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Emergent Storytelling Viking Battle for Asgard

Because video games are an experiential art form, it's really hard to share stories about any specific game with people who haven't played it.  And, e-sports excepted, they're not even much fun to watch -- the peaks of any game experience are what we remember as players, but we do spend a lot of time muddling about trying to figure out where to go and what to do, or re-playing from a checkpoint when things go badly.

What games can do, though, is provide for spontaneous bits of emergent story-telling that can be appreciated without benefit of shared experience.  I've recently been playing SEGA's Viking: Battle for Asgard, a sort of open-world fantasy adventure set in the world of Norse mythology, with routine fighting/collecting missions punctuated by moments of stealth and impressive large-scale battles.  It's not a great game by any means, or even a particularly good one -- but I picked it up cheap on Steam after it finally came to the PC, years after it's 2008 console release, and I've been working my way through it.  Anyway, here's what happened during one of my recent play sessions...


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