hey everyone I am NOT Megan Tennant and today we have a new video for you. Today
I'm gonna be talking about video games but not just video games in general, but
about how you as a writer can use video games to create more immersive stories. A
lot of people like to brush off video games as a creative medium because they
think they're childish and they're simple, but in reality, modern video games
are very complex and can sometimes have more thoughtful and emotional stories
than some books. And for that reason I think that some authors are doing
themselves a disservice by pushing this other medium aside when in reality they
could be analyzing this story for use in their own work. Some of the stories that
affected me the most have been in the form of video games. And so for the month
of dystopia I'm gonna give you guys a list of dystopian video games that I
feel have themes that I think are really important for the dystopian genre. So I
highly recommend that you guys go out, get these games, play them and then put
that into your own writing. You can go out and look for synopsises... Synpsy's?
synopsisees? synopsize? You can go and find synopsises for these video games but I
think you're doing a disservice to the actual medium. They're in the form of a
video game because they do a great job at bringing you into that world.
I should mention since I'm going to be talking about the plot of a number of
games, there are gonna be very minor spoilers. There's gonna be a list down in
the description below. but I'm gonna try not to spoil anything super major.
We'll start with the seventh theme, the meaning of life. And the game that I've
chosen for this is Near Automata. I highly recommend. So in this game there is a war
going on on earth between androids and machines. There are no humans in the
picture, they're supposedly out on the moon and on a moon colony waiting for
the androids which have been built by the humans in
order to eradicate the machines on earth. And so it starts out with the main
characters being a couple of androids that are being sent to earth to go and
kill all the machines to make it safe for
humanity to come back onto earth. But as the game continues they start realizing
that, instead of just being blank slates, machines without any type of
emotion, it turns out that they're starting to evolve a little bit and
they're starting to have some human characteristics. They're setting up
societies to protect themselves from other groups of machines. And so over the
course of the game the androids start wondering what is our actual purpose?
Should we be killing these machines, even though we're just told to do it
while in reality they might not be as smart as humans but they're starting to
develop? They're starting to create human emotion. They're starting to create
colonies. Does it make sense to eradicate this life no matter how minor
or insignificant they might have been told that it is? I find the theme really
important to dystopia because there's a just, with the genre, there's a lot of
death and destruction and I feel that as a writer you should be able to distill
that down into instead of it just being "oh that's the bad guy so we're gonna go
kill him" you should set up that they have their
own motivations. They might be the bad guys in the main character's story but
they're not the bad guys in their own life. The sixth theme is fear and
uncertainty and the game that I've chosen for this one is Metro 2033 which
along with being a videogame is also a book. So you guys, if you don't want to
play the video game, you can go read the book for this specific one. But it isn't
necessarily the storyline that I think represents the themes very well, I think
it's the gameplay which you can definitely take lessons from when you're
creating your world and creating the hardships that your characters have to
go through. So the game takes place in Russia a number of years after an atomic
war where all of humanity inside of Russia specifically has gone into the
Metro tunnels in order to escape the irradiated surface and it's while there
they're stuck in these confined places where they have to deal with both the
Raiders trying to get their supplies and these monsters that cause people to go
crazy and kill themselves, they're so stressed and fearful that their literal
currency are bullets, the only thing that can protect them. You aren't just running
around with a ton of bullets you have to conserve your ammo because
it's also the thing that you can buy items with. When you're going through certain
sections of the tunnel they've been collapsed and so they're irradiated. So you
have air filters that you need to screw onto your mask, in order to not be irradiated.
But they're very hard to come by and if you're not wearing them you can go crazy.
Plus along with all that you have the monsters and the bandits that are
constantly attacking them from all sides to either kill them or to steal their
resources. If the characters lives are too easy in the dystopia it's not gonna
come off as exciting and there's gonna be a lack of motivation for the
characters to actually accomplish anything. You need to make it hard for
your character. You need to make it hard for them to find supplies, and you need to
make it hard for them to win over alliances. The fifth theme is technology
and control. The game that I've chosen for this one is Deus Ex. This is actually
really old game, so you could actually probably go buy it on Steam and I
guarantee it'll run on your computer. It's very old, however the story is good.
Don't go there for good graphics though. The world that's taking place in the
games is currently reeling from the effect of the great death which is a
virus that's going around and affecting the population causing mass hysteria and
obviously death. And so the main character is part of an anti terrorist
organization who is sent out to stop the blockage of a cure called ambrosia and
while he's doing this he finds this disease has actually been spread by the
massive corporations and secret societies in order to control the
population. Essentially these corporations, which have created all the
technology, have created this disease in order to make the common population
dependent on their new technology. They submit themselves to mass surveillance,
to a police force, and eventually these corporations want to use technology to
brainwash everybody into accepting the secret society as a benevolent dictator.
so I think that theme of using technology to control the masses should
be a core central theme when you're dealing with technology in a dystopia. It
doesn't really make sense in my mind that they would be selling this
technology just for the good of humanity. I know it sounds kind of dark but I
think that's just the state of the world, is that if you provide something that
people start depending on (in this case technology) it's eventually
going to turn into a power struggle where that organization wants to control
the people who are using it such that they use that technology more or gain
some type of power through social politics. The fourth theme is
personalities as a result of experiences. The game that I've chosen for this one
is Remember Me. Now the gameplay itself isn't super interesting but this story
is great. This actually kind of plays into the last theme a little bit about
technology and control. The plot of this one is that it's the far future in an
upgraded kind of version of Paris called Neo Paris and essentially there's a
corporation that has created a brain implant which allows you to download and
to extract memories from the people that it's implanted inside of. So this
initially creates kind of a utopia where people can pay for memories of new
experiences or to remember and experience certain things inside of
their own mind or if they're in some state of grief they can pay this
corporation to remove those memories so that they don't have to feel that pain
anymore. And so eventually this company gets greedy and they start realizing
that they can use this to control people. When you go to jail basically they start
erasing your memories until you become into a slave. I think this brings up a
common theme inside of dystopian where you need to make sure that the characters
personalities are driven by their experiences. We aren't just created with
our opinions built how they're built. Our opinions are usually molded from our
experiences over time. Without those experiences or with different
experiences we'd be very different people.
Nothing should seem random. Your readers are gonna connect with your characters a
lot more if they can understand where they're coming from and why they're
making certain decisions. The third theme is introspection and the game that I've
chosen for this one actually isn't a game it's a series of games. It is the
Metal Gear Solid franchise. I love this series. The only issue is that it's super
convoluted. When I was talking about games having very complex and emotional
stories this is a perfect example. You cannot just jump into one of the
many games that they have and understand what is going on. You need to
have played the games beforehand because there are so many recurring characters,
so many recurring themes you have to understand the motivations of every
character. There's multiple different plot twists. If you are a fan of military
sci-fi and even a little mix of like anime type story plot beats I highly
recommend this one. It's very good but you're gonna get sucked into it
really hard. If you want an understanding of how convoluted and complex this
storyline is go to Metal Gear timeline .com and just scroll down because it is
such a massive timeline. However that makes it very hard to create a synopsis.
Okay, where to start? Okay so I think that it can be generally described as: it's
the end of world war 2 and there are a number of superpowers that have created
this organization called the philosophers. They've piled all their
money together into hundreds and billions of dollars and they've created
the Philosopher's legacy (I believe it's called.) While all these countries
initially set out to create this slush fund in order to control all the power
and the economy in the world they eventually split up and tried to get
that money for themselves and so the game takes place from the perspective of
soldiers who are in charge of trying to watch the armies of the other people and
then to steal that Philosopher's legacy and get the money for their own nation.
And across that there's cloning and cybernetics and AI and nano machines and
why are we here just to suffer! *music plays* why are we still here
just suffer? and it just gets so crazy to the point
Where there's constantly this evolving these evolving machines that are
creating this nuclear threat against all these nations. These characters keep
getting screwed over by their own nations and eventually the main
character creates their own army base to try to create their own nation such that
there can be these professional soldiers who can live out their professional
career without needing to be influenced by any type of society. And it ultimately
brings up a lot of questions about who we are as human beings, what our goals
are, what we're trying to accomplish. Introspection is throughout the entire
series both from introspection from a societal standpoint and introspection
from a personal standpoint. Why am I still fighting why do I still feel the
need to go and help people that I know we're eventually gonna double-cross me
in the future? How do we even know what's best for society and do we actually need
peace? Is it possible to get peace or is it just more important to accept that
there's always going to be war there's always going to be conflict? This is
really important in terms of dystopian because you don't want a character who's
constantly driven towards some goal without questioning why they want that
goal.They're not questioning what it takes to get that goal. It's important
for the character to take a step back, especially after all the conflict and
the pain or the loss that they're going through, in order to analyze how they
even feel about that. Especially when it comes to society. There are not a lot of
black and white answers to problems. There's a lot of gray area and because
of that there needs to be thought put into what that gray area is and what it
means to the character. The second theme is the continuation of humanity. The game
that I've chosen for this one is Horizon Zero Dawn, it just came out and it's an
amazing game. Go ask Megan because she loves that game. The plot of this one is
basically that it is the 31st century (I believe) and humanity has regressed back
into a old tribal form. They know that there was this advanced civilization
before them that somehow came to ruin that they call the old ones.
Interesting part of this plot is that there are also these giant robotic
dinosaurs basically that are living alongside with them and for most of
their life time they've been peaceful. They'd coexisted with these early humans.
However they've started getting something called the derangement which
started causing them to go crazy and actually attack human settlements and so
the main character was an outcast from a tribe actually goes out to try to find
what is causing this derangement in order to fix it and throughout this
story there's the constant theme of how did we get to this state? Why is there
this advanced civilization? Who or what came before us and how come they're not
here anymore? What caused them to destroy themselves such that we're all that's
left that we have to start humanity over again? And eventually there's an amazing
amazing revelation at the end which I will not spoil because it just makes
this story so amazing. Highly recommend you go play it. But ultimately I think
that this general question of what happens to society after some type of
apocalyptic event that destroys most of it, how did these people grow over time?
Do they take up that the whole technology that they did before in order
to protect themselves? Do they continue the conflict that happens such that
eventually that humanity gets wiped out? Or do they need to regress back to time
where they have to basically act like they don't have any type of modern
technology and start from the ground up again? What plans are they creating
inward to continue humanity? Most humans I think would agree that you don't want
to just sit down and let the human race die out, but then what do you do to
continue it? And I think that Horizon Zero Dawn provides a really great
creative reason for this and it gives a great description as to why humanity's
in the state it is and how they destroyed themselves initially. And the final theme
that we've gotten to here is freedom and mania and the game
that I've chosen for this is again a series and happens to be my favorite
game series: Bioshock. All of the games are dystopian societies, both Bioshock 1
and BioShock Infinite are different dystopian in their own right so
specifically I'm going to talk about Bioshock 1 because it was just such a
revelation when it came out. It had such a great twist in it, please go play it. I want
you to experience that twist. It was a dystopia that people, I don't think, had
really ever seen before. Essentially the idea behind the first
Bioshock game is that there is a society that has built themselves underneath the
sea far away from humanity. They took a number of philosophers and artists and
engineers who were put off by the rules that society had imposed on them and so
they built this city where they could have complete freedom to work on
whatever they wanted however they wanted. This type of freedom, while it initially
created this bright utopia, it eventually led to their ruin because they have too
much freedom. The city of Rapture, which is what the city was called, underneath
water eventually came to its fall because of the mania that was created
from that pure freedom that they were given. People got addicted to the bionics
that they had created, people got too obsessed with their creations where
the artists started murdering people. Scientific endeavors started becoming
very unethical where it started affecting the general population of
Rapture and eventually this underwater city became this ruined mess of monsters
of human beings. Bioshock through its story made the player question whether
freedom was actually worth total freedom. A lot of current dystopias are all about
"yeah let's destroy the civilization because they're overbearing and they're
controlling us!" but they never usually continue on past that what happens when
they get their freedom eventually they're gonna have to enact some type
of controls on the populace in order to keep civilization running and
because people need rules to survive. Without
some type of rule or law or repercussions for your actions
the type of mania that inflicted the residents of rapture is going to spread
and eventually going to lead to the same dystopia that they initially freed
themselves from. I think as a dystopian writer it's really important for you to
question what are the characters actually trying to accomplish? Because
freedom can be dangerous. So thank you guys for letting me rant about video
games which I love! I hope you guys all go and play those video games. I have a
list of them down below in the description. Have you guys played any of
these video games? I hope so. If you have let me know what
you guys think about them down below. Also let me know down below if you want
to see more talking about video games.So if you enjoined this video, leave us a like
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