. Nothing. In the end, my only recourse was Bethesda’s tech support, and that was absolutely useless (I only ever got auto-responses recommending I try the same things I had already told them I tried). It looked like Deathloop was going to be one of those Fallout: Vegas situations, where a game simply didn’t work for me. Oh well, at least I still had Aliens: Fireteam Elite!

I forget how I realized it – probably parsing an unusual error message – but at a certain point, I realized that Deathloop acted like I didn’t have a badass videocard, which I do. An Nvidia 3070. So I went to verify that the card was seated securely in the motherboard…at which point I discovered my monitor wasn’t plugged into the videocard. After my “spring cleaning”, I had plugged the monitor into the motherboard instead of the outlet at the back of the videocard. All my graphics output had been going through an Intel integrated graphics chip from 2014. It had been running Aliens: Fireteam Elite ever since it had come out, as well as every other game I had been playing.

So, yeah, for a stretch of 2021 – probably at least a month – I was playing videogames without even a graphics card.

-Tom

In the sense that the demands of the format are different, yes. A movie has different needs than a book, as does a comic, or an audio drama. So too with games. But the same building blocks apply, the same principles of narrative. They simply need to be used in a way that respects the format.

It can work just as well or better if it’s written to be in an interactive virtual medium and not just a movie where you sometimes can go putz around in a narratively dissonant way. It’s an unfortunate truth that, in part because of people who think of storytelling in games as “a layer of paint over the gameplay”, there’s relatively few games that take on writing in that manner or spend much time or effort on it, or people who’ve really gotten to grips with the specific demands of the format in their writing. But even if it doesn’t address the format appropriately, it’s still far better and more engaging storytelling for me than procedural systems bumping into one another.

I don’t agree. I find impact and satisfaction in the game acknowledging my actions in the authored narrative, but emergent events are a big ol’ shrug for me and the absence of purpose and deliberate narrative construction means there’s no coherent whole, the position in which is what makes those beats powerful for me.

There’s also a real sense of ownership in those events. Something that’s pre-scripted, that’s going to happen no matter what I do in the game, really is just a “coat of paint over the gameplay.” Stories and situations that arise as a direct result of the mechanics and my own choices are far more interesting to me because they’re my stories, not stories someone else put there for me to push “X” to complete next plot point.

This keeps getting brought up and I just don’t find it a meaningful comparison. I don’t need the story in a video game to be better than some Hollywood movie, I just need it to be better than whatever story I could dream up and paste over the random events unfolding on my monitor. Sometimes it isn’t but the times that it has it’s been far greater than the stories I’ve made up for myself. That is why I say I’ve never seen an emergent story that can compete with a well designed fully plotted one.

I would expand it saying that environmental storytelling is just storytelling that, instead being linear, like it would be in a film or a cutscene, it’s discovered by the player as she explores the environment. There’s a lot of craft involved in designing the geography of the story beat, as well as tools like acting, lighting, etc…

Note that environmental storytelling can be forced on the player by placing it in a must-visit location, but you can’t force the emphasis placed on such a beat, since players can choose to expend whatever time the want taking it in (exceptions are a minimum time due to forced camera/closed paths and maximum like time NPC conversations).

I think we may also be walking into completely different genres - it’s like completely different films.

  • carefully plotted dramas : the RPGs where the characters have names and backstories and relationships that were carefully designed. You can toggle some switches but it’s more a choose your own adventure. “Traditional Storytelling”

  • the “unscripted” (but actually scripted) reality TV shows : All those survival games where you’re trying to build a tree fort to have shelter from the storm but surprise that’s actually the statue of liberty you’ve been on future earth all this time and - drama - your wife leaves you because it’s day fourteen and a portal to the next island appears. I think both emergent and environmental storytelling sit here.

  • the “historical” documentaries: a lot of strategy games completely eshew any macro storytelling, and they’re telling stories like “unit 457 attacked position 322 pushing back the advance and cutting of supply lines to 125” - but some folks care more that the 80mm anti aircraft cannons can defeat certain types tank armour - whether private ryan survives or not is up to “realistic” fate - no plot armour!

  • the summer action flicks: there’s plenty of games that put visual spectacle or game mechanics first - like a Transformers movie or a Knizia boardgame, they have their emphasis completely orthogonal to the “story” or even the setting making sense in any way. That’s all window dressing.