Somehow this is about Texas

Want to start a fight in a room full of video game fans? Take a strong stance on whether or not video games do have or should have stories. It's a debate as old as time itself. Or as old as video games anyway, so I don't know, maybe since the late 50's? Doesn't matter. Oh, and fair warning: this one's going to wander, and then it takes a turn.

"This televisual game is interesting, but what's the triangle's 
motivation? Why is it having a space war? I need context, Steve!"

-literally no one when first introduced to

Spacewar! one of the earliest video games

"Especially if they don't make any sense."

-noted game producer and

nonsensicalist, Hideo Kojima

The answer is, obviously, that games can have stories, but they don't have to have stories. Debate: over, thank you for coming. It's a question of definitions. A movie is usually understood to tell a story, but not all films or videos are narrative. So video game, as a term, describes a medium, not a genre. A puzzle game like Tetris probably doesn't have--or need--a story while something like Last of Us or Final Fantasy does. Even if they don't make sense, they have some kind of plot.  

Bored yet? Yeah, me too, but to be clear, I'm just talking here, I'm not an expert. What got me thinking about this is the guy behind the Zelda series said in an interview with IGN that he doesn't care about the timeline. The Zelda timeline that is, not everything that's happened since the Big Bang.

I actually have an easier time following this than the Zelda timeline.

"Hey! Listen! It's about family."

-I mean, obviously

To be clear, Eiji Aonuma didn't say he was opposed to story, he's just not interested in series continuity for Zelda games. A few years ago Nintendo finally gave in and released a weird flow chart that attempted to put all the games in the series into some kind of coherent history. It was decidedly incoherent, and relied on alternate timelines and time travel and I mean at that point, what's the point? You might as well include the Fast and the Furious movies and say they're set in a parallel universe. 

The point is that they tried to smoosh a series of narratively unconnected things into one continuum and my question is why? And my speculative answer to that question is that people are way too into shared universes and giant interconnected whatevers.

Don't bother zooming in, it won't make more sense.

Amazing until the fans start pitching
you their movie ideas that is.

There are people whose entire job it is to oversee fictional universes. Kevin Feige for Marvel, Pablo Hidalgo for Star Wars, and now James Gunn is trying to cobble together one for DC movies and don't get me wrong, these sound like amazing jobs. What do you do? Why I sit around and decide if Thor would win in a fight with Galactus and whether or not a droid can use the force. Nerds would literally kill to wield this kind of power over made-up nonsense. But is it healthy? For storytelling, I mean. 

Pictured: Aonuma, seen here enjoying a
giant pretzel instead of worrying about canon.

In the interview Aonuma said: 

"I don't like to put too much stock in the chronology of the seres, because from a design perspective, that can kind of box us in and limit where we're able to take the story." 

-Zelda Producer Eiji "I'll give you 

damn a timeline if it will make 

you shut up about it" Aonuma

What about the Nintendo Cereal System?
Where does breakfast figure into all of this?

That is, it's harder to tell a story about an elf and his magical iPad that can craft hover cars if you have to worry about some overall continuity, so why even bother? Is it Aonuma's job to make an interesting video game or is it his job to make an interesting game that supports, advances, and is beholden to a narrative universe stretching back decades? Are the CDI games canon? Is the cartoon series? Sure! Or not! Doesn't matter, it's fiction. Nothing matters.

The carpets of Conference Room B at the
Denver Hilton ran red with nerd blood that day.

Fine, stories matter, fiction matter, but literal wars have been fought over things like this. Not about Zelda or Star Wars or the MCU, but like, religious wars about people who really love, for example, the Bible. People get really testy over what it does or does not say (it does say don't be a dick, it does not say don't have an abortion) and sometimes have a schism over it, or an inquisition. I'm not saying that our culture's current fascination with shared universes and canon is going to lead to a thousand years of bloody conflict, I'm only suggesting that maybe we could all calm down about it.

Wait, you say. Calm down about the entertainment industry's substitution of self-reference and lore for compelling storytelling? Or about clinging to weird and often textually unsupported religious interpretations that lead to things like, transphobia, racism, and women having to flee their homes in order to get medical care they had a constitutional right to just a couple of years ago? Um...yes? Both.

Pictured: the smug, self-satisfied face of Ken Paxton, the Texas Attorney General
and one of the many straight, conservative, white dudes making America a worse
place to live. I hope you'll join me in voting them all out of office. #fucktheGOP