I have the honour of writing the last article to be published on Bullet Points in 2017 and although we try to focus on the month’s specific game, because of the timing here, I’m given to reflecting on an increasingly prevalent videogame trend with Destiny merely as a discussional springboard. In the first Destiny, story and information about the game’s fictional world are delivered via collectable “Grimoire Cards”; upon completing a mission, attaining a rank, or defeating a prized enemy, you get a Card and then go onto developer Bungie’s website and punch in your account details to access the Card’s material. Gathering and accessing a story in this way, like one would a rare weapon or unlocked character outfit, epitomises an unfortunate conflation of videogame mechanics and videogame tone. Destiny is a broad and messy text, whereby players may complete significant, story-related sections in varying order, and for that reason perhaps belies typical dramatic structure. But turning background information—and by extension tone, mood, ambience—into something which is procedurally collected reduces the game world’s power, or more specifically, a sense that the world is something living and sensory that you can understand just by walking around, rather than dispassionate reading. By virtue of being potential rewards, potential rewards which you have to make an extra, outside-of-game effort to fully access, the details in the Grimoire Cards are ignorable. We’re accustomed to optional methods of playing a videogame. In fact, the amount of options available—the quantity of approaches that you can just ignore—is synonymous with a game’s quality and value for money: the availability of stealthy, aggressive, sniping, and tankish player builds in Destiny, and the opportunity to select one and cultivate your character and your game experience to be exclusively yours, is central to the games’ appeal. But when this dynamic extends into world-building, set-dressing, backgrounding, etc., it threatens to set a precedent. The contents of the Grimoire Cards are frankly frivolous and owing to interpretation and individuated perspective, to an extent, people will always take from games what they want to take. But lore, as it’s offered in Destiny, like a difficult Raid or a hidden weapon, threatens to alter players’ and more fundamentally game-makers’ attitudes to writing. We, meaning videogame critics, already have a hard enough time convincing our readers—sometimes even our editors—there might be more to, say, Ghost Recon Wildlands than an enjoyable, technically impressive squad shooter. Should we reach a point where the material required to form opinions and interpretations is literally separated from the game itself and either the beautiful or ugly undertones of a game are wholly optional, that work, which I seriously think is vital for the progression of something, if I can’t say exactly what that something is, will become more difficult. It sounds vaguely hysterical. But considering the pushback you tend to receive when you discuss Uncharted as a story about masculinity, and that in today’s ludicrously prohibitive market game designers have to try and please everyone so as to charter the biggest consumer base possible, it isn’t hard to imagine Destiny’s approach to fantasy lore, story beats, and thematic elements brought to other games pertaining to racism, politics, sex, and other things that actually matter. Consider these topics, likewise quarantined as optional extras. When videogames have nurtured an audience that believes choice and their own expression are of formal, paramount importance, “this game discusses racism in America” becomes a less enticing prospect than “this game discusses racism in America if you want”. Lore, of this collectible kind, the kind that is experienced completely at players’ leisure, is congruent with videogame mechanics, structure, and other in-game material. But it isn’t congruent to what I—and I imagine a lot of other people, involved in all aspects of videogame culture—would declaim is videogames’ current artistic aspiration: to almost didactically, certainly clearly and unapologetically, say things. And now, if you’ll follow me into the outer reaches of grandiosity, “lore” undermines the essence of storytelling. If story, potentially, has been detrimentally conflated with the videogamic principles of choice and collection, it’s also a means of exercising videogame players’ and videogame makers’ propensity for more. I’m not qualified to give it, and there’s no holistic definition for how story should always be written, but if brevity is the soul of wit then lore is the anti-soul, protracting and billowing game stories until everything within them becomes equally inane. In the case of Destiny, the object of lore is not a greater understanding of anything, really, beyond the world of the game—laced with proper nouns and obscure fictional facts (“The Kell is screaming inches from my face . . . I used my flaming gun on those three Taken outside the obelisk”) it mainly exists, like a higher player level or better gun, to be gained. Lore might increase your understanding of Destiny’s world, in turn allowing you to feel more engaged and enveloped by it, in turn adding to your enjoyment, and therefore lore might be credited with having some kind of emotional, experiential qualities. But considering how games are marketed and received, based on amount of hours available to play, amount of “content” to consume, and amount of virtual space to be explored, lore, owing to its general vapidness in disproportionate ratio to its vast quantity, starts to feel like just another selling point; a way for game-makers to offer value-for-money, and game players to feel like they’re getting value-for-money, on the familiar terms of more always equalling better. Rather than significantly nourish the imagination, lore of the Destiny kind works simply to fill it. Lore is an extension of the games-as-a-service paradigm, another quantifiable but perpetually incompletable and incomprehensible thing that impels you to keep playing Destiny in lieu of anything else. Stories, surely, have to end. Resolutions have to be reached. The end of the journey is also the pay-off. Lore, by its nature, extends indefinitely. It is the pink dragon of writing. Be it experience points, character levels, or even gold rings, we’re accustomed to equating having more with a better, “higher” game experience. Under the rubrics of story and providing a more vital setting, lore exploits this hardwired gaming mentality; the concept of fiction itself is bastardised, and games are judged by the quantity of lore rather than the quality.

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Ed Smith contributes to Edge, Rolling Stone, Paste, GamesTM, and PCGamesN.