The Emotional Impact of Storytelling
- Caitlin McDonough
- Feb 4, 2021
- 3 min read
Keywords: media, stories, storytelling, video games, favorite characters
What makes your favorite movie your favorite? What about your favorite book or video game? Is it the actors in it? The special effects or animation? The witty humor in the dialogue?
Here I could say, “It’s probably none of those things! It’s the well-organized plot of the story that makes it your favorite,” but that wouldn’t be true. In fact, storytelling is made up of all of these factors and more. The voices and faces that play characters, the lighting and colors of scenes, the writing and narration – these are all a part of storytelling, especially in our digital age, and these subtle details can drastically change the way a story is interpreted.
As a storytelling species, we can’t resist engaging stories across different media. Much of our culture and lives revolve around interpreting stories. Whether you enjoy watching or reading the news, bingeing television shows about doctors falling in love, or playing video games that call into question the morality of a character’s actions, you’re deeply invested in the stories you love. But why do we love these stories?
The ending of my favorite movie, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, 2012
We love stories that engage our emotions, maybe emotions we don’t get to feel very often. Maybe your grandfather enjoys watching the news because he feels a glimmer of hope when he sees a positive story between the tragedies and crimes. Maybe your mother loves Criminal Minds and crime novels because she gets to feel like a brilliant detective who always fights for good, and she gets to forget her mundane job as a bank teller. Maybe you love video games that have a bit of violence in them – not because you’re a violent person – but because the characters you control have to deal with violence in their daily lives, such as in The Last of Us series, or make interesting moral choices, like in Telltale Games’ The Walking Dead series.
Storytelling is important to emotional growth as human beings, and they inspire us to create our own stories or communicate with each other in, as Henry Jenkins calls it, a participatory culture. In a digital age, we are constantly engaged in this participatory culture though sharing media, messaging, and creating our own content in response to media. Media participants can be quiet consumers that don’t like or comment on posts, but constantly share videos and songs with their friends. Or they might be an aspiring video editor who makes edits to music of their favorite game characters.
Through various forms of media, we carry stories to each other and create new ones out of them. We insert ourselves into worlds of fantasy through art and roleplay, and we do it even if it feels embarrassing because we enjoy it so much. We create cultures of nerds and geeks and gamers that just love telling stories for the fun of it, not for any financial gain. We get inspired by media, so inspired that we want to make it our livelihood, through animating, coding, or writing ourselves.
A (spoiler-free) scene from my favorite TV show, Mr. Robot, 2015-2019
Storytelling looks a lot different than it did when the television first came out, and it’s much different than when the printing press was invented. However, we’re still telling the same stories. Stories of love and loss sit on the shelves of Barnes and Noble, stories of superpowered heroes fighting against all odds reach the big screens of our [empty] movie theaters, and stories of war, choice, and morality touch us through the controllers at our fingertips.
Personally, my favorite stories are the ones that make me think and feel. Ones where I’m represented on the screen or in the text. Ones that say what I’ve always felt but could never put to words. Ones where I cry because I feel like I truly know the characters and their souls.
Not all stories will do that to you. But as a writer, I strive to be inspired by all stories and write my own that impact people in the same way my favorite stories impact me.
A scene from my favorite video game series, The Last of Us Part 2, 2020
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