What is Dear Esther, exactly? Is it a game? A graphic novel? A movie, interactive or otherwise? Is it art? These are a few of the questions that the game poses after playing it. It's a game, but at the same time, it's something else entirely. This would be a travesty to something that I would certainly like to see more of. Choosing this particular medium out of convenience, or out of the desire to embrace it as a gimmick will surely condemn it to irrelevancy. Every story benefits from choosing the appropriate medium to tell it in: be it film, novel, game or anything in between.
The real issue, however, is authors flocking to this medium simply to ham fist their story into it. There are ways of circumventing this (and not all stories require the benefit of controlled pacing, as evidenced by Dear Esther), making the future of this medium rather interesting.
If a player decides to stop short, further story sequences will not be triggered until they choose to start again. An experience like Dear Esther, by its nature, cannot offer this same experience: if a player chooses to walk right when the story would’ve benefitted from walking left, an inherent pacing problem is presented. Watch any decent film and you’ll notice that the composition of the scene (the framing, the cuts, the score) is carefully orchestrated to propel the story forward, as well as provide some form of emotional resonance. However, there are potential flaws to this, mostly in the form of the inherent lack of pacing. In essence, it leverages the advantage that games have over films (that of player interactivity), creating something that is both mediums and neither of them at the same time. Dear Esther allows the player to simply gaze at, and be part of, the world without sacrificing the story. Yes, the story ultimately has a set path that it takes to the end, but that journey is not an A to B of frames being spit out of a projector: if something that I’m seeing on screen resonants as a result of the script, I can stop and reflect on it without jarring the experience, or leaving the world. If I choose to, I can let the poetry of the script sink in and be afforded more context by stopping progression and watching the waves rush to the shore. However, giving the player control, even in such a rudimentary fashion, completely up-ends the notion of the traditional director/viewer relationship.ĭear Esther allows me to essentially create my own pacing for the story. If Dear Esther were a purely scripted affair, in which the ‘player’ is afforded absolutely no controls, then it would absolutely be a film. Films offer the opportunity to audiences to reflect and submit their own reading of them, but it’s virtually impossible for that viewer to, say, retool an action film as a drama at their own leisure.
A film is dictated by the whims of the director: the way it’s shot, edited, scored and ultimately viewed is, by and large, controlled. Dear Esther is also absurdly beautiful to look at: yet another game where I wish it were a real location.ĭoes this make it a film? Not exactly. Gameplay is, after all, the whole point of gaming in a rather blunt sense, Pong has more gameplay than Dear Esther. While it’s important for appropriate games to include a rich and well-written story, the fact that Dear Esther features essentially no gameplay discredits a pure labelling of ‘game’. If one were to pick hairs, Dear Esther strays closer to film than game viewed as a gaming experience, it would fair quite poorly. What it can be classified as isn’t strictly relevant either, as the sum of its parts have given birth to something rather exciting, particularly to those that value story. Though it shares similarities with the aforementioned mediums, it really can’t be classified as either one of them.
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