Creating Narrative

Gamers, those who engage with game worlds, have a tendency to create narrative inside these worlds in a way that was not perhaps originally present. A long running and well known YouTube channel, GameTheory, exemplifies this trend very directly. The creator of this channel has achieved decent popularity and commercial success by theorizing about the narratives of video games. These theories range from attempting to find “hidden” narrative structures within games to attempting to decode games whose narrative is seen as purposefully obtuse. To me, the more interesting of these two types of theory is the kind that seeks to find hidden structures, theories asserting that Sans from Undertale is a time traveling version of Nes from Earthbound, to claiming that link is undead in Majora’s mask, or that Fortnite is a game set on Venus about the genesis of humanity in the far past.

 

To me, these ideas, almost certainly not intended by the creators of the games, speak more to two things: the fundamental ability of games to engage their players in a world which they become invested in, and the human desire to find narrative threads in everything they do. Theories about television and movies are also popular alongside video games, but these theories tend to be rooted in a narrative base. Some of the theories created about games are based in games with little to no narrative, or a narrative that is unrelated to the theory. For me, the prime example of this is a recent Fortnite video that digs through small scraps of promotional material and “scientific” evidence comparing data from the game to the real world venus.

 

To me, these rampant speculations highlight the fundamental human desire to craft narrative, even where it doesn’t exist. Games are uniquely positioned to provide examples of this, as well as commentary on it, because they are one of the few engaging pieces of media that takes up a great deal of our time, but does not always have a narrative, or at least does not have a very complete narrative.