Got sidetracked last week. Sorry about that! I'm back now with an assortment of story ideas and techniques drawn from a variety of different kinds of storytelling.
Today, I want to talk about ELDEN RING, aka the thing that is currently ruining my life. My sister bought it for me as a belated Christmas present, and it's nearly impossible to stop playing.
But I'm realizing that what makes it so compelling is actually the fact that it has straight up refused to build its world and story in the gradual, let's learn one step at a time way that almost action adventure every video game does. Almost as soon as you enter into the world you are confronted with monsters that you will never be able to defeat for a very long time.
And everywhere you go it is like that. There is a sort of training module if you can find it--I didn't stumble onto it until I'd been playing for almost two weeks. And honestly, even though it was basic it was still helpful, because the game has so many different mechanics going on it's just really easy to not know how to do stuff. Almost from the beginning we are told that people can jump between dimensions, and now on more than occasion I have been killed by someone who did just that. But there is so much more basic stuff that I have yet to master, I can't even predict when any of that is going to make any sense.
I know I'm supposed to put the Elden Ring together, but how is completely unexplained. You just wander around (mostly getting killed by monsters) and little by little you learn stuff.
Video games have their own mechanics and there are some things you might be able to get away with there that might not work in say, a television show. But I don't know, the more I play the more I wonder whether there isn't more room to experiment, particularly with regard to how much you spoon feed your audience. TWIN PEAKS: THE RETURN was endlessly impossible to get your head fully around, and yet I would say it's probably the greatest season of television I've ever seen. The ending of season one of EUPHORIA was much the same. I don't know what the hell was going on with that crowd scene, but it was incredible and I felt so lucky to have seen it.
Being difficult for difficulty's sake doesn't work. The audience almost instinctively knows that's what you're doing and most will walk away. But if the challenge you pose to the expectations of your audience actually serves the story, I honestly wonder if there's a limit to how difficult or outside the box you can be.
There's a principle in improv that might also apply: if you do something and it fails to land, do it again. By the third time, the audience will love it simply by virtue of the fact you've taught them to expect it.
I wonder if challenging expectations is similar. If you're going to do it, don't go halfway. The more you push--again, assuming you're serving the story--the more the audience will rise to the challenge.
