A Shared World

Video games are a major creative influence for how I structure my stories. I think that's true for other young writers too

My book about the history of Tulsa’s Greenwood District, Built From the Fire, releases on May 23. You can pre-order at your local independent bookstore, or at Amazon, Bookshop, Barnes & Noble, or Books-A-Million. I hope to see you on my upcoming book tour as well.

The other day I went to a book event here in Tulsa for Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah's new novel Chain Gang All-Stars. The book is about a near-future where private prisons turn inmates into gladiators who fight in deathmatches for their freedom. It’s grim, but both Adjei-Brenyah and the book itself have a comic streak which allow people a less intimidating entry point into this world. At the event, an audience member asked Adjei-Brenyah why he decided to put footnotes in a fictional work, and why those footnotes became increasingly adventurous as the story progressed (the notes go from being traditional factoids to full-blown mini-eulogies for fallen characters). The author cited an unexpected inspiration: the 2002 Nintendo GameCube game Metroid Prime. 

In Metroid Prime, you play as a bounty hunter named Samus Aran who’s exploring a mysterious, dangerous planet. You’re alone for the entire game, but Samus is equipped with a visor which allows her to scan objects in the world to gather clues about her surroundings. Some of the items she scans offer basic encyclopedic info dumps, but others reveal eerie prophecies written by an ancient race of extinct aliens. A few even unlock doors. Adjei-Brenyah said he liked how versatile scanning could be in the game, taking an extremely mechanical function--gathering environmental data--and turning it into something dynamic, unexpected, and a little strange. He brought the same approach to his footnotes. 

I loved hearing him talk through this, and not only because Metroid Prime is one of my favorite games. Video games played a huge role in how I structured Built From the Fire, both intentionally and subconsciously. This must be true of many more young writers my age (early 30’s, like Adjei-Brenyah), who spent their formative years immersed not just in games, but in game worlds. 

In their earliest days, video games were extremely linear--Mario runs from the start of the level to the end to save the princess. Today nonlinearity is king. Open world games like Elden Ring and The Witcher III let you complete goals in any order, customize your player’s fighting style and make decisions that impact the game’s overall plot, all in worlds that span entire continents. The old linear games are simple by today’s standards, and while the open world games are impressive, they tend to lack the direction and authorial craftsmanship of earlier titles. 

But there was an interesting middle ground between these two extremes, popular roughly between 1995 and 2005, when 2D gaming was being perfected and 3D gaming was just getting figured out. In that era, the best games were linear in structure but used clever design tricks to give the player the illusion that they were boundless, open-ended experiences. They provided just enough details about their worlds to let the player imagine the rest. They put thematic mood front and center because the technology was not yet available to make these worlds convincingly “cinematic.”  In effect, they were literary. 

The most literary of all was 2000’s The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask, another Nintendo classic that I played only a couple of years before I booted up Metroid Prime. As an 11-year-old, I remember finding Majora’s Mask creepy and difficult, both in increasing measure as the game progressed. I quit halfway through and didn’t return to it until college. But now it’s one of my all-time favorite creative works. This game does worldbuilding better than any other, and I draw a lot of inspiration from it as a writer. 

In Majora’s Mask, you play as a hero who is trapped in a strange, carnivalesque city called Clock Town. A moon with a haunting Cheshire grin looms above you; it is going to crash into the city and destroy the world in three days. You are granted certain powers to try and stop it, including the ability to travel back in time and relive the three days before Armageddon again and again. The game drips with dramatic irony--you, the player, are the only person who knows the world’s fate, and while some people in Clock Town are attuned to the looming threat (just look up!), others are completely oblivious. 

Clock Town, the main setting of the 2000 video game The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask

Nintendo could have produced a very cynical game with this setup, but Majora’s Mask has a lot of heart, and a lot of hope. The game runs on two parallel tracks. There is an “A” plot where you are doing very traditional video game tasks: exploring dungeons, slaying monsters, and so forth, while trying to stop the main villain. But the “B” plot in the game is just as important: learning about the townsfolk of Clock Town and helping them solve their personal problems. A star-crossed couple tries to find their way back into each other’s arms before it’s too late; the mailman trains to run the most efficient postal route through the city; a father mourns the loss of his son in the events leading up to the moon crash. There’s both whimsy and heartbreak in these smaller stories, but they’re all part of what you’d find behind closed doors in any real neighborhood.

In most games, these “B plot” activities, known as side quests, are treated as afterthoughts. But in Majora’s Mask, they grant you additional powers which help you defeat the final boss. Much more important to me is that these quests give you a sense of the color, texture, and humanity of Clock Town. They make it feel like a town actually worth saving.

Built From the Fire has a lot of people in it--real people, who I don’t mean to diminish by comparing them to video game characters. But the sprawl of the book is something I expect people to comment on, and early readers have already been asking me how I was able to keep so many plotlines and themes in the air at the same time. They’ve asked how I can combine so many disparate parts into a coherent whole. I think this upbringing in video games--specifically narrow-but-deep games like Majora’s Mask--is part of the calculus. 

You have to spend time in Greenwood to really understand the tragedy of what was lost here, in a way that extends beyond kneejerk sympathy for a traumatic event. So I’ve taken us down to the ground-level, to the shotgun houses, the regal hotels, the grimy juke joints, the glittering theaters. I’ve nestled in small tragic stories and hopeful asides, to give a sense of that ebb and flow that we all feel in our communities day to day. 

In video games like Majora’s Mask, the knowledge you gain about how the characters live their lives changes your perception of the world over time. I hope Built From the Fire can have a similar effect. We revisit Greenwood Avenue so many times in this book--from its origins as an unpaved road crowded with squeaky horse-drawn wagons in the 1910’s to the day the President of the United States walked down the street in 2021. There are three chapters in this book about what unfolded on Greenwood Avenue during the race massacre. But here, the “B plot” is just as important as the “A plot.” You cannot truly understand the pain of Greenwood in turmoil unless you’ve witnessed the pleasure of Greenwood at rest. This applies to later eras, too. I spent a lot of time diving into the liveliness of Greenwood’s second heyday before returning to the “A plot”: ongoing efforts to destroy the neighborhood, through policies such as urban renewal and interstate construction. 

Immersion is powerful--it’s the core appeal of not only video games, but of great books, films, and television shows. I view it as a first step toward genuine connection. It’s more important to me that you feel this place than that you exit this story with a particular worldview or agenda. I cannot control how you choose to organize your politics, but I think understanding this place on a personal level, along with the black communities it mirrors, is the beginning of undoing the damage that has been wrought here. Let’s take a first step of being together in this space, whether in person or on the page. 

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