Week-to-Week: Continuities and Congruences of Game and TV Narratives
As TV's first true video game "adaptation" is in production, the intersections between the two media are more apparent than ever
Welcome to Week-to-Week, the newsletter for my Substack, Episodic Medium. This arrives to all subscribers each Monday (at least for now, given what else I am covering, the day could change in the future)—subscribe for free to get it directly to your inbox, and start a paid subscription to join the conversation. (Yes, you can also just tweet at me. But then your comments won’t be archived for all of time here!)
Technically, the function of these weekly newsletters is to encourage people to subscribe to this Substack featuring episodic television criticism, so I want to acknowledge up front that my decision to begin this conversation with a discussion of video games is probably counter-intuitive.
However, my recent gaming time has been spent with two games—Horizon Zero Dawn and its sequel, Horizon Forbidden West—that have really foregrounded some particularities about game narratives, and has me thinking about broader realities of media narratives that I promise brings television into this conversation eventually both in terms of TV narrative generally and how upcoming TV shows will be adapting game narratives.
Horizon Zero Dawn came out in 2017, but for a variety of reasons—Breath of the Wild coming out days later, a save file lost to a lightning-struck PS41—I only returned to the game recently in preparation for the sequel’s release. An open-world action-RPG set in a post-apocalyptic Earth where tribes jostle for power alongside ferocious machines, Zero Dawn has an incredibly deep story that relies heavily on worldbuilding principles most commonly associated with television among visual media. By the end of the game, you have the full picture of the tragedies that led to Aloy being humanity’s last chance at survival, with a combination of holograms, audio logs, and other “relics” of the “ancient” world uncovering the full scale of how the game’s world came to be. It’s an incredibly rich experience, even if it did take me five years to get around to finishing it.
When I sat down to start the sequel, I knew that the game would have naturally evolved: it’s been five years since Zero Dawn came out, and in addition to aesthetic and technological improvements the developers would naturally look to evolve how Forbidden West plays. Such changes include a simplified item management system, new ways of upgrading and adding to weapons, new combat strategies, free-climbing exploration, and a more diversified skill tree, which are all pretty typical places for adjustments in a sequel.2 From a gameplay perspective, it feels like a natural evolution from the original game, and I’m having a lot of fun with how the game’s mission structure is pushing me to explore these different mechanics.
However, what’s been throwing me for a loop—and what has me talking about this in the context of television—is how the continuity within the game’s story is complicating those gameplay shifts. The game picks up six months after the end of the first game, tracking Aloy as she responds to a new set of threats to the fragile ecosystem she’s working hard to protect. However, those new threats are something of a mirage: the game quickly—without going into too many spoilers—revives old threats, reintroduces allies, and frames your exploration of new lands as a direct continuation of the journey of the previous game (including the Forbidden Wilds DLC, which in many ways was a “bridge” from a story perspective). And in case someone hasn’t played the first game, they literally put in a “Previously On” sequence before you even start the game proper.
It’s definitely the most direct sequel I’ve ever played from a video game perspective.3 Admittedly, this continuity is especially apparent for me as someone who literally finished Zero Dawn less than a week before starting Forbidden West—this is probably not a unique experience, as some players might have replayed the first game to refresh their memories, but it’s still not what the game is necessarily designed for. And it has the effect of making it seem very odd that the gameplay—meant to be representative of Aloy’s skills—has changed in the way that it has. The game tiptoes around the diegesis of “skill trees” when the character spent the whole last game training and learning, but offers no explanation for missing skills—like whistling to draw machines close to you—that they decided weren’t conducive to the gameplay this time around.4 There are diegetic justifications for some “resets”—like new machines requiring new cauldrons to learn how to override them—but it feels weird to be simultaneously continuing a story and, from a gameplay perspective, starting an entirely new game.
As I think on it, my sense is that the dissonance comes from the fact that other than television, no other form of visual media is really built for “direct” continuity in this way. While there are exceptions in the case of movie sequels filmed consecutively and designed to function as part of one large story—best exemplified by the Lord of the Rings trilogy—most film sequels pick up after a fair amount of time has passed, using that gap to generate new tensions and conflicts. The same principle admittedly applies for many broadcast television shows, which historically either skipped over or fast-forwarded through the summer to reset to the calendar year and line up with major holidays. But as cable and streaming took over, it became far more common for a show to literally pick up exactly where the story left off, dropping us back into the characters’ “next day” despite it having been a year since we last spent time with them.
It made me realize that while game developers are naturally inclined to look to television as game narratives evolve into sprawling story worlds, they can’t just do what a TV show would do and easily accommodate the evolution of the gameplay itself. Perhaps this is why the next big Playstation-exclusive sequel, God of War Ragnarok, is turning to the traditional “movie sequel” logic of a three-year time gap, which will create more space to justify any changes being made to the mechanics (especially since Kratos’ son will have aged up over that period). The Assassin’s Creed series, meanwhile, concocted an elaborate frame narrative to allow for TV-like continuity while justifying gameplay resets, a clever solution that became less clever once the yearly release schedule burnt me out 10 hours into Assassin’s Creed III.5
I bring all of this up because it feels particularly relevant as we prepare for a pretty pivotal year for the relationship between games and television, with the first two in what seems like a trend of video game I.P. being drawn on for American television series. Paramount+’s Halo (finally) launches this month, and HBO’s The Last Of Us (probably) arrives early in 2023, with Fallout and Twisted Metal on the horizon.
The two arriving soon are quite dissimilar in terms of how the adaptation is likely to play out. Halo’s lore is nothing to sneeze at, but as a first-person shooter its gameplay mechanics are less tied to its story, and the show is going to need to diverge wildly from the gameplay loop in order to tell it—they’re also, notably, treating it like an “expanded universe” show, as opposed to trying to adapt specific games.
The Last of Us, though, is an incredibly linear game, and embeds its worldbuilding and character development within its action in such a way that you could basically adapt it setpiece-by-setpiece and end up with something recognizable as a TV show. It will be, I would argue, the first true attempt to adapt a story-driven video game into a series, and thus a foundational text for understanding the intersections between the two media from a narrative perspective.
And accordingly, I have a lot of questions about how the writers on The Last Of Us will end up treating this particular challenge. Neil Druckmann—who wrote and directed the original game—has said they plan to adapt the first game into the show’s first season, but will that include the DLC content that fleshed out Ellie’s past? Will there be any effort to integrate story elements that emerged in the second game’s parallel narrative earlier? Will they maintain the time jump between the first and second games between seasons—harder when Bella Ramsey won’t have aged much—or adjust the timeline to become more immediate in a way people expect from a TV show? These are questions I had before I created my own dramaturgical intervention playing the two Horizon games back-to-back, but ones that have moved to the forefront as I ponder the undeniable yet also unpredictable links between the two forms.
It’s important to acknowledge that video games tell stories using methods distinct to the medium, and suggesting games are embracing televisual modes of storytelling is not to imply they are losing their specificity. However, as the two media are intersecting more than ever before, and as I’m playing two games in the same way one would binge two seasons of a TV show, it’s not unlike Aloy using her “Focus” device to see the hidden patterns of the world: side quests and errands as the B-stories and C-stories, pieces falling into place. I don’t know if an actual TV adaptation of the Horizon games is on the, well, horizon, but it’s certainly contributing to what feels like a real moment for the two media currently dominating my attention over Spring Break.6
Links-to-Links
In my final piece for The A.V. Club (still processing that, this whole “games” thing was a distraction to avoid writing THAT reflection), I was given the opportunity to consider the success of CBS’ Ghosts, and relive my glory days on the site when the comments just turned into a discussion of whether the American version is allowed to be good compared to the British one, mirroring nicely the debate in the comments on every review I wrote of Elementary’s first season.
However, while we have been trained to think of single-camera as a disruptive format choice (especially at CBS) and genre as a limitation on a show’s audience, Ghosts’ success stems from the fact it isn’t treating them this way. …what showrunners Joe Port and Joe Wiseman seemingly realized when adapting the series was that even though the first impressions of Ghosts might seem out of place on CBS, its bones are something that broadcast sitcoms have always relied on: a diverse set of characters in a dynamic situation easily adaptable into the careful blend of mirth and pathos a sitcom needs to build a connection with its audience.
Speaking of continuity, the arrival of the Netflix Marvel series on Disney+ is primarily interesting to the internet in terms of how their canonicity within the MCU, but personally I’m far more excited that when I travel to Canada I’ll actually be able to access TV-MA content from Hulu that’s available under the “Star” brand there but inaccessible on U.S. accounts due to the U.S. parental controls previously only going to TV-14. A fun globalized wrinkle ironed out at last.
I’ve enjoyed the handful of Abbott Elementary episodes I’ve been catching up on over the past week or so (other than the tepid attempt at a will-they-won’t-they I neither need nor want), but I need to be That Guy and say that all those viral tweets about how it was ABC’s biggest show since Modern Family (predictably) drove me bonkers. Is it meaningful that the 35-day multi-platform ratings for the show’s time-slot premiere in the 18-49 demo were higher than the ratings in the same category for Modern Family’s series finale? Yes. Did the excitement around it strongly suggest people are overestimating how many people watched that series finale? Also yes.
Programming Note
Starting on Wednesday, I’ll be adding a second show into the coverage rotation here at Episodic Medium with the 42nd season of Survivor. All subscribers will get access to the first review on Wednesday, with paid subscribers getting all subsequent reviews. I’m looking forward to have a space to discuss the show on a weekly basis, and am hopeful that others will join in the discussion (aka concur with my rants about how Jeff Probst is set on ruining the game).
To be specific, the lost save only covered the first 5-ish hours of the game, which is all I played up to that point, but it was still a barrier to restarting knowing I’d have to replay it.
Instead of “But she’s got a new hat!” it’s “She got a grappling hook!”
I asked on Twitter and some folks suggested the Mass Effect games as maybe the next closest to a “direct” sequel, but I admittedly never got to those, so you be the judge.
This is actually totally fair, because it’s too easy to abuse it and just sit in the bushes, call machines and guards over one by one, and just avoid fighting. Not that I ever played that way.
Does this mean I stopped buying them? No. I recommend taking the “over” on the amount of I’ve purchased and never played in the intervening decade.
I will say that much as The Last Of Us Part II made the idea of adapting The Last of Us into a TV show seem more viable, I’d say the same for Forbidden West in terms of investing in the supporting cast and presenting a central theme of “Hey, lone wolf heroine, maybe try letting your friends help once in a while!”
I'm curious to know if you had a chance to check out Arcane (possibly my favourite show of 2021). When I think about gaming and TV colliding, I think of the recent spate of IPs transformed into animated shows geared toward adults - e.g., Arcane, DOTA, and if you include tabletop then Critical Role. There's a clear connection between animated video games and animated TV shows (see: all of the animes), so it's interesting to see a turn toward live action video game adaptations (Witcher, now Halo and Last of Us).
Otherwise, agreed about how the mechanics of gaming don't always lend themselves well to explaining an entirely new and underpowered main character in a sequel. But one place where video game narrative can do something I would love to see television tackle (though I don't know if it can) is in the Visual Novel (and to a lesser degree, RPG) space - where a single game contains maybe half a dozen different versions of the same story, and even more endings, based on pivotal choices. For example, if you decide to date one character, or choose to side with a particular faction, the story and the world expand in different directions. It's about concurrent storytelling - where all options are available from the start, but you experience the fullness of the world (and the twists and turns) by playing through different story paths with no particular order needed. Sometimes, what you learn in one playthrough informs how you play through the next section. Sometimes you need to beat a certain path to continue on another. Etc.