Something has only just occurred to me about Horizon Zero Dawn. The PlayStation 4 action adventure game, set in a post-apocalyptic world dominated by robotic dinosaurs, is thrilling and beautiful – that much is obvious right from the start. Also obvious is the fact that it borrows a lot of mechanics from the Far Cry series, and that it lacks the sheer depth and scope of role-playing adventures like Witcher 3 and Zelda: Breath of the Wild. But what dawned on me much more slowly was the fact that its wonderful lead protagonist, Aloy, is not so much motivated by some grand mission to save humanity (though that sort of comes into it), she is motivated by intellectual curiosity. She is fascinated by the mechanised monsters roaming the landscape and the ruins of an ancient technological culture that she first discovers as a child, and she wants to learn more. Her interactions with the world, the characters and the wider narrative within it, are all personal rather than heroic. In short, she acts like a human being.

For a very long time, a huge percentage of action-adventure games were about saving the planet – sometimes even the entire universe – from some monstrous invading evil. The stakes were almost always that high. There were many intermingled reasons for this. Partly, there’s the huge influence that fantasy and science-fiction masterworks have had on game developers – the overbearing presence of Lord of the Rings and Star Wars in the collective imaginative canon. But also, a lot of early video games drew their story-telling approach directly from mythic sources – the great legends, folk and fairy tales – because with limited visual and narrative story-telling tools available, these primal tales were the easiest to communicate. Hence, a lot of games about lone heroes triumphing against the odds – rendering Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces into interactive life.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Modern motion capture technology can accurately depict facial expressions as well as physical mannerisms increasing the visual authenticity of human characters. Photograph: Nic Delves-Broughton

But in the modern era, the capacity of mainstream games to tell more complex, emotional stories has grown enormously. The arrival of high-definition visuals, the development of intensely accurate facial motion capture, and the recruitment of Triple A acting and writing talent has led to the creation of characters who are recognisable, relatable and intrinsically human. And when you have characters and environments that the player can understand and recognise as authentic, the need for vast heroic narratives is lessened. We care enough about the protagonist to put them, rather than some vast cosmic good/evil struggle, at the centre of the experience.

Take Nathan Drake. Of course, his adventures always involve baddies and artefacts of great power that could do terrible damage in the wrong hands. But really, Drake is motivated by a keen curiosity about the world, about history, culture and – most importantly – his own role in that universe (symbolised by his belief that he’s a direct descendent of Sir Francis Drake, tying in his globe-trotting antics with a personal story of family and belonging).

Nathan Drake doesn’t want to save the world, he wants to find stuff out – being a hero is a side-product. This is the bit people often miss when they compare him with Indiana Jones: yes, both men run around the world punching bad guys and uncovering ancient evils, but that’s not their modus operandi. They want to learn, and if they can meet friends along the way, even better.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest In Uncharted 4, Nathan Drake is motivated by inquisitiveness and personal drama rather than heroic need to save the world. Photograph: Sony Computer Entertainment

This shift in focus from the mythic/epic to the personal seems to indicate a maturing medium – video games are gathering the confidence to think about conflict and motivation in more complicated ways. Of course, this all relates to mainstream games – independent titles have been doing all this for years without relying on state-of-the-art visual effects. But when the big-budget, popcorn flicks of the gaming world start to think about their characters as functioning humans, it says a lot about the creative status of the industry.

This is happening in lots of games at the moment. Resident Evil 7 abandoned the dim, dumb, action-focused macho antics of its immediate predecessors to bring us an enclosed, claustrophobic tale of marital collapse. Nier: Automata asks questions about the nature of humanity in a world dominated by synthetic beings. These games take place in epic wastelands and nightmarish rural expanses, but they tell contained stories that revel in personal meditations and concerns. Life is Strange isn’t really about the lead character’s apocalyptic visions, it’s about her friendship with Chloe. A lot of the interactions the game explores – a lot of its potency as an interactive experience – could exist and function without the whole time-unravelling over-plot. And of course, the rebooted Tomb Raider is about Lara proving herself worthy of her family name rather than shooting ancient gods.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Lara Croft grew as a character when the narrative scale of her games was drawn in around her. Photograph: Square Enix

Perhaps the most important example of this subtle shift in mainstream video game storytelling, away from grand mythical narratives and toward personal tales, is The Last of Us.

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Throughout the game, lead character Joel has two motivations: the need to save humanity by delivering Ellie to the science lab in Boston (which could lead to a vaccine against the apocalyptic zombifying fungal infection), and the need to rediscover his own humanity after years spent mourning the death of his daughter. When the duo finally reach the hospital, and Ellie is being prepped for an operation that will extract the infection but also kill her, Joel must face the fact that his two motivations are at odds – he wants to save the world but he’s also learned to love this girl giving him back his humanity. In one of the bravest and most important narrative decisions of the last decade, developer Naughty Dog forces the player to save Ellie, abandoning the “save the world” portion of his mission. In this moment, the game confirms itself as an intimate story of personal salvation.

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Of course, video games have always explored human themes, but these have often been en route to a “grander” victory. Horizon Zero Dawn and games like it, point toward an era of human drama in video games. This doesn’t necessarily mean it’s all going to be about relationships from now on – let’s not be reductive. In the culture war that the modern games industry has become, there are plenty of defensive voices that yell out against at any progressive ideas daring to look beyond “fun”, beyond “get the girl, kill the baddies”. Games aren’t going to drop violence for romance or reasoning. But maybe we’ll get more games in which the motivations are intricate and human, where the motivating factor isn’t an evil sorcerer or the imminent heat death of the universe.



We like our literary and cinematic heroes to be flawed, complicated and intelligent, and when they achieve this, we’re happy if they save their home, their lover or their job. It is refreshing to inhabit characters who are curious about life rather than obsessed with death and destruction. Frankly, I’d have followed Aloy on her quest even if all she wanted to do was find out what happened to the ancient civilisation that had fascinated her since she was a child. I didn’t need to save her tribe. To me, that makes not only a good, fun game but also a worthwhile experience. Fiction is partly about inhabiting the lives of other people and learning from that experience. I did not think that one day I would be doing this by firing arrows at giant metal monsters.