![]() ![]() Dear Esther implies that every game with walking in them can achieve the moments that it does, and that there is something to aspire to. It is the next game in the line of great level design in which the Half Life series resides. It critiques games that use innumerable amounts of game mechanics to communicate experience. In a sense, Dear Esther puts most games that feature walking as an activity to shame. In essence, Dear Esther is provocative because the interaction takes place within the player and not superficially within the game. Video games reinvent this idea by using game mechanics as a method for the player to internalize the narrative, a method in which their personal disposition interacts with and changes the story. From bards weaving epic tales for an audience to a child in our own century interjecting their thoughts and questions into a tale told at bedtime, stories have been mutable and dependent on those involved in telling and listening to them. For some reason, we’re quick to throw out the interactive element of in much of storytelling that existed long before video games. These moments when the player questions their memory and realizes that this isn’t the same walk that they took before is how Dear Esther tells its story. It is the change in visual details on a second run through that causes the player to doubt themselves and others. Listening to a speaker is only part of some of those moments. ![]() ![]() In actuality, Dear Esther is about encountering many poetic moments while simply walking through a space. The narration is one of many elements that the game offers, but players rarely move past it to analyzing its storytelling methods. ![]() It’s also a game that fails to produce much when assessed by its story and not its narrative design. The moments that Alexander mentions are especially poignant to players, and we’ll never get past this conversation if we continue to see storytelling in games as being like the traditional story elements that we recognize in other mediums and not as the moments of experience that games often engender.Ī recent victim of the “legitimacy police” is Dear Esther, unable to catch a break from one armchair opinion to the next. Her article ends with a shrug, considering an alternative way to look at games, but it also offers an insight that she might have not seen coming: storytelling in games has never followed the methodology of other mediums. In the essay, she moves past the allure of equating everything noble about games to their capability to tell stories, batting away shadows that still linger of the “but other mediums…” attitude. We have smart pieces like Leigh Alexander’s “Tale Spin” that continue to tiptoe towards the edge away from these questions, taking sure but frustratingly small steps ( “Opinion: Tale Spin”, Edge, 19 March 2012). While there is value in any critical thinking, it’s curious writers still feel they have something to add to conversations that always dissolve into some sort of nihilism. At any given moment in the discussion on how we are to consider games, someone is choosing their position on whether the rules of the game matter or the narrative in a game, while another decides if a particular video game is even a game or not. Dear Esther is certainly not for everyone, but those who cue to its curious flavors will find something quite memorable on this cloudy, windswept island.There seems to be a couple of conversations that just won’t die. In the end, it's perhaps not so much an interactive story as a multimedia rumination on the search for understanding and meaning in the seemingly random events of our lives. This, coupled with the shape of the tale itself (which at times seems intentionally vague, meandering, and difficult to understand), will be enough to send some players off the deep end as they fruitlessly attempt to work out what it all means.īut there also will be some who find beauty in the poetry of the language used, who marvel at the game's undeniable visual splendor, and who appreciate the subtle but atmospheric score that enhances the game's dark, lonely undertones. There will be those who walk away believing it's not a game at all but instead a new form of media-based storytelling driven by players pressing directional keys on their keyboards. Dear Esther challenges players' conception of what a video game can be. ![]()
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