How video games drain your creativity
The dangers of spending too long in inhabitable mythologies
Games as inhabitable myths
Following on the smashing success of Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Tears of the Kingdom brought even more of that sense of freedom fans and gamers loved about the first truly open world entry into the Zelda series of the current gaming era with the ability to craft mechanical objects.
In addition to possessing the fighting prowess of their favorite anime heroes, players can build incredible flying machines and literal tanks out of raw materials not seen since the days of DaVinci and Daedalus.
While the videos of rolling buzzsaws and soaring ornithopters with Greco-Ainu-Polynesian detailing has been undoubtedly fun to watch, the fact that we are investing so much of our ingenuity and cleverness into a video game brings with it a host of concerns around how we’re utilizing our divine potential.
Simply put: We’re squandering it.
We were never meant to live in our stories
There may be a few architects today who can point to Roblox or Minecraft as the early sparks of their realized adult ambitions, studies show that even so-called “educational” and “creative” games hamper rather than encourage our children to pursue and realize their dreams.
On a tactical level, this is because the game mechanics don’t transfer very well to real life. As powerful as it might feel to assemble a floating castle or gun down a dozen Nazis in the course of a few hours, anyone who attempts to replicate these feats in real life quickly discovers that the entire experience was merely fantasy.
Real construction takes time, is constrained by the laws of physics and the legal stipulations of reams and reams of bureaucratic permitting and paperwork.
Real war is endless hours of marching, preparing, and waiting around for things to happen punctuated by seconds of sheer abject terror, uncertainty, and danger.
Most of us know this, just as we all know that real life rarely contains the thrills and rushes video games bring. You don’t get to save the world, most of the time you barely get to help your family.
When faced with real challenges and really tiny payoffs, it’s no wonder so many turn to the virtual myths that promise great heroism and greater prizes, even if they are only simulated.
This isn’t anything new, we’ve craved the fantastical since before we were conscious: it’s easy to forget from our secular modern vantage point that all culture, from music to war to games, once had mystical origins.
So too with games. Before it was Snakes & Ladders, it was known as Leela, and Indian divination tool in which each square had a symbolic meaning and each dice roll a way for the cosmos to communicate your fortune.
And so also with stories. They began as lyrics set to music, to be used in ceremonies to help those within a society orient themselves in and communicate with their universe. Stories literally made sense of the world and helped us function within it.
Is it any wonder that many of our games, Zelda included, carry mythic or medieval fantasy themes? The adventures are frequently set in long-forgotten times in faraway places. Places that exist in stories collectively remembered, not merely because they were told to all of us as children, but because they are an expression of a part of us that has existed since we were children.
We can’t help but want to see our dreams realized, and games are the most immersive way to make that happen. The puzzles we get to solve, the quests we get to complete, and the monsters we can defeat, are enough to make us never want to leave. But there’s a problem with stories we get to live in, and it’s not just that we sacrifice our real lives to dwell there.
The problem with video games is that, while they contain the same trappings of our favorite stories, they lack the same real-world applicability. What’s missing is substance.
I’ve never played any of the video game versions of The Odyssey, but I am somewhat familiar with the series of games that borrow heavily from the Greek and Norse pantheons, God of War, and aside from showing you the destructive capabilities of some neat weapons of dubious historical authenticity, there’s not much there that’s real.
And yes, I’ve seen the pedantic reply on Reddit and Bill Maher often enough that I can repeat it verbatim, “Dude, you’re arguing that a game where world-swallowing serpents and flying elves and lightning-spewing axes exist isn’t real enough? lol.”
Yes, I am. And if your Adderal-and-Mountain-Dew-addled brain can handle it, I can explain:
Plato complained about books being a poor substitute for real conversation and human memory, and he was right. But the thing that makes a story infinitely better in book form than almost any other medium is the fact that there’s only so much action you can put into words before they get boring.
The Iliad is 15,000+ lines of war. You know what a video game version of the same material would look like? Players collecting all the armor and loot while running faceless hordes through with their spears or running over them with their chariots. To break up the boredom you get some puzzles and “boss battles” in which the player learns to exploit the mechanical movement patterns of the different Trojan heroes (wait ‘til Hector throws his rock, dodge Paris’s arrows, then strike, rinse, repeat). Maybe a truly “faithful” recreation will let you enslave their families.
Those who come back for the sequel will get more of the same, only this time you get a boat and bigger boss monsters.
But none of it matters, because what’s actually useful from the classics, what the plot hinges on, are speeches.
The stuff 99% of video games would put in cinematic sequences where the player has no agency is precisely the parts of the book readers can crib from to exercise agency over their own lives.
How does Athena keep Achilles from murdering King Agamemnon after the king publicly humiliates him by taking his girl? How does Nestor keep the Greeks from falling into traps laid by the Trojans and their gods time and again? Wise words.
I’m not saying it’s all talk and no action, either. There are awesome feats, to be sure, like Odysseus tricking a room full of young upstarts into arming him by challenging them to shoot an arrow through 20 axe-heads, but only after the heroes have also solved impossible problems in ways possible even to us.
What do you do when trapped in a cave with a giant one-eyed cannibal? The video game answer is to do impossible leaps onto its back, stab its weak spot, roll out from under its lumbering grasp, and take cover as it smashes the playable area. Repeat until dead. Not something anybody would ever actually try with a threatening assailant at a bar. But you don’t need Odysseus-level cleverness to get him drunk and sneak out while he’s napping. Strain your brain a little harder and you might even come up with a fake name so his buddies will never find you.
How did Hercules and Jason find out who really wanted to join the Argonauts while punishing those who merely came to eat and drink at their patron’s expense? They had the volunteers divide themselves into those who still wanted to go and those who no longer wished to, then forced the freeloaders to strip naked and leave their fine clothes, jewelry and weapons behind.
How did Jason keep the crew’s spirits up during the long and perilous journey to heist the Golden Fleece? They sang rowing songs and listened to Orpheus play the lyre.
Every culture has inspiring stories filled with fun-yet-useful moments like these, and everywhere video games are ruining them by bringing their fantastical parts to life and covering what’s real under layers of CGI and game mechanics or worse, omitting what’s real altogether.
The point of these stories was to get young people to aim for the impossible while equipping them with the means to make them possible. The point of video games is to make young people feel like they’re doing the impossible by keeping them playing for as long as possible.
And the results speak for themselves. I don’t need to go into the studies linking lack of social development, the rise in autism, and the utter despair that exists amongst males who’ve squandered their potential for over 20 years on games. The basement-dwelling, neckbeard-and-fedora-sporting, forty-something incel memes alone are a too-real expression of the after-effects of gaming addiction. Suffice it to say that while all narratives are designed for you to get lost in, books and old-school storytelling gave you something to take with you on your way out, while games are increasingly designed like casinos–they never want you to leave.
While I don’t know if it will ever truly be possible to create games that inspire the kind of real-world action we so desperately need from our gamers today, I am certain that we’re never going to close this Pandora’s box now that it’s been blown so wide open.
But like Odysseus, adrift and so far from the home he has little hope of ever reaching again, all we can do is try.
At least we have the stories in their original forms to guide us.