Gaming Systems as Storytelling Metaphors

I think a lot about storytelling because I write a lot and I’m a huge small-talker. I’ll chat your ear off for hours about the most mundane stuff because I find that I can find something passionate inside of the subjects. That’s why I think that in many videogames, the very systems of the game itself are metaphors for storytelling. What inspired this line of thinking in me was the SNES classic RPG (and greatest game of all time, I’ll fight over it) Chrono Trigger.

In Chrono Trigger you have standard RPG game engine tropes; HP or Hit Points as a way of tackling your characters remaining health, MP or Magic (or Mana) Points as your way of traditionally metering your character’s ability to cast magic spells. Chrono Trigger has something I’d rarely seen in games before it though; not all your “spells” were magical. Your characters can use extra-normal abilities that AREN’T magical in nature. Some are seemingly spiritual (one character has the ability to heal people by praying), some are more chi or ki based a la Dragonball Z (the art director for CT IS Akira Toriyama), and another character uses a variety of trick devices, inventions and weapons to do her special attacks. This ended up leaving the game referring to ALL extra-normal powers as Techs, short for Techniques. And they likely left MP as MP and not TP because the engine was already sort of based on Secret of Mana and Final Fantasy and those were what people were most familiar with.

So that’s the crux of the first part of this, that MP is a story telling metaphor and simplification for any extra-normal powers and abilities characters have under one umbrella. In the case of the inventor girl, it could be a battery pack for her devices, or available fuel left in her various tanks. In the case of the praying girl it could be a measurement of her faith and how connected she feels to her gods or church. In the case of the main character’s attacks it could be a metaphor for putting a metric on feelings of fatigue, whatever.

For health this could not only be a measurement of physical damage, but also just pain, or even ennui and emotional stress. Which would explain how certain attacks that logically wouldn’t cause harm can still lower HP and lead to a character falling unconscious. These metaphors don’t just apply to Chrono Trigger, but many other RPGs and videogames in general.

Samus Aran in Metroid for example; I posit she doesn’t have a “life bar” per se, but more likely a power bar for a structural integrity field that holds her power suit together and is drained by being shorted out by damage or contact with enemies (perhaps damage on enemy contact has to do with completing or shorting out the circuit). That explains how her suit can look intact up with no damage up until she’s killed, and it explodes. This may actually have been addressed in the universe, but I’ve barely played any 3D Metroid games.

Back to RPGs though, this would also explain why so many varied items can restore health or recharge MP. Eating can restore HP and MP, sleeping can do it too. 2 functions necessary for life it would make sense. Many times, games have nebulous “magic potions” so those aren’t really something we can comment beyond “a wizard did it”, but still other games actually have “painkillers” or “medicine” to restore health. Painkillers can’t instantly heal wounds, but they can rapidly relieve pain, pointing to HP being a metaphor for general wellbeing.