Sharing Life Stories and Sharing Video-Game Stories

The stories of our lives can make for thorny conversations. Many of us make sense of our goals, values, communities, and sense of self by bundling some of our experiences into a story in which we’re the main character: a series of odd jobs with no apparent unifying theme becomes a story of self-discovery; a collection of episodes with a beloved pet becomes a story of cultivating and honoring a non-human friendship. Even if we don’t always make sense of our experiences narratively in that present moment when we have them, narrative discourse is a staple of how we express and explain our lives to ourselves and each other. But when it comes to using our life stories as a form of interpersonal expression and explanation, we can find ourselves caught between a seeming Scylla and Charybdis based on how similar or dissimilar our interlocutor is to us:

On the one hand, suppose a person is speaking with someone about a series of experiences to which the recipient has no obvious connection in their own life—say, Sally sharing the story of her time as an astronaut with John, who has worked as a farmer his whole life. In this case, there might be no obvious lingua franca to make that story relatable and useful to its recipient. John might be able to imagine in a quite abstract sense what space travel might be like, but this might simply be too beyond the pale of his life experience for him to appreciate what it would mean for a subject, like Sally, to be the main character in such a story. In this case, the sort of conversation we might hope could forge new relationships might never get off the ground in the first place.
On the other hand, suppose a person is speaking with someone about a series of experiences to which the recipient can relate through their own set of quite similar experiences—say, Sally sharing the story of her time as an astronaut with Neil, a fellow astronaut. In this case, the two people might have undertaken their experiences for such different reasons, and drawn such different lessons from them, that they have trouble reconciling the meaning they’ve taken from their life story with the meaning their interlocutor has taken from the interlocutor’s life story, instead seeing these stories as standing in a mutual conflict that must be resolved. If Sally’s trying to express to Neil the value of gender equity she’s found in pursuing space travel and Neil has instead engaged in space travel as a way to pursue the value of frontiersmanship, Neil might feel as though Sally misunderstands the meaning of space travel, despite Sally speaking form her own life story, because he has trouble making space for other values emanating from a subject matter that anchors such a central set of values in his own life.

I don’t think these scenarios pose a necessary tension for conversation, but all the same, they point to a tension that’s a real and common struggle for many people. How can we share the stories of our life experiences in such a way as to make them relatable, while still holding space to acknowledge and compare a range of life stories other people might have had from similar life experiences?

It turns out that, over the last forty years or so, members of a particular modern culture have become uniquely adept at this dimension of interpersonal communication because of the structure of that culture’s subject matter. The players of single-player, narrative video games have to resolve this tension in order to discuss the games they play with other players of those same games.

Video games of this kind give their players a bifocal sort of “life story.” Seen through one lens, these games tell the story not of their player, but rather of a particular main character, the avatar, represented within the game. Like other main characters in stories, the avatar participates in events that collectively express “narrative” flavors of meaning from the arc of that character’s life. But seen through their other lens, video games call their player to make choices, determining (among other things) some of the actions the avatar will take in the story. Both the input and output of the player’s choices contribute to that story: she may make choices that bring about different events in the story than the choices of a different player, and she may make the very same choices as another player for different reasons.

So, if I play a game like the newly remade Silent Hill 2 and then want to discuss that game with other players, I’m immediately confronted with our Scylla and Charybdis, but I also have the conceptual resources to chart a productive and illuminating course between them. My fellow player and I might have come to the game for different reasons, looking to get different kinds of value out of it, but our journeys are anchored to a narrative lingua franca in the experience of James, our avatar, as he travels through the nightmare of Silent Hill in search of his wife. And because that lingua franca constitutes a different “level” of story than the story of our choices as players—that first lens versus the second lens—it’s possible for us to overcome the conflict that comes from crowding out the meaning of another player’s experience with our own preferred meaning. Rather than making choices that lead to one of Silent Hill 2’s multiple possible endings and then inferring, by way of some imagined priority which we take our personal experience to have, that this constitutes the single “true” ending of the story, we can instead share with each other the distinct outcomes of our choices as a way of enriching our collective understanding of the underlying text constituting all possible versions of Jame’s journey. Video games’ structure gives us everything we need to communicate, within the context of a single life story (the avatar’s), the distinct values (the players’) that usually mark our life stories as divergent from each other, inviting an enriched discourse that avoids the all-too-tempting interpersonal conflicts of its non-game analogues.

I’ve spent the last ten years working on the applied philosophy of video-game stories not just because I’ve loved these stories since I was eight years old, but also because I believe that the innermost lessons of how to express and understand oneself within these narrative structures also reveal rich possibilities for how we can make new, better sense of ourselves, our stories, and our communities beyond those games. Perhaps by finding the right way to map the player/avatar dynamic onto the interactive stories of our lives, we might uncover an entirely new language for sharing those stories.