DISPATCHES PERSPECTIVE
Unreliable Narrator
Exploring stories in games and the art of telling tales
SAM BARLOW
This column has been running for two years now, which matches up neatly with this whole pandemic thing. So rather than look back and reflect on the work I’ve done and the way the world of games has changed in that time, it’s increasingly hard to not just ask, instead: what is the point? I was thinking about how the comedians from my childhood are starting to show their age and rage against ‘cancel culture’. Perhaps their fear comes from the realisation that the Great Comedy they created might not last forever – that like most media it was a product of its time and… might not even be funny any more? John Cleese made some of the most influential and brilliant comedy television and so perhaps had assumed his immortality – and residuals – were all but assured. But for all their cutting edges, even Monty Python and Fawlty Towers were not created in a vacuum. Comedy is more brittle and likely to spoil than other forms, a side effect of being targeted at the edge of contemporary taste and mores. Thinking on this, is it the case that videogames are an even worse medium in which to make one’s immortality projects? So many factors conspire to erase games after their heyday – hardware becomes obsolete, servers are taken down, technology ages so rapidly that what once looked alive suddenly… doesn’t. Now big money is intent on making games that only exist in the moment, driven increasingly by games-asservice systems and block—