

When possible, major cutscenes get skipped completely, making not only the plot but the characters and their motivations impossible for the viewer to understand. In the typical speedrun you might watch on YouTube or Twitch, the player will mash buttons to get past any plot-explaining text, causing the backstory to fly by too quickly for a human to comprehend. Speedrunning is a type of gaming where players try to beat a game as fast as possible. And you really only need the latter for a game to be great. While games can tell stories-even good ones, some tiny percent of the time!-the point of a game isn’t its narrative, but its interactive nature.

If you think that video gaming is primarily about telling rich, interactive stories or inhabiting fully realized characters, you’ve missed the point-and speedrunning is the cure. Meanwhile, some of the most successful games-like Minecraft-have no recognizable story at all. Disney characters and wide-eyed anime bois fight with keys/swords to save the world. Time-traveling science assassins fight over alien relics. Try to sum up any major game’s story: A plumber repeatedly attempts to rescue a princess from a dinosaur. The Video Game Company That Banned a Pro–Hong Kong Player Is Handling Its China Controversy About As Well As the NBA Didĭeep down, even the most apostolic gamers know it’s true: The stories, characters, and dialogue in video games are almost always terrible, ridiculous, or both. I Finally Asked: What Is Animal Crossing?

I Am Extremely Jealous of Ilhan Omar’s Gaming Setup
