VIDEO GAMES DON'T NEED SWORDS or dragons to be considered fantasies. From Animal Crossing's Stalk Market to Before the Storm's examination of causality, games grant players the opportunity to be someone or something extraordinary. That makes any game a vehicle for storytelling.

Venerable fighting-game franchises such as Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter have added campaigns that explicitly spell out the fates of their characters, but the real stories in fighting games are the language of combos, special attacks, basic moves, and timing—in summation, player knowledge and skill—that come together and result in victory or defeat. Ikaruga, developer Treasure's more puzzle-focused shoot-em-up, tells the story of the player's ability to dodge white or black bullets by switching between white and black forms, often with only heartbeats to swap back and forth as bullets fill the screen.

Before the Storm director Zak Garriss knows his skills at Ikaruga pale in comparison to the feats he's witnessed on Twitch and YouTube, but he still admires the shoot-em-up's ability to tell a unique kind of story. "If you can navigate that, that's a metaphor for chaos and the ability to perfectly navigate it compellingly," he says of Ikaruga's toughest challenges. "It speaks to sophistication. That's a little pretentious; it's not like any of us know what we're doing as game devs. We're on the threshold of a new kind of storytelling. But I think we are seeing a sophistication emerge."

Control lies at the heart of every videogame-powered fantasy. Games like Doom Eternal empower players by giving them the tools they need to lay waste to Hell. Before the Storm offers a different type of control: The ability to step inside Chloe's shoes and decide how she confronts anger and grief. That, too, is a type of empowerment. Chloe doesn't dodge bullets or slaughter demons, but she does give players a vehicle through which they may examine emotion.

"If the chief end isn't empowerment, what else could we ask?" Garriss says. "Let's talk about being 16 years old and grieving the loss of your dad; let's have a game that's all about. That's part of why I love doing what we get to do, and why Deck Nine believes this frontier of storytelling is unlike any other type of storytelling right now."

As game narratives have evolved, the definition of "game" has undergone more scrutiny. And deservedly so. "Game as a taxonomy is an insufficient use of language, now," Garriss believes. "The complexity of types of games is so complex that bundling them all into one group, and putting Pokémon next to Life is Strange next to Scrabble, is maybe an insufficient demarcation."

What is a story? Is it an account of something that has happened, or that will happen, or that could happen, with a three-act structure—beginning, middle, and end? If so, do games like Ikaruga and Mortal Kombat fit within its constraints? Perhaps story, in any form, is an apparatus capable of taking many forms (paintings, murals, music, dance, first-person shooters, interactive novels), the purpose of which is to show us how we should relate to one another and to better understand the forces that threaten to tear our world apart.

"The feelings we have inside, and things on the outside, that break us—story is a space to explore those things, and to look at how other people struggle with those forces. If that's your starting point, games can ask questions about the human experience," says Garriss.

Stories ask questions. Ikaruga asks, How much control can you exercise over this one element when everything else around you is out of your control? Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter ask, How quickly can you learn your opponent's weaknesses and exploit them, while at the same time being aware of and protecting your own?

Creators have a responsibility to think critically about the story they want to tell, and how best to tell it. Some stories are aspirational and fun. Doom gives players lots of weapons and sets them loose on demons who don't stand a chance against them. The success of Marvel's cinematic universe, the MCU, is predicated on the fantasy of superpowered beings smashing villains.

Real-life circumstances mix with each person's personality to determine what types of stories resonate with them. As the COVID-19 pandemic infested the globe, people sheltered in place and felt the bonds connecting them to their friends, family, and coworkers slacken. Human beings are social creatures; we need contact with other people. In lieu of that, we seek out stories to escape, or to better understand someone else's situation, or better understand our own circumstances.

Escapism is as valid a story construct as something weightier, Garriss believes. "Yeah, sometimes COVID-19 strikes, and we all need to be heroic and band together to survive. Games also afford the ability to interrogate in a more complex way. To show worlds and characters whose maps to extract from the chaos are harder to follow, the chaos more broken."

Life is Strange, its sequel, and its stormy prequel give players an escape. Life is Strange also presents opportunities to learn. Its world is ordered at times, disordered at others. Oftentimes, there are forces in Deck Nine's and Dontnod's universe as far beyond the player's control as the projectiles that swarm the screen in Ikaruga. In those moments, the world doesn't make sense. In those moments, Life is Strange games say to characters and to players, It's okay to not feel okay.

"For a few moments, you just want to smash a car, because life will do that to you," Garriss says. Chloe does just that in the junkyard scene of Before the Storm's debut episode. "Let yourself feel that way, but then, also remember that that's just one moment. In the next moment, you're going to meet someone new, and life's going to change. Maybe there's still hope, and hope could live not in the absence of the things that break us, but in the idea that despite those things, we can keep going."

"We were really surprised and humbled by personal emails from people who played Before the Storm, and of course there were people who really enjoyed how much fun it was," Litchford adds. "But the volume of people who reached out to talk to us about what this game and this story meant to them in their lives, how important it was to their relationships and its impact on those relationships—these people played the game with family members and friends, and it allowed them to connect in a way they never had."

Before the Storm was well-received by critics and fans, but crafting the game was only the first step in a two-part process. "We're fighting the clock, fighting sleep, fighting tech, any number of things," admits Garriss. "There's a magic that comes from that process. It's intense. When the dust settles, the second step is to take a step back, listen to fans, and see what's landing and what's not, and to be critical and thoughtful to learn from all that. The next time we start building a new world, we chase that love and passion, and hopefully we've learned lessons from fan response."

Deck Nine's developers cherish their connection with fans. They've noticed that when fans write to them, it's not to express sadness over the fate of Chloe and Rachel. It's to thank them for the opportunity to relate to characters in whom they can see themselves. From the chaos of those fictional lives arose the possibility that they too could aspire to something better.

"They spent so much time in Chloe's shoes being wounded," Garriss says. "The chance to also see Chloe experience joy was profound. You need that relationship [between sorrow and joy]. To offer that in a spectacular way just came together. Then in episode three, to round out a story that is fundamentally dark, the last episode goes to a very dark place in service to Chloe's larger story. I think fans felt a great deal of pain in watching that come crashing down. I think about that a lot."

Before the Storm's development had highs and lows. But that experience was aspirational for Deck Nine.

"I lost my father during the development of Before the Storm and my mother shortly afterward," Litchford says. "As a studio, in order to build Before the Storm, we had to bring together a diverse team of people who were dedicated to telling meaningful stories with engaging gameplay. The fan response and success of the game, and the team, really, gave us the confidence to feel like we belong in this space. We have meaningful stories to tell, and thanks to the response, we decided to take bigger risks with our projects going forward and trust our creative instincts. I'm really excited about what we're working on, and can't wait to share it with everyone."