THEMES AS A STANDARD

It depends on the scope of a work. My games usually have some kind of theme or main emotional idea, mostly just to keep the narrative somewhat cohesive and help me focus on atmosphere; I use it to inform how mechanics and aesthetics work.

My webcomic is built less around a theme and more just a combo of "this is cool" and following the character progression of and relationship between the two protags. There's bits that can be seen as themes, but they're really more incidental.

It's generally a good idea to have some sort of theme or at least connecting element, just so your whole work coheres nicely. It's also helpful in circumstances where you're not sure where to go, or if you're trying to edit things down, since it gives a good metric of what to keep and what to throw out.

Without a theme in a narrative, you essentially have a rambling mess. I love how Libby uses Twilight as an example of how stories don't need themes, while at the same time, Twilight is nearly an unreadable mess (speaking as someone who's read it), to anyone but 13-year-old girls who swoon over shirtless undead. Let me give a counter example: Eragon.

With Eragon, you have bad narrative, largely directionless and rambling storytelling, circumstances that completely forego common sense, and basic lack of understanding of natural science (dragon can't land because wings are caught in wind: yeah, that's not how wings work), but it works because it manages to maintain a consistent theme throughout. No matter how ridiculous the story gets, the mind is continually drawn to the all important quest. The story never forgets it, and no matter what tangent it goes off on, it is constantly reminding you that the world needs saving.

Meanwhile, Twilight only appeals to a very specific type of audience...the kind of audience that writes Fifty Shades of Grey. When you have a thousand page book that's essentially about a girl living in a back woods community that has to choose between bestiality and necrophilia, you better believe it's gone off on a tangent. And what a tangent it goes off on! It throws Bella in the middle of this war that ordinary people know nothing about and HAS ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO DO WITH THE STORY BEING TOLD! NOTHING! It's literally there only to have this big War and Peace idea of love torn by war, two people on the wrong side of the tracks, and ultimately, it does nothing to affect the outcome of the story. Every twist, every sense of danger, is just there as filler to maintain suspense until the happy ending. Good grief, the idiot girl fucking commits suicide, and she still ends up with her happily ever after...with an abusive husband and a daughter in hiding. There's even finally a huge battle where everyone dies: PSYCHE! Newsflash: it's not a twist if it doesn't change the story!

Twilight suffers from a lack of theme. It's basically a romance with a fantasy story tacked on as an afterthought. It has little focus. How it has such I following, I can't even guess. I had to force myself through the books. I mean, they weren't eyebleeding. They were just so fucking dull and boring.

Another example, aside from Eragon, where theme keeps an unwieldy story interesting is the Harry Potter series. We all love them, or most of us anyway, but just stop and take a look at poorly conceived much of it is. Voldemort spends most of his time talking about killing Harry instead of actually doing it. We have an inept school staff that can't keep the school safe and don't really teach anything anyway, and even if they did, there are no maths, no history, basic grammar education. We have a school where adults will emerge with a 10-year-old's comprehension of history. The premise is absurd, not to mention the fact Rowling is an human exposition fairy. I mean, what enemies, near the end of a battle have a pages long conversation before the final fight? Again, we forgive these failings because the set dressing is accompanied by consistent, focused themes that we can all relate to.

I can think of very few examples of successful stories that lacked themes, other than Twilight. Jupiter Ascending was a spectacular wreck. After Earth will be famous for being a pathetic excuse for a film. Terminator: Genesys. These are all films that strayed from their themes and failed spectacularly because of it. All any of them had to do was maintain their focus! Even Twilight could have been good if Meyer had simply made the vampire war lastingly relevant to Bella's love life.

So, yeah, I'm going to have say that theme is absolutely mandatory in a fictional narrative.

Romance by itself isn't a theme. Not a useful one anyway. It's way too general. I would say one of the themes of FF8 is the memory of lost romance. Another theme is the inability to go back to the way things were. Both of these are, of course, related to multiple plot points that are explored in different ways as the game goes on - the game includes time travel where the heroes can't actually change anything, memory loss among people who shared a childhood together, a second generation of lovers who attempt to pick up where their parents failed.

We fill our games with enemies, monsters, demons. In a well formed game, every enemy is an embodiment of the game's thematic conflict - physical form given to dark emotions, or to temptations, or to obstacles standing in the way of burning desires. Letting the player battle them in our games is a way of showing that they can be overcome - of providing that experience firsthand to the audience.

The way the player battles should reflect on the theme too. Are these enemies defeated quickly, dispatched in rapid succession, showing that momentum will carry you forward through the ordeal? Or does the player need to move slowly and cautiously to avoid being overwhelmed? Are the enemies - the representations of what we're fighting against - blocking the player's path, or can they be avoided, or does the player need to stop moving forward and seek them out? What happens when the player loses? Can they pick themselves right back up, or do they need to make a bargain, or do they lose a great deal of progress towards their goal?

In Final Fantasy 8, the heroes fight against time compression, trying to move forward in their own lives despite everything else trying to pull them away. The enemies created by the sorceresses serve as representations of the concept of inability to escape the past. The human Galbadian enemies serve as representatives of a world trying to hold lovers apart. The powers utilized by the heroes literally erase the heroes' memories as the cost of moving forward. Enemies are usually dispatched quickly but return over and over, endlessly. If the player wishes, they can linger on a memory, trying to draw power from it, but only to a point; eventually they have to leave it behind.

These kinds of themes are actually common in games if you know how to look for them. It's more difficult and rare in a video game to create a tragic theme, to tell a story of a broken world that isn't fixable. Due to the nature of the medium, the player in a video game usually has to be able to win. But I don't always like those happy endings. I don't think what they represent is the only theme worth exploring. I want to explore that darkness, not simply stomp it down. The theme I'm interested in is one of a world filled with darkness, and our attempt not to defeat it but to accept that we're inexorably part of it. I think that's why I'm drawn to games where the player becomes the demon. Games like Warcraft 3, Undertale, Shin Megami Tensei, Twilight Princess. One of my own games Vindication explores this theme in a lame, juvenile way. I'd like to do a better job in the future.

Is this the most pretentious fucking post I've made so far in 2016? Yes, but I hope it doesn't stay that way for long. I live to outdo myself.

Sorry breh that's not really pretentious, just good sense.

Well, theme is definitely useful to me for keeping focus. If I can keep focussed on whatever it is in a particular story, I can identify excess characters or plotlines. Maintaining a manageable scope for a game is a priority so using a theme to build everything around certainly helps that.

LockeZ
These kinds of themes are actually common in games if you know how to look for them. It's more difficult and rare in a video game to create a tragic theme, to tell a story of a broken world that isn't fixable. Due to the nature of the medium, the player in a video game usually has to be able to win. But I don't always like those happy endings. I don't think what they represent is the only theme worth exploring. I want to explore that darkness, not simply stomp it down. The theme I'm interested in is one of a world filled with darkness, and our attempt not to defeat it but to accept that we're inexorably part of it. I think that's why I'm drawn to games where the player becomes the demon. Games like Warcraft 3, Undertale, Shin Megami Tensei, Twilight Princess.

I like this idea a whole lot, by the by.

I always start with the theme in mind when I sit down to write something. If you know what story you want to tell, that's great, but I find that stories that just tell stories tend to get sidetracked a lot and eventually you lose focus of the central idea of the narrative. To counter this, I usually ask myself, "What's the point of this story? Why am I spending the time to write this? Why would others spend the time to read/play this?" If something doesn't jive with the central theme of the story, I usually scrap it.

To me, a theme is a foundation of a story, not the be all/end all. There can be many sub themes and concepts in a work, but if they don't contribute something to the overall narrative as a whole, then it's less a story and more a collection of events that happen. Which is fine if that's what you want, but I feel those kinds of stories tend to lack focus, and I personally can't get invested in them as much.

I'm gonna talk about ICO, my favorite game of all time here, which I think keeps to a central theme perfectly. I'm no authority on the game or the subject matter, so take what I say with a grain of salt. I think the theme of the game isn't love so much as it is togetherness. You could absolutely draw the love theme from that, but I felt the game was less about the intimacy between the two and more about them being together. That's why the entire game was centered around the two of them cooperating, not talking. You communicated by holding Yorda's hand, and the feel of keeping that hand held constantly invokes that feeling of togetherness, as the act of keeping that trigger held was a constant reminder of the fact that you were not alone. This is further reinforced by the feeling you have when you are NOT together, when you don't have that trigger held down.

So, to bring it back on topic, I feel like ICO was developed with the central theme of togetherness, and the love theme being quite secondary and open to interpretation. Not once was it ever openly expressed to players. "HEY! DON'T YOU FEEL A CONNECTION TO YORDA?! HUH? DO YOU?1"

Anyway, I think that all stories need to have some sort of central theme to them, whether they be a simple one word theme or a complex mix of them. It's all in the nuance, though, as simply throwing themes into a creative work can be just as jarring and unfocused as a project with no idea or direction.