Video Games Can Tell Stories? Since When?
Every human has at least one "thing" that lights a spark and compels them to indulge themselves until they're sick, if they're allowed. I was born two weeks past my due date with a compulsion to find and absorb stories, folklore, faerie tales, and legend. I needed to hear them, read them, and watch the awkward movies assembled from their bones. I also had a compulsion to eat styrofoam, so be assured I'm not trying to make myself sound like I was a budding starchild.
Books were my favourite, especially stories by Judy Blume and books about Ramona being a chaotic shit all up and down Klickitat Street. C.S. Lewis's Narnia series had me enthralled despite starting with The Last Battle, the last book in the series' timeline. As a young Jew unfamiliar with the Book of Revelations, it was wild to watch a black sun descend on a frozen, broken Narnia that was promptly reborn. The symbolism meant nothing to me; as far as I knew, I'd just gone on a literary acid trip with unicorns, centaurs, and bestial false gods pre-supplied. No wonder I was hooked. When someone insists I must start a story or series from the first book/episode, I tell them I read the Narnia series backwards and loved it. This isn't math! Stories don't need no order of operations!
Movies can also tell great stories, but I admit it took time for movies to grow on me. First I had to drop my snobbish habit of automatically condemning movies as inherently inferior to the books they're based on. It was a slow journey given how badly I was gaslit by 1971's Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory as a youngster. The book has nothing resembling the tunnel scene wherein Gene Wilder shepherds a boatload of screaming kids through an LSD trip like a garish Charon. Was there a scene in the book where the kids see footage of bugs crawling out of a woman's mouth? Had I even read the right book? It shames me now to think there was a time when I regarded that twisted movie masterpiece with anything other than reverence. I don't deserve heaven.
I also loved stories in comic books, and in fact learned to read thanks to my dad's MAD Magazine collection (only the highest-quality reading content in my parents' house), my brother's Archie comics, and the incessant trickle of Beano comics that invariably makes its way from overseas if you have so much as one relative in the United Kingdom.
The itch to write inevitably followed my reading sessions. My preferred method of creation was to read a comic story (usually something from the "Little Archie" comic sub-series) and then describe the scene on paper with a ballpoint pen and terrible handwriting. I can't recall why I specifically wrote stories about Little Archie; my best guess is that the little red-headed wiener typically went on adventures that spanned multiple pages, which are more satisfying to narrate than teen Archie's typical three- or four-page gag comics. (That would be something. "And then Mr. Lodge said, 'Oh boy, here we go again'!")
Unfortunately, this was around the same time my grade 2 teacher got fed up with us idiot children copying information straight out of books for our research projects on robins and whatever. She finally gathered us for a very special Carpet Time, which was a lesson about plagiarism instead of the show-and-tell sessions that Carpet Time was usually reserved for. She also made it clear she'd flay our weaselly little hides if we didn't knock it off.
My little kid brain became a paranoid mess after the discussion because it was incapable of understanding fanworks versus straight-up plagiarism. I stopped writing fanfiction altogether for a while. It's not as if my teacher criticized fanfics specifically. For all I knew, she was a closet Spock/Kirk shipper who had a stack of Star Trek zines stashed somewhere at home. But I stewed in fear of being hauled off to the special wing of jail that existed for seven-year-olds who write fanfiction.
Ultimately, the threat of doing hard time didn't stifle my urge to damage other people's books and movies with my own interpretations. Even as a little child I loved to watch order dissolve into chaos. With a pen in my hand and a licensed character in my head, I could give birth to all sorts of dumb possibilities. I'd been doing my nonsense for some time even before I was introduced to video games, a virgin media that was ripe for effing around with.
