The windows are dark, and the alarm clock hidden behind a skateboard rack on my bedroom wall reads 4:47 a.m. I ignore it, brushing my messy hair away and concentrating on the screen. My fingers press against the controller, and my armored cyborg character moves through the interior of a massive spaceship. I put on the headset, and a cloud of the sounds and chatter of my friends accompanying me on this raid envelopes me, a far more enticing challenge than school, which starts in three hours. But before we can safely escape, my dad opens the door.
He's understandably upset, but not surprised. The year is 2018. I was 16 years old and a senior at Hightstown High School near Princeton, New Jersey. This had been our daily routine for years. Diagnosed with ADHD and hearing impairment at a young age, I struggled to fit in in a classroom environment. Even when I could hear what the teacher was saying, I had a hard time concentrating. I could do well in most subjects if I studied hard, but it all felt like a wasted effort, with no results. So why try?
It's not that I didn't wish things were different. My parents made it a priority to pursue your passions, and in our family, that typically involved storytelling. My father is a painter and filmmaker, and my sister started acting and writing as early as she could. Even my mother uses stories as a motivational tool in her personal training business. Conversations about which art form best tells a story were common at the dinner table. I loved stories too, but I hadn't found my “thing” so it never really became a thing.
I felt like I was adrift and video games were my refuge. That virtual world felt more real to me and the sense of accomplishment of beating the final boss was much more palpable than what I would get at school. Like so many other nights, my dad interrogates me. Why am I up? Why haven't I done my homework? I can't sleep and I struggle to understand. All I know is that I can't put the games down. Years and a bachelor's degree in game development later, I still don't have the answers, but I think I know where I can find them: the English department. Listen.
A notice sits on his desk, cluttered with unfinished assignments: He's been kicked off the robotics team for his poor English grade. Nearby, an Xbox monitor flickers.
Video games have become inescapable. More than 3 billion people play video games, roughly 1 in 74% of U.S. households. Nearly everyone I meet had at least one gaming console in their home as a kid. Gaming isn't for everyone; it can be a dark place for some. But harmless fun like dancing or playing tennis on a console like the Wii that reads your body movements and directs the action on the screen was a formative experience for Gen Z. So was building worlds in Minecraft, playing army games with friends in Halo, and immersing yourself in powerful stories with The Legend of Zelda.
Of course, consoles weren't always so sophisticated. One of the first video games was 1958's Tennis for Two. Built on a physics simulator for a science exhibit at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York, the game featured a two-dimensional “court” with lines as rackets and a blocky “ball” that was moved back and forth with the click of a button. When California's Atari adapted the concept for its arcade game Pong, it proved a hit, selling more than 8,000 units and eventually finding its way into our living rooms alongside the original consoles.
Released in 1977, the Atari 2600 was a simple 8-bit device that played games stored on cartridges, like 8-track tapes. Soon, kids across the country were gathering at friends' houses to play games like Combat and Space Invaders, and the accompanying economic boom allowed designers to try more complex projects. Atari Adventure introduced a narrative of good versus evil, while Pac-Man added cutscenes, or animated segments that advanced the story between the game's iconic maze levels.
Still, the games industry faced its own pitfalls. By the early 1980s, new consoles were flooding the market. Gameplay was becoming monotonous and quality was inconsistent. To stand out, companies began adapting blockbuster movies like “E.T.”, the story of a young boy who bonds with a good-natured alien. But the games were rushed to market with major problems, becoming frustrating disasters that epitomized an industry in crisis. It didn't seem like there would be a recovery until the Nintendo Entertainment System launched in 1985.
The Japanese parent company that developed the Famicom quickly upended the gaming industry. By limiting cartridge manufacturers for its consoles, Nintendo reduced the number of games it made and increased their quality. It targeted a younger demographic with more emotional storylines in franchises like Super Mario Bros. and Zelda. As this approach took hold, developers began studying other mediums, like film, to learn how to better tell stories. Cutscenes created suspense and laid out complex plot threads that gameplay couldn't cover, but as technology caught up with the creators' vision, things were changing.
Development has also evolved, with independent studios taking more creative risks. In 2013, Naughty Dog released “The Last of Us,” which blended action sequences with narrative progression and player engagement to tell the story of an antihero and a brave teenage girl surviving a zombie apocalypse. That story resurfaced this year as the HBO hit “The Last of Us,” starring Pedro Pascal and marking a landmark for this powerful new medium. Scholars today study the finer points that distinguish games from theater, poetry, and film. But games don't just tell stories, they tell stories through us. It's a unique way of finding something within ourselves.
It's just like in real life, I was just going through the motions without believing I could make a difference, and I didn't expect it to teach me anything.
A few months later, a notice sits on my desk, littered with unfinished assignments. My poor English grade has got me kicked off the robotics team at Hightstown High. Nearby, an Xbox monitor flashes. I know that if I turn in the late assignment with a generous apology, I'll be fine. I've stopped taking my ADHD meds and I'm unmotivated. So I scroll through the titles and come across the notoriously difficult Dark Souls III. Still, I'm shocked when the first boss slams my avatar into the ground before I have a chance to react. Frustrated but also a little excited, I try again. And again.
The game takes place in a dying, hopeless world, and the characters are just trying to survive. I am left with a general feeling of purposelessness. Every time my character dies or I take a break, the game resets. No matter how well I do, nothing changes. Any progress is entirely internal, unable to change the world around me. It was like real life, where I was just going through the motions without believing I could make a difference. I didn't realize it was teaching me anything.
To make this game, lead developer Hidetaka Miyazaki defied his superiors at Japanese video game company FromSoftware and ignored industry conventions that usually allow players to win with minimal or manageable friction. Instead, he made a game about pain itself, and it became a genre-defining cult classic. The game presents a rigorous set of challenges and doesn't offer up a hand to make them easier. The narrative itself is also frustrating, as the player's actions have no meaning to the overall story. It's pure adversity, and that's its appeal.
In a CNET article, critic Andrew Gebhart argued that Dark Souls “was my coming of age.” Its rigorous and consistent difficulty helped him learn personal responsibility. Players had to find meaning in their suffering. Perhaps subconsciously echoing Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel's classic memoir “Night,” the player's only power was how they dealt with it. The outcome never changed; all that mattered was the effort. That lesson permeated Gebhart's life, redirecting him “to the pursuit of experience, and the joy of knowing that my most memorable moments were of my own making.”
After finally beating the first boss after banging my head on it countless times, I felt oddly proud. I didn't win by skill, I was one step away from death, but I fought my way through the fight and it felt great. I looked away from the screen and saw a pile of homework. I put down the controller and picked up a pencil. By the end of the semester, I'd got an A in English and could get back to robotics.
I took my headphones off and realized I was crying, the emotion was deep and familiar, yet something only a video game could evoke in this way.
My hair is shorter, my vision is clearer. It's 2022 and my desk is still messy, but my assignments are done and my grades are good. On the screen, I'm moving across a sparkling desert — or rather, my character is moving. A mountain rises in the distance, resembling the Wasatch Front ridge outside my apartment window. I'm a senior at the University of Utah, majoring in gaming, so this is homework. Everything I encounter seems to lead me to that mountain, even the second character that appears next to me. So we teamed up and headed there.
I came here to study game design, a new field that blends classical design with psychology and focuses on the rules that work in video games. But what I'm most interested in is how these things tell stories, so I'm also taking an English class that compares games to film and literature. Tonight's assignment: Journey, released for the PlayStation 3 in 2012. The title refers to the hero's journey, a classic plot structure derived from themes common to world mythology, as compiled by Joseph Campbell, a prominent thinker and literature professor at Sarah Lawrence College who passed away in 1987.
Many beloved stories, like Homer's The Odyssey and the original Star Wars films, follow this storyline in which a central hero must leave the everyday world to solve some problem or challenge. From the call to adventure (Luke Skywalker is given his father's lightsaber) to the belly of the beast (Luke helps infiltrate the Death Star) to apotheosis (Luke uses the Force to destroy the Death Star and save the galaxy), this classic framework allows the hero to grow physically, mentally and even spiritually. Journey follows that same pattern, for the most part.
This game taught me something unique. It was a narrative of movement, the player's ability to walk and fly. The only characters and plot were implicit, embedded in this world-traversing experience. It was an experimental project that pushed the boundaries of the medium. Today, indie developers have access to the same technology as big brands through websites like itch.io and Steam. Now anyone can be a “game developer.” Like Salt Lake City resident David Payne, who builds craft cabinet games for the Gallery of Fine and Hyperart (GOFHA), a specialty arcade housed in a converted school bus. And now games can be anything they want, including literature.
But games can do things books can't, like bring two strangers together. As I struggle to reach the top of a snowy mountain in Journey, my temporary partner, who I can only communicate with through chirping, comes by my side to keep me warm. And I realize that together we move faster in the game. “The players are there to help each other travel to the top, and the mountain is there to connect the two players,” explains my professor Alf Siegert. I know that reading novels builds empathy, but this is another level. When our avatars finally reach the top and the screen fades to white, I take off my headphones and realize I've been crying. The emotion is deep and familiar, but for me it's also an emotion that only video games can evoke in this way. I need to immediately understand why and share it with others. I feel motivated in a way I've never felt before.
During a recent trip home to New Jersey, my dad and I got talking about art. I'm on a gap year and want to enroll in a graduate English program at a school to study video games as literature. Utah is pioneering, hiring people to research and teach these new ideas in the context of classic novels. So I reminded my dad of an old dinner table conversation we had, arguing that experiencing a story through gameplay is just as effective as any form of storytelling. He agreed. I'd finally found my “thing.” It turned out it had been inside of me all along.
This story appears in the December issue Deseret Magazine. Learn more about how to subscribe.
