...Wow, that title sounds high-brow.
Games with themes, I find, are actually rarer than you might think, I find. Amongst even the games that are considered to have good writing, it's very rare that you can find games that manage to pull off a consistent theme without them incessantly quoting the Bible to give the impression of thematic depth without actually having it (looking at you, ME2, Fallout 3).
I suppose it struck me when I was playing Deus Ex: Human Revolution while having to write a paper for Ancient History just how much the themes and symbolism in Human Revolution are in the forefront over the actual story. While the actual story itself is decent, if not altogether amazing, it's the thematic element that ends up standing out strongly. Extra Credits already did this game to death, though, so I'm just going to touch up on something I think they missed:
So, Deus Ex Machine means "God from the machine" and refers to the ancient Greek tradition of lowering a god character onto the scene to sort everything out at the end of the third act. When you think about it, the end of Human Revolution, weak as it is, has Adam Jensen taking on this role. When the god character was lowered onto the stage in ancient Greece, it was also to reinforce the central moral of the story, the axis around which the entire story turns, and at the end of Human Revolution, Adam (and by extension, the player) gets to choose the moral: Is transhuman augmentation really dangerous? If we really want to proceed with this field, should it be mitigated by government, or can we trust the corporate powers to police it themselves? At the very end, Adam has transcended from partly transhuman to a fully transhuman, acting as JC Denton did in the original game as the "New Man" who has to sort out the fate of the old species he's left behind.
Another game which surprised me with the amount of thematic depth it carried was Fallout: New Vegas. I'm going to split this one up into two pieces as well, main game and DLC:
A big criticism from people who liked Fallout 3 when describing New Vegas is that it doesn't really feel "post-apocalyptic". It feels too civilized, too organized to be the true post-apocalypse. And truth be told, I think that's kind of the point. It's been 200 years since the boms fell. Humanity's started advancing again. Things have started to roll again. People are organizing themselves, settling down, rebuilding civilization in a way that (hopefully) won't cause another "hard reset" through a nuclear holocaust.
The DLC's all carry a common theme, and Dead Money even makes it abundantly clear. All of the DLC's are about letting go. In Dead Money, Christine, Dean and Dog/God all have something they need to let go of. Elijah, the main villain, ultimately fails because he could not let go of the Sierra Madre. And by making the gold bars hideously heavy, the player is also forced to let go of the promises of the Sierra Madre's riches and make off with what he/she can carry. In Honest Hearts, Joshua Graham needs to learn to let go of his hatred of KAY-SAR and the zealous hatred he carries in his heart, all the pent-up yearning for vengeance that he masks behind the pretense of being a righteous crusader. The Think Tank have to let go of Big Mountain and the Old World, and need to learn how to embrace the New World that's coming and is explored throughout the main game. Ulysses, the final antagonist of Lonesome Road, needs to let go of his hatred of the player and his attachment to the bombed, ruined remnants of the Divide, as well as his dreams of building a nation of his own.
So, what games have you played, recently or long ago, that had a theme that you could really dig into/really resonated with you/had a theme at all?
Games with themes, I find, are actually rarer than you might think, I find. Amongst even the games that are considered to have good writing, it's very rare that you can find games that manage to pull off a consistent theme without them incessantly quoting the Bible to give the impression of thematic depth without actually having it (looking at you, ME2, Fallout 3).
I suppose it struck me when I was playing Deus Ex: Human Revolution while having to write a paper for Ancient History just how much the themes and symbolism in Human Revolution are in the forefront over the actual story. While the actual story itself is decent, if not altogether amazing, it's the thematic element that ends up standing out strongly. Extra Credits already did this game to death, though, so I'm just going to touch up on something I think they missed:
So, Deus Ex Machine means "God from the machine" and refers to the ancient Greek tradition of lowering a god character onto the scene to sort everything out at the end of the third act. When you think about it, the end of Human Revolution, weak as it is, has Adam Jensen taking on this role. When the god character was lowered onto the stage in ancient Greece, it was also to reinforce the central moral of the story, the axis around which the entire story turns, and at the end of Human Revolution, Adam (and by extension, the player) gets to choose the moral: Is transhuman augmentation really dangerous? If we really want to proceed with this field, should it be mitigated by government, or can we trust the corporate powers to police it themselves? At the very end, Adam has transcended from partly transhuman to a fully transhuman, acting as JC Denton did in the original game as the "New Man" who has to sort out the fate of the old species he's left behind.
Another game which surprised me with the amount of thematic depth it carried was Fallout: New Vegas. I'm going to split this one up into two pieces as well, main game and DLC:
A big criticism from people who liked Fallout 3 when describing New Vegas is that it doesn't really feel "post-apocalyptic". It feels too civilized, too organized to be the true post-apocalypse. And truth be told, I think that's kind of the point. It's been 200 years since the boms fell. Humanity's started advancing again. Things have started to roll again. People are organizing themselves, settling down, rebuilding civilization in a way that (hopefully) won't cause another "hard reset" through a nuclear holocaust.
The DLC's all carry a common theme, and Dead Money even makes it abundantly clear. All of the DLC's are about letting go. In Dead Money, Christine, Dean and Dog/God all have something they need to let go of. Elijah, the main villain, ultimately fails because he could not let go of the Sierra Madre. And by making the gold bars hideously heavy, the player is also forced to let go of the promises of the Sierra Madre's riches and make off with what he/she can carry. In Honest Hearts, Joshua Graham needs to learn to let go of his hatred of KAY-SAR and the zealous hatred he carries in his heart, all the pent-up yearning for vengeance that he masks behind the pretense of being a righteous crusader. The Think Tank have to let go of Big Mountain and the Old World, and need to learn how to embrace the New World that's coming and is explored throughout the main game. Ulysses, the final antagonist of Lonesome Road, needs to let go of his hatred of the player and his attachment to the bombed, ruined remnants of the Divide, as well as his dreams of building a nation of his own.
So, what games have you played, recently or long ago, that had a theme that you could really dig into/really resonated with you/had a theme at all?
