Trigger Happy
168
model, indeed, for all detective fiction: whodunit is the
diachronic story, while the process of investigation is
the synchronic story.) In general, because a story in any
medium must limit itself to a finite period of time, and
cannot tell the entire history of the universe leading up
to the events it describes, it must nearly always refer to
some diachronic story—old Hamlet was murdered
while asleep in the garden; a Jedi turned to the Dark
Side and the Empire grew
22
—in the process of
elaborating the synchronic one.
What does this mean for videogames? Well, it turns
out that the delicate balance of story types is skewed in
videogames: it is very heavily weighted toward the
diachronic. Perhaps surprisingly, videogames have
nearly always had a back story, however simple.
Robotron acquits itself diachronically with a post-
nuclear fable about evil machines and saving the last
human family; Doom’s back story is that the moon has
been invaded by aliens; Donkey Kong is predicated on
a princess’s kidnapping.
_________________
22 The theoretical problem with George Lucas’s prequels is exactly that
they plan to elaborate synchronically what was so suggestively mythical in
the back story of the original
Star Wars
films: how Anakin Skywalker
became Darth Vader.
