Video Games And Canon, or, The Lack Thereof

I'm supposed to be writing a short piece on Plato, but instead I'm going to talk about two subjects I enjoy far more, namely Stars Wars and videogames.

I actually have a couple SW related posts bouncing lazily around my skull, but this one is short and relevant to what I'm currently doing.

Anyway, Star Wars. I like Star Wars. I like the stories, I know the canon well, I have enjoyed and continued to enjoy the universe in its entirety, despite various ups and downs (and forcibly ignoring the travesty that is Karin Travess, may a Sarlacc consume her). I like videogames a lot too, as the number of posts on this site will attest. I don't think they work well together as a general rule, though, specifically when it involves story-telling.

For instance, KotOR. I'll admit I've never played through either game completely, but what I did play didn't impress me very much. For starts, the time period is kind of boring to me in terms of the SW continuity, and in addition they had to make things 2000 or whatever BANH (before A New Hope) but still maintain the Star Wars feel, which ends up being ANH with different names and none of the same characters. It would have been interesting if they had seriously messed with the look or feel of the universe... but they didn't, so I for one just was wondering where everything I know was. I understand why they did it, since it gives them far freer rein in what stories to tell and what to do with the characters, but I kind of ignore it for the same reason that I ignore the series set hundreds of years after the Yuuzhan Vong war.

Another example are the two Battlefront games. While being excellent games, they didn't make a strong attempt to be canon, and I think they gained from it. While I'll always be annoyed at things like using thermal detonators as grenades, it tried to be a good, solid shooter, and succeeded. Things like Battlefield 1942 didn't need much of a story, just a good background to set the war in, and this succeeded.

Another example is Super Bombad Racing. I'm not really gonna touch that.

Anyway, this brings me to the latest point, where I started today playing the Force Unleashed. This is where canonicity really rears its head. For starters, the first level is on Kashyyyk. On the ground.

Admittedly, a couple other games and the movie itself also featured ground on Kashyyyk. But in canon, you don't go to ground level. If you're there, you're dead and being eaten by giant predators. But to serve   a videogame setting, it's on the ground. Likewise you get Wookies dying in droves, despite how long lived and relatively rare offspring are. The game moves on to things like taking multiple lightsaber slashes to kill a single human, Force powers always having a physical appearance, and a Jedi Master sacrificing his entire battalion to draw out a Force user.

I get it, videogames need certain liberties in order to function. If you could always one-hit kill with a lightsaber, it would get somewhat old quickly. But then I hear things about the canon of these kind of games being contested, and I just want to say: No. They're no canon. They're games. In the same way that I view the Blood Angels as a fun fan Chapter that Relic made up, or even how a football team winning in Madden 200x doesn't represent real life, any videogame drawn from an outside canon is probably not actually going to follow the canon well, and I will likely not buy into it.

Videogames need certain parameters to work, and often this conflicts with the universe lore. While this isn't a problem in and of itself, when you try to force a videogame that simple conflicts into canon, then you have problems. I think the solution is to (again only for series not originating in videogames) simply leave the games as a fun side note, and leave the canon to books, movies, and other mediums.

-HTMC