Blog Posts About Storytelling by Timothy Johnson, Speculative Fiction Author

The cast of Shrinking are gathered around a long park bench on a beautiful day.

Recently, my wife and I finished watching the second season of Shrinking, and while the credits rolled, I leaned in, wrapped my arms around her, and just stayed there for a while because I cherish her so damn much.

For me, it was a moment of pure storytelling magic. While stories can have myriad effects on us, depending on the story and the audience, Shrinking is a show about cherishing loved ones and growing by facing personal challenges together. It’s therapeutic and only natural that my response to it is an outpouring of love. Other responses also are perfectly natural or reasonable, though, if it makes you feel violent, you might want to talk to someone about that. I found myself profoundly moved.

When I taught literature to undergrads, I distinguished between fact and truth with my students. One appealing aspect of nonfiction storytelling is it’s built on facts. We tend to call them “true stories,” but I wish we’d call them “factual stories” because there’s a larger truth to factual stories that goes beyond the facts. We watch a documentary about Bernie Madoff and think, “yeah, he had a really good life for a while, but when the hammer came down, they even took his underwear. Maybe stealing from people isn’t worth it.” We read a biography about a great political figure and walk away with a perspective of hope. We watch a 30-second clip on the Internet of a guy rescuing a doe from a frozen lake, and our faith in humanity is restored.

Fictional stories access these same larger truths even though they may be based on fabrications and fantasy. Fiction, despite being totally made up, contains truth or truths.

Book-to-film adaptations can be hit or miss, but it seems like a rule that video-game-to-film adaptations are always bad. Good and bad in any artform are, of course, matters of taste, but there’s a persistent, nagging sentiment in popular media that, when filmmakers consider a video game adaptation, they take its success and built-in fan adoration for granted. Producers wield more power than actual talented filmmakers and writers, and the whole affair leans further into entertainment for entertainment’s sake, because the popular sentiment of video games is still driven by people who think Mario and Luigi saving Princess Peach from Bowser’s clutches is the standard in video game storytelling.

(Relevant note: The plot of the forthcoming Mario adaptation is that Mario and Peach are trying to save Luigi from Bowser this time.)

I consider myself a little weird as a fiction writer with some academic decoration, because I am a life-long gamer. We’re not as weird as you’d think, it turns out, but in many literary circles, video games are still considered anathema to good storytelling. I think, considering some of the truly great writing and storytelling I’ve experienced through video games in my life, that’s tragic. The literary world is warming up to TV and films as legitimate mediums for good writing, but video games are still viewed as a medium for children despite the average age of a gamer being 33, and their artistic validity beyond their use of art as resources is still questioned.

(Sure, this is an old post, and Ebert is a bit of a punching bag on the subject, but it’s illustrative of the argument, which I’d argue is flawed because the distinctions he made aren’t independently exclusive, but that’s not what this post is about.)

This year, HBO released a series adapting a video game called The Last of Us, which was developed by video game studio Naughty Dog. I played that game in 2013, and it not only redefined for me what good storytelling is in video games, but it also demonstrated a new potential for immersive storytelling experiences that only video games can provide: in this way, I felt The Last of Us offered new justification not only for the validity of video games as art but that we should consider video games a new artform in their own right.

I can’t overstate the profound effect this game had on me as a storyteller, and it isn’t a game that made me want to make games. It’s a game that made me want to tell better stories, and I think that’s important: the influence The Last of Us had on me transcends the medium.

I can’t think of a better definition for art.

Tag: Storytelling

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