I found out about BioWare closing yesterday, and I was and still am absolutely heartbroken. Losing a game studio is always devastating but I feel like the timing of this shutdown has hit me harder this year for one reason: We need stories now more than ever.
My fear is that we are forgetting or grossly minimizing something profoundly important about what stories mean to humanity and have meant since we’ve recorded our own history. Humans are storytellers. We can’t lose that.
My musings/rant today come from the perspective of a therapist and a cognitive neuroscience doctoral researcher so apologies in advance as I am very passionate about this topic.
I have dedicated my research to understanding how interactive storytelling may influence empathy, compassion, and our ability to understand one another…and I can’t think of a time when that work has felt more important than right now.
Look around us.
We live in a world overflowing with information, yet increasingly divided in understanding. We see suffering reduced to statistics. Human beings reduced to labels. Entire lives condensed into arguments, headlines, or just simply placed into a 30-second reel or video.
We are constantly being told what to think about one another, but how often are we being invited to understand one another?
This is why we need stories.
Stories ask something different of us. They ask us to be present with people who may not understand. They ask us to witness suffering we may never experience ourselves. Or, they may also make us recognize humanity in someone whose life, beliefs, or circumstances are entirely different than our own.
Losing BioWare or any studio is devastating right now because video games offer something particularly extraordinary: they don’t ask us to just passively watch. They ask us to make active choices. To make a decision without knowing whether it is right, or to confront consequences we never intended or to care about someone whose pain we can’t fix.
Think about the characters that stayed with you long after you beat a game or completed a difficult mission. Think about the choices you may have agonized over. Think about the fictional person you desperately wanted to save. Why did it matter so much? Why did you grieve someone who never existed? Why did a fictional world make you question something about your own?
It’s because the emotions were real, even when the world was not…and perhaps those experiences deserve more attention than we’ve noticed.
I’m not arguing that playing a video game automatically makes someone compassionate; the science is far more complicated than that. In fact, understanding whether actively participating in a story engages empathy differently than simply observing it is part of the very question I am trying to answer through my doctoral research. But I believe the question itself matters looking at because empathy is not merely agreeing with someone. It’s the willingness to recognize that another person’s experience exists beyond our own. Our compassion is what asks what we might do with that recognition.
We need opportunities to practice those capacities. We need art that challenges us. We need characters who make us uncomfortable, stories that complicate our certainty, and worlds that remind us that being human has never been simple. And yes, we need joy. We need imagination. We need stories that allow us to rest, to laugh, to belong, and to hope.
Not every story needs to teach us a lesson, its value doesn’t depend on its ability to make us better people…but sometimes the simple act of feeling less alone is enough and I think that’s why the closure of a studio like BioWare hurts so much.
Games like Mass Effect, Dragon Age, Baldur’s Gate, and so many others were never just products to the people who loved them. They were real experiences where we built memories, relationships with unforgettable characters, and challenged our thoughts and choices. For some, they were places of belonging during moments when the real world offered very little. And even beyond the player experiences were artists, writers, developers, composers, and countless people whose creativity made those worlds possible. I want them to know that their work matters more than they know.
We can acknowledge the economic realities of the gaming industry while still questioning what happens when creative spaces become increasingly difficult to sustain, because a story’s financial performance is not the complete measure of its human value.
We are living through a time of enormous uncertainty, division, and suffering and I know stories will not solve those problems by themselves…but I cannot accept that the things helping us imagine lives beyond our own are somehow unimportant to the future we are building. We need science. We need education. We need action, and we need stories. Before we can care about someone else’s suffering, we must first be willing to recognize their humanity… and stories may help us learn how.
So, to the storytellers, artists, developers, and dreamers who continue creating worlds for us to explore: Please keep telling stories!!! And to everyone who has ever cried over a fictional character, found courage in an imaginary world, or has been impacted by a story that’s been with them for years: don’t let anyone convince you that what you experienced was meaningless.
The world does not need fewer opportunities to understand one another; it needs more.
This is why I will keep studying stories. This is why I will keep defending their importance. And that is why, especially now, I believe we need them more than ever.
I know that I included multiple other games in this post, but I want to thank BioWare for everything they have done. My hope is that the individuals who worked for the studio continue their dreams and their work in other places, and understand that their contributions will always matter.
And for those of you who have read this far, thank you so much. I hope something in this post was meaningful for you. Please go out and tell your story as well.
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