[also posted on GameCareerGuides]
Do games tell stories?
Sure, text, artwork, voice acting and cut-scenes can all arguably tell or help tell a story, but how can you truly say that the game itself is telling the story? And by the game, I mean the actual system, the units and rules that create the possibility for gameplay. Is gameplay a form of storytelling? Maybe not in most games (to avoid the argument), but if we wanted to conceptualize gameplay as storytelling, how would we do it? And if we wanted to make a game that told its story well, what would it take?
In short, and I’ll go into more detail later in this article, yes: it can be useful to think of gameplay as a medium through which players experience a unique form of storytelling. Maybe you’ve experienced it yourself where for one brief moment everything—the characters, the sounds, the visuals and what you were doing—all seemed to click, and you felt truly engaged in the story being told. It’s something that many gamers have felt at some point, but that no one has yet been able to consistently reproduce. “It” eludes us not because we lack the tools to describe or evaluate it, but because it crosses so many fields and disciplines. Theories of fun and swords and circuitry, research into expressive AI and dreams of Hamlet on the Holodeck all bring us closer to understanding it, but none provide that one true holistic vantage point from which a game designer can envision how to truly tell stories well through gameplay.
A holistic approach to storytelling in games has to consider many literary and filmic concepts like story, plot, character development, cinematography, lighting, audiography and “editing”. But unlike film, a holistic approach must also consider the game mechanics and expressive processes that determine the above (no small feat), all the while recognizing that games are interactive, and have spatial and haptic dimensions. Is it any wonder that a holistic view of storytelling in games has eluded us for so long? The solution isn’t to mash the concepts together and hope for the best. Putting Steven Spielberg, Conrad Hall, Syd Field, Jorge Luis Borges, Chris Crawford, Nobuo Uematsu, and Michael Mateas into a room probably won’t produce anything worthwhile because they have no common framework on which to have a meaningful discussion.
To find that common framework, we have to go up the conceptual tree to find what all of these seemingly disparate disciplines share. And that shared concept is communication. Ultimately, they are all means of getting an idea from person A, across some medium, to person B. But that net might be cast a little too wide for our purposes. Storytelling is a specific form of communication, a form studied for thousands of years by that often misunderstood field of study: narratology (as it’s called today). But I’d like to ignore Aristotle for once and instead shed some light on the modern founders of narratology, the Russian Formalists, who a hundred years ago decided to analyze literature as if the stories it told were complex machines intentionally and purposefully constructed using “devices” or “functions” that serve particular purposes. It’s from this concept that we get the term “plot device”. This approach to understanding storytelling is interesting because today we use complex machines to intentionally and purposefully design and program functions that serve particular purposes in order to tell stories. Somehow, this conceptual similarity has rarely been noticed.
Unfortunately, after years of largely pointless “Ludology vs. Narratology” debates, narratology is seen as a dead horse whose body is periodically dragged out by articles like this one for yet another beating. Except that this article isn’t about using narratology to “understand” games, it’s about giving designers a framework on which they can use all of the tools in their toolkit, not just a few. Narratology is the foundation for a common framework that we can all use to set up and guide the shape and direction of ours stories; game design, cinematography, level design, artificial intelligence, art, sound design, etc., are the tools we use to create a story; and gameplay is the way we as players experience that story. So what is this common framework?
