Okay, here’s one that’s been bothering me for a while.
The epistolary novel is a mode of storytelling in which the story is communicated in the form of a series of fabricated documents ostensibly authored by the characters who inhabit that story. Letters, diary entries, and newspaper articles are traditional, but contemporary examples of the type may also include emails, chat logs, social media threads, and video transcripts.
If we switch from literature to cinema, one popular equivalent is the found footage film. The framing is usually a little more immediate, and the plots tend to be constrained by the need to restrict the action to situations where one or more of the characters involved would plausibly be recording video, but it’s the same basic idea.
So here’s the question: what would the video game equivalent of the epistolary novel be?
It can’t be a game where you read letters or watch videos authored by characters in the game – that’s just using the gameplay as a framing device for conventional epistolary storytelling. It’d have to be something where the gameplay itself constitutes a found document.
I’ve run into attempts at the form where the game is presented as having been coded by a fictional character, so there’s a metatextual layer where the game you’re playing is part of the fiction, but that’s not quite there, I think.
It’s hard to imagine an exact analogue because people hardly ever code video games about what they’re doing.
Also video games in general don’t have the same… Okay, text is routinely used to record or transmit data, often with no particular purpose or direction. Video too. The concept of the epistolary novel is that it’s in the form of this data transmission or recordings that don’t have to have a plot or a purpose or an anything, but really! it has a plot!
Whereas you can’t really have a video game that’s just sort of not doing anything. It has to be doing something.
Maybe something like… a puzzle game which is designed to look like a piece of educational software of some kind? And there’s a narrative hidden in there somewhere? No, that still doesn’t quite make sense to me…
You could…set up an open-world game that’s designed around the idea that you’re accessing somebody’s saved file?
The game’s already partway played by somebody else. They left notes to themself in various in-game books, which you can also edit, and quests and building projects half-done. There’s all this evidence of the player before you, whose game you’re overwriting even as you explore it.
(You also get to play the ‘actual game,’ with the added fun of having missed a lot of the tutorials and early story exposition; making this not too frustrating would be a pretty cool challenge.)
There’s a mystery. Maybe the Original Player went missing. Maybe they hid the notes to their breakthrough project or the code to the bank vault somewhere in the game, and you’re trying to find it. Or maybe you just found the game like this and ‘you’ only figure out as you play that Something Was Going On beyond the obvious.
Maybe it was a file two people were either playing in together or taking turns in, so you’ll find notes meant for one another.
So the gameplay is like some kind of collision of Minecraft and Skyrim, except there’s a separate layer of story where you-the-player are playing a character who is playing the game trying to discover something about the previous player.
And along the way you get to know them, too, because you’re interacting with this thing they made.
That is an AMAZING idea!
Maybe, after certain points in the game, if you save, quit, and come back, there will be signs some one else was playing while you were gone?
Like, they’re triggered by getting something, but don’t happen unless you quit for a bit. If you take lots of breaks, the changes are mild and infrequent. If you binge it, the game changes drastically – everything piling up and happening at once.
If you play the whole thing in one sitting, you can get the ‘proper’ ending – the one the ‘original’ game was supposed to have. Otherwise, the ending is influenced more or less by the Original Player.
kiragecko 