I’ve been thinking about the stories that video games tell, the ones you find within them, and the way that some games lack any kind of storytelling in favor of simulating a person’s ability to choose to do whatever they want. All of these kinds of games have their own places in the broad field that is “video games,” but I was preparing myself to write about why I prefer games with stories to tell and had to set that blog post aside because I’m too worn down by life and everything to really get my thoughts together like that. I figured I’d write a Tired and Sad post instead and realized, as I dug around for a topic, that the game I’ve maybe written the most about is The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Which prompted the thought that maybe I prefer emergent storytelling since that game has almost no story to tell you. Not because you have the ability to choose things (well, you’ve got the ability to choose to do them or not, which is maybe the easiest choice to give to players), but because the whole game is so focused on creating little nuggets of story that only emerge as you play and explore and find them for yourself.

Breath of the Wild is a masterpiece of emergent storytelling, made all the more singular because this storytelling sits in the background of a relatively simple story that nevertheless adopts a premise that the series has played with before and goes further with it. Breath of the Wild is not the first time Link emerges into a ruined world that he failed to save. There’s an element of that in Ocarina of Time, as Link travels through time to a future where he is finally capable of succeeding but that he still failed to prevent in his original present, and in Majora’s Mask as you are forced to roll the clock back again and again, trying to prevent a cataclysm from coming to pass (rather than trying to clean up after one). Neither of them plants you in a world where things are ruined and all you can do is maybe get it right this time around, though. Each one is about this interplay of time travel, saving the world, taking action before disaster, and how a little kindness can be transformed over time into something much bigger and stronger, but only Breath of the Wild is about killing the big bad evil guy and every little scrap of loss, love, grief, hope, disaster, and life you run into along the way.

Which, as I think about it, is what I love about tabletop games. I love having a vague idea for a story, a quick premise to get the ball rolling and then chasing after it as it rolls down the uneven hill that is gameplay. All of my favorite moments from my own tabletop games are things that came out of nowhere, that sprung up as a result of random chance, and that occasionally altered the plot in a more dramatic way than I could have ever predicted or done by myself. A character death introducing a threat that would unfold slowly over years. A random thought from a player at a moment of extreme power completely altering the course of the entire world the game was playing in because of something that player had no way of knowing. The decision of my players to get focused on a tiny little splotch on the map I gave them that I didn’t even remember making. Story grows out of any fertile soil it can find, if you let it, and it getting attention from the entire group of players at the table inevitably makes it something better and more grand than you could have ever come up with on your own. These kinds of moments are why I love running tabletop games and try to avoid coming into them with too much preparation. They’re also why I want to be a player in a tabletop game as badly as I do. I want to be on the other end of moments like those and it’s not really like I can get them out of video games. For the most part, anyway.

Since I played Breath of the Wild and discovered just how much story can emerge from a video game designed to let you look for it, I’ve chased that particular high elsewhere. It was nowhere to be found in Tears of the Kingdom, unfortunately, but I’ve had more luck finding it more readily in other, smaller games. Like The Stanley Parable, for instance. The emergent narrative is different from what I got out of Breath of the Wild, of course, but the experience I had playing The Stanley Parable happened only because I played it through in the way that I did. If I’d played another way, I’d have had a very different experience. Hell, I know exactly how close I came to that since I ran into a space with a specific form factor early on that just didn’t seem to exist in my later playthroughs of the game. I’m still looking for more games that can give me a similar experience and I’ve got some games that might do it hanging out in my Steam library, but I’ll have to play them through before I know how they stack up.

Still, I don’t know if any of them could really compare to the experience of playing through Breath of the Wild for the first time. There’s very little in the universe that I know as well and nigh-completely as Legend of Zelda video game lore, so every little word and hint at something larger in BotW absolutely landed with me. The ruins of Lon Lon Ranch. Tiny little Makar Island with a single dead tree and an endless undead horde. Burned down homes. Once-mighty fallen trees. Discarded weapons and ruined bastions now overrun with monsters. Ruins with the faintest tinkling hints of a song from long ago. The rusted ruins of a battlefield where an army had its desperate last stand from a century ago that means nothing until, suddenly, it means everything. All of it is there for you to find and to build some kind of understanding and story out of as you weave through the ruins of the past in search of kindling you can use to ignite hope for the future as you gather a wisp of it from every person you pass who is just living the best life they can make for themselves. Someday, I hope I can run a tabletop game that lives up to that. It would be the accomplishment of a lifetime.