No, this 2022 there is no possibility that the best game of the year will be Spanish, but the nominations for The Game Awards, the great prizes of the world of video games (which will be held on Friday the 9th), have left several curiosities and topics that deserve reflection.
To begin with, the detail that the award for best performance has no gender.
Something that the big festivals have been raising for years —and some, like the one in San Sebastián, have already decided— is a debate that has been overcome in video games.
Which is to say: Ashly Burch (Aloy in
Horizon Forbidden West
), Charlotte McBurney (Amicia in
A Plague Tale: Requiem
), Christopher Judge and Sunny Suljic (Kratos and Atreus in
God of War Ragnarök
) and Manon Gage (Marissa Marcel in
Immortality
) compete for the best interpretation regardless of whether they are men or women.
But we are not here to influence that (which might have a tighter space in other sections), but rather to talk about culture.
And after these nominations, a first-rate cultural debate has been established around the Best Narrative award, for which
A Plague Tale: Requiem
,
Elden Ring
,
God of War Ragnarök
,
Horizon Forbidden West
and
Immortality
are nominated .
We have glossed the narrative virtues of several of them here, from the revolution when it comes to telling what
Immortality
is to the more traditional stories, more like movies, from
Requiem
,
Ragnarök
and
Horizon
.
But the inclusion of
Elden Ring
, with its fragmentary narrative, its story supported not by dialogues and cinematographic scenes but by descriptions of objects and environmental architecture, and its absence of a beginning and an end as clear as the others, was widely criticized on social networks.
Gene Park, a reporter for
The Washington Post specializing in video games, defended the
Elden Ring
narrative
in an interesting Twitter thread.
It is true that many players only fully understand the entire worldview of the game when they watch videos of other players who investigate the folklore of the work, but that is not, Park believes, a reason to flatly oust its narrative structure.
"Dismissing Elden Ring as a good narrative because you need YouTube videos to understand it is like saying James Joyce shouldn't be considered the greatest author of the 20th century because you didn't understand
Ulysses ."
", wrote.
And then he gave the possible key to everything: “In my opinion, the definition of good storytelling in a video game should be expanded beyond 'here's a cinematic and some actors saying some dialogue.'
The medium has already achieved that and a critical discussion about it is needed.
On the left, a scene from 'God of War', an example of classic narrative;
on the right, 'Immortality', with its fragmented and experimental narrative.
It goes without saying that what Twitter was created for happened on Twitter: the debate heated up, threats arose, Park didn't manage it well (he was about to have surgery for cancer) and he almost closed his account.
But his reflections are accurate.
For Park, in fact, the best narrative of the year is not that of
Elden Ring
, but that of
God of War
(which he considers only slightly better than that of
Xenoblade Chronicles 3
) but, according to his words, that of
Elden Ring
should not be dismissed just because paratextual messages and context notes are needed to fully understand it.
And it's true.
The clue may lie in part of one of Park's tweets quoted above: "The outlet has already done that."
There are hundreds of video games that replicate the classic narrative forms: everyone can copy a movie.
But, although many people confuse the narrative framework of a video game with a movie, the reality is that what constitutes the uniqueness of a video game goes elsewhere.
Park throws in two very illuminating examples from
Elden Ring
: “The player finds a treasure chest in a lonely tower in the southern fields.
He opens it, but inside there is only smoke that comes out and envelops him.
The player blinks and when he opens his eyes he finds himself transported to a mine, he doesn't know where.
He gets out of her and what he sees is a blood red sky: he has reached Caelid.
That is narrative
”.
“The player finds a small temple in a forest.
Its door sizzles open at his approach.
He finds an elevator and rides.
The journey down takes a long time, and suddenly he arrives in a big city under a night sky full of stars despite the sunlight shining above, outside.
That is narrative
”.
That's narrative, says Park.
And he is absolutely right.
In a three-dimensional virtual representation, the narrative is
precisely
that.
Each art finds its narrative in its essential elements.
Isn't Caravaggio's light narrative?
Are not De Chirico's structures narrative, Escher's impossible spaces?
The brushstrokes in a painting, the basses in a melody, the shapes of a sculpture, aren't they narrative?
If video games want to achieve a unique status as art, it will not be through the repetition of film tropes, or in any other expressive way, but through the achievement of their own calligraphy and the imposition of their own characteristics, no matter how away from the formula 'narration = actors + dialogues' that is.
The narrative in video games must be claimed.
And, especially in such a young medium, experiment.
Formal experimentation is a toll that all art must pay before finding what makes it unique.
Perhaps the prize will go to
Elden Ring
.
Maybe
Immortality
.
Maybe someone will end up making a movie about how the video game found its own way of telling things.
It wouldn't be a bad story.
And the best of all is that we are living it right now.
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