The problem with reality is that it doesn’t have a plot.
We like to imagine it does. After all, what are we but the protagonists of our own lives? But anyone who’s ever taken a course on “The Causes of (insert war here)” or had passionate, possibly drunk late-night arguments about “What if X thing happened instead of Y” knows that life is messy and full of inconsistencies. Tiny mistakes change the course of history. Random coincidences and singular bad decisions snowball into giant disasters.
The Chernobyl meltdown is a good example of this. There’s no “plot” to the Chernobyl story: no arc, no theme, no single protagonist. There wasn’t even a villain, unless you count state bureaucracy and inefficiency. Many small, independent issues added up: a delayed safety test, an inexperienced night shift handling a procedure they’d never done before, a flaw in the system they didn’t even know about, cost-cutting here and there. A few details here and a few details there until KABOOM, and you’re left picking pieces of radioactive debris off the roof and wondering what happened.
In a book or a movie, something like Chernobyl would need a more coherent through-line. We’d need a structure, acts, a theme to focus on and keep us going. Stories have to have a point.
The recent “Chernobyl” miniseries managed to get through the problem by focusing on individual character arcs. “Lies” and “bureaucracy” were the overarching enemy, the symptom of a system rotten to the core. The character’s arcs were about discovering what happened and making a public statement, to counteract the lies.
But that wasn’t quite enough to make the story work. They needed a temporal villain, a man with a face that we could hate: “lies” are too abstract for something like this. So the series creators wrote shift lead Anatoly Dyatlov as a bad boss who pushed his stressed subordinates to the breaking point and thus shouldered much of the blame for the disaster.
When you’re writing fiction, being too realistic is a bad idea. Readers need plot and structure because those things make a story satisfying: they have logic, B follows A, and we get the enjoyment of setup and payoff. If we tell a story where everything is chaos, nothing makes sense, the real villain doesn’t appear until the last minute, and the whole thing snowballs simply because a few too many people made a bunch of unconnected mistakes … well, it’s realistic, but it’s also unsatisfying.
Which brings me to “Dragon Age 2.”
These days, DA2 is pretty much considered the redheaded stepchild of the Dragon Age franchise. Which is fair: the game was a rushed sequel that didn’t seem sure what it was doing, where it was going, or what its focus was. Pieces are missing; B doesn’t always follow A; and your protagonist actually has very little effect on the outcome of the story, barring which of the factions they support. Environments are limited. The story is small.
But I will go to bat for this one, because Dragon Age 2 may be the most realistic video game I’ve ever played. The jumbled approach and nonsensical plot accidentally ends up mirroring many real-world historical scenarios. And I find it very interesting to look at, if only as an illustration of the difference between plotted fiction and plotless reality, and how reality is unrealistic.
Note: You don’t have to be a Dragon Age fan to read this essay. Believe me, I will explain everything in exhaustive TL;DR. Spoiler warning!
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