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Every Monday morning I took a taxi from my apartment in Virginia to the Washington DC train station as the first part of a five hour trip to New York. Every Monday morning I passed the Washington Monument, and every Monday morning my uncontrollable reaction to seeing it was the same — "Why isn't it broken?"
The part of my brain that recognizes objects — the part that knows what something should look like and sends out an unsettling shock of confusion when a known object looks unexpectedly misshapen — was consistently surprised by the intact, unscarred, unbroken Washington Monument on the horizon, thanks to Fallout 3. And it occurred to me after this continued happening week after week, that this is what I want from an RPG. I want to explore a world so cohesive and believable and realistic that it becomes my world while I am playing it — a world that pulls me into it so deeply that I forget my own exists — a world that stays with me long after a game is completed, even to the point that it alters the way I view the real one.
Novels easily do this to me. When daydreaming, it is not unusual for my mind to drift to works of fiction I read years ago, sometimes going as far back to required reading in high school that is still embedded in my mind somewhere. Video games rarely leave such a lasting impression on my psyche by force of plot alone. I did laundry last weekend, and was softly talking out loud to myself while folding clothes when I took notice of the words I was speaking: "There once was an old hag, a solver of puzzles that need not solving, who saw a creature caged in a structure made entirely of doors..." For whatever reason, I was mindlessly summarizing a part of the story in Planescape: Torment, a game I last played in 2003.
This also showcases one of the most basic problems I have with Japanese RPGs — I forget their stories. I forget their stories quickly. I forget their worlds. I forget their people. They do not pull me away from reality. As I play JRPGs, I think about work, I wonder what I'll fix for dinner, I reminisce about the past, I ponder the future, and when I turn off the console I do not feel as though I am stepping from a fantasy world back into the real one. A major exception to this has been the Shin Megami Tensei series. Nocturne's philosophical questions and tragic characters are still with me in much the same way Planescape: Torment's are. When a coworker questioned my anti-social nature a couple of months ago, I framed my explanation from the same sullen philosophical standpoint Isamu did, even pulling a paraphrased quote I remembered from a FAQ for the game by concluding that we would all be happier if "each man had an island to himself." I never told the coworker I was thinking of a video game character the entire time I was talking.
Role-playing games, as story vehicles, are significantly inferior to movies and novels, and this disappoints me because it is purely from a lack of effort rather than a lack of potential. Strong stories have become synonymous with hardcore gaming as part of the unfortunate, though correct, belief that people play games for action, not reading. Unique settings capable of impacting the player require a level of creativity and risk that, sadly, are lacking in the modern game development world. And so we are stuck with games that are low on dialogue, bland in setting, or both, even in a genre that once stood for the exact opposite. I want games to leave me thinking about their stories long after they have ended. I want worlds that I miss after I step out of them. I want RPG designers to be creative storytellers who make a real attempt at impacting their audience.
After seven or eight weeks, my mind finally accepted that the Washington Monument is not supposed to be in ruins, no longer getting stunned when the structure appeared in the distance during my Monday morning taxi rides. Then a funny thing happened. Broken Steel came out, I started a new Fallout 3 playthrough that weekend, and on Monday I was shocked to see the Washington Monument in the distance, intact, all over again.
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