Worlds

When I was a kid, I considered for along time becoming a video game developer, or writer, or something of the sort. I didn't really know a lot about how making video games worked - I just had this idea that I could create one, and that it would be a thing, and that I could make it be exactly what I had in mind, and that I would find a way to make it a good. I was young. It was also during a point in my life where I really wanted to know more about my religion, and I was frequently trying to read the bible - try being the keyword. I never made it very far. But there were some stories I read that caught my attention, and that I thought could make for good stories or games.

As I grew older, I started to learn more about games and how they were made and how many people were involved, and I started to realize that, perhaps, that wasn't the path for me. But that didn't take my enjoyment of them away, and I learned to appreciate video games and their creators on a new level that I hadn't experienced before. My friends and I talked (and still do talk) about them all the time. What we liked about them. What we didn't like. What we wished they did and didn't do. And how we would change things if given the opportunity. We discussed video games the way other people discuss religion or philosophy - it may not have been a conscious thing, but we wanted to know more.

One of the things that we struggled with frequently, and that I think most gamers struggle with, is what makes a game in a series a part of that series. I think that's a weird question for people who aren't into video games. It's not really something that other forms of media have to deal with. In tv, movies, and books, parts of a series are connected by characters or settings. But that's not necessarily the case in video games.

Probably the best example of this is in Final Fantasy. Let's ignore for the moment how dumb of a name that is given what comes next, but Final Fantasy is a series that has spanned three decades, with a fifteenth main title coming out soon, and numerous spin off titles under its wings. Which tends to confuse people, because none of those main titles are connected to each other. Final Fantasy 1 has absolutely nothing to do with Final Fantasy 2, regardless of whether or not it's the Japanese or American version of the game - which is a different problem entirely.

But if that's the case, why do we recognize them as being a part of the same series? They take place in different worlds, with different characters, accomplishing different feats with different motivations. Surely the gameplay then? But comparing the latest game to the first, even the gameplay is hardly recognizable between the two, and there are hundreds of other games with the same gameplay that are completely unrelated.

It's small things that connect them. Reoccurring names or animals. The twist that occurs part way through the game. The surprisingly complicated stories and characters. And the ability to flip the switch from quirky and funny to serious and depressing. Things that, on their own, hardly make the series special, but when you put them all together... Well, you get Final Fantasy.

It makes me wonder if something like that could be accomplished in other forms of media. If a series of books can be linked without links, and that rather than saying "Oh, those are x author's books," a reader would say, "Oh, that's part of that series." To take completely unrelated stories, but write them in such a way that they are undoubtedly connected in some way.

I think that would be an interesting challenge. But it starts with making one story that connects to itself. So I still have a ways to go.