Episode 118: The best game that lets YOU control the narrative

The Best Games Ever Podcast

Interactivity is this medium's entire thing. It's a composite of many other art forms: everything from prose, to sculpture, to television. What it cribs from those things is often its weakest work, but what it does brilliantly and almost singularly is give the audience some control within the experience. All art is interactive on some level, in that the relationship between a creative work, its author, and its enjoyer is always a conversation of sorts. We project our own world view onto motionless hunks of marble. Our own life experiences onto flat planes of pigmented acrylics. Our own cultural conditioning onto Ant and Dec's Saturday Night Takeaway. And there's those Choose Your Own Adventure books that give you some sense of a branching narrative and are also rubbish.

But games? You may inhabit entire worlds beyond the screen via a proxy. An avatar quite often of our own design. An effective physical presence. Games don't just tell us what Narnia is like: they let us stick a steel toe-capped size twelve through the fucking wardrobe, mate. We all get to be Dorothy, except instead of a nippy wee dug we've got an AK-47 and a bandolier of frag grenades. This medium doesn't need to be better at imparting meaning through narrative than all the places it steals from, because it does something that none of those other things can: freedom to change the script.

Whether it's through small, inconsequential choices like whether to shoot a guy in the bonce or the willy, or full-on branching narratives with multiple possible origin stories, middles, and endings, games are more or less what you put into them. Namely, you.

But what is the best game that lets you control the narrative? Let's ask our esteemed panel of professional Game Likers from VG247, which is sort of like Eurogamer but communist.

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