Video game stories give us more than one way to play

destructoid.com:

Sappy. Sentimental. Downright cheesy. If there’s a video game story (or really any other media, for that matter) that is going to make me cry from pure emotion, you can bet your bottom dollar that I’m going to love it. With the world becoming an increasingly horrific dumpster fire that somehow burns hotter every day, media can be a welcome respite from the chaos.

Don’t get me wrong here, I love dark, provocative stories in certain contexts, but sometimes, what you really need is something that knows what it is, and leans as hard as it can into that fantasy. I’m not talking about dragons and wizards, but a different kind of fantasy — the fantasy of play (although there is quite a bit of overlap between those two). Allow me to explain.

Stating the obvious here, but when we play a video game, we’re engaged in very active play: pressing buttons to manipulate what we see on the screen, and engaging with gameplay systems that designers have put in place to provide us with a fulfilling experience. We love exploring the constraints of those systems, and using their rules to create scenarios where we come out on top.

But when we add in the storytelling elements of a game — the setting, characters, plot, and so on — we’re engaging with another type of play: make-believe. Similar to how a child might play princess or knight, there’s something in us that loves the fantasy of being someone else. It’s the same thing in us that loves immersive experiences, which can include anything from an engrossing movie to an all-enveloping real-life experience like going to Disneyland or a Renaissance Faire. In those scenarios, we allow ourselves to shed our identities and put on new ones — something that can be incredibly freeing — and we do the