[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?
Once again, Ian Bogost changes the way I look at games. The first time was with persuasive games, and now with his latest article, The End of Gamers. I’ve argued in the past (not online) that games aren’t a medium. The reason for my conviction came from quickly considering the first couple of mediums that came to mind: print, photography, radio, film, etc., and then comparing them to games. I concluded that a game wasn’t a medium since one medium can pretty readily be translated into another. What’s written in words can be shown in a film, or vice versa. On the other hand, it isn’t possible to translate a film into a game. You can say your game is about Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith, but the gameplay itself is nothing like watching or even reading Star Wars episode 3. Instead of going into it here, I’ll just refer you to Jesper Juul’s argument.
The reason I don’t want to get into it here is because, well, I’ve changed my mind. My flaw was in having too narrow of a view of what a medium really is. As Ian points out, games are a medium of procedurality, of systems, a medium “that lets us play a role within the constraints of a model world.” Games are the medium through which the very procedurality of systems is transmitted, can be accessed, controlled and played with.
Once you fully grasp this concept, suddenly games aren’t just about either being entertaining or being serious. I think Ian says it best when he challenges us to “do with games what we do already, implicitly, with every other medium we use to create or consume ideas. We must imagine videogames as a medium with valid uses across the spectrum, from art to tools and everything in between.”
I’ve come to the point where I have to wonder why we still call everything in this medium a ‘game’, when that term implicitly connotes entertainment and basically just causes confusion or ruins the legitimacy of some interesting systems of play. Of course, I won’t propose or start using some new name, but there will either come a time when we will have to adopt a new name for this burgeoning medium, and ‘game’ will remain the name of entertaining systems of play, or else ‘game’ will need to lose its current connotations and come to express all interactive procedural systems, regardless of whether they’re just for fun or something else/more.
I think it’s fitting that the first post made on this site coincides with one made by Jesper Juul titled, Why Make Games that Make Stories?, since answering that question is exactly what this site is all about.
In a ripost to James Willis’ article “Making Games That Make Stories” for Second Person, Juuls asks the “ludological” quesiton: Why?
Why make games that tell stories? Well, in this tiny corner of cyberspace—where ludology and narratology make sweet, sweet love: a Venn diagram whose sets are related at a point, immeasurable, like lovers kissing with just the tiniest lick of tongue—we will try to answer it, or at least explore the possibilities.
—-
There will always be a place in our consoles, on our computers, (in my heart) for games that aspire to be great games and nothing more, games where “story” is just another word for context. Games for gaming’s sake don’t need a story, and so Juul has every right to beg the question: Why?
The answer’s simple. Because games have revealed themselves to be powerful storytelling systems. With each generation the stories and the storytelling get better. Why do it? Because games tell stories in a novel and engaging way. Why progress instead of standing still? Because we can.
I think the current situation of “game” vs. “story” is a non-issue. Unfortunately, the bad rap around “story” seems to be kept alive by the fact that a great game can have a horrible story and still be fun, whereas a horrible game with a great story is irritating and just plain not fun. So why put so much effort into the story at all? But this assumption isn’t completely accurate. A horrible game could never tell a great story, because the telling would be as horrible as the game. The story itself may have the potential to be great, but a terrible game will do a terrible job telling it to you. So it’s never the case that terrible game has a great story. In reality, only a well designed game call tell a great story well.
To touch another point in Juul’s riposte, let me agree and say that games aren’t stories. A game by any definition will never be a story; they are two distinct kinds of things (they share some characteristics only because they can both be considered systems and are both experienced linearly in time—like everything else). Stories in games are experiential, they are produced by the game through the act of play. To say that “no silver bullet will appear that allows any arbitrary story to be made into a satisfying game” is to miss this distinction, or miss the point of storytelling in games.
Stories can’t be made into games, but games can be made to tell stories.
The art of telling stories with games is one that many game designers flirt with without truly knowing it. It is a formalistic, system-centric (read: ludological) approach to the act of storytelling (read: narratology) that, ultimately, has yet to be defined.
And that’s what this site’s all about. It’s that metaphorical space where ludology steals a kiss from narratology.. when no one’s looking.
