[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?
I was reading an analysis by Daniel Cook over at Gamasutra that at first made me nod in agreement. Games have repetitious themes and often implement them in disjunction with or with disregard for their game mechanics. It’s good to see yet another member of the games industry catch on to this endemic problem and suggest a solution. But then a curious thing happens, Cook goes from talking about literary themes to what I’d rather call genre, but he keeps on calling it “theme”. Piracy in a work isn’t, as Cook assumes, a literary theme like “redemption” or “estrangement”. It’s a theme in the same sense that you can have a costume party with a pirate theme… but that definition doesn’t do us any good here. A literary theme arises from the interplay of plot, setting, character, conflict, and tone. According to Cook:
The theme you select directly influences how you present your initial skills to the user. By saying “pirates,” I turn on a particular schema in the player’s brain and a network of possible behaviors and likely outcomes instantaneously lights up.
“Pirates” here is more of a genre, a mental model for what is expected of the structure and content of the work. It isn’t the same as a story about redemption, something much more intangible and difficult to communicate. But whatever you want to call it, mixing up this “theme” with literary themes only leads to a confused analysis of how themes and games interact. To implement a literary theme, let’s say redemption again, would require well thought out and coherent game mechanics that convey the essence of what it is to be a protagonist experiencing or delivering redemption. There isn’t a simple mental model for the representation of a literary theme, since these are generally aspects of the human condition that have confounded us since the dawn of recorded history.
I mean, okay, this kind of stuff is generally dismissed as quibbling. Getting into arguments about terms and definitions is usually the quickest way to say a whole lot of nothing while annoying the hell out of everyone. But, clearly defined terms are the only way we can have productive conversations. It seems everyone in this industry has their own definition of theme, story, plot and narrative; and we wonder why no one can agree on what it means to have a game that tells a story.
This is part two of the Flaws of Narrative, a look at Michael Abbott’s Narrative manifesto. Click here to read part I.
If I were to follow Michael’s order, I would next comment on Braid‘s visionary designer Jonathan Blow, but since I basically agree with everything he says, that’s going to be a mountain I’ll climb in part III.
Steve Gaynor – The game designer’s role
Steve’s point of view is similar to Redding and Hocking’s (part I) in that he believes the designer should be largely “hands-off” and simply give players the tools they need to create their own stories.
I believe this is again an example of a viewpoint that sees the inherent chaos and unpredictability of the player, and without being able to see beyond traditional linear storytelling just gives up on story in games by pointing to the popularity of games like The Sims, or online worlds, where players create their own stories. My reply is basically the same in part I. Just because there is an infinite number of prime numbers, we shouldn’t avoid looking for the Riemann zeta function; and just because genetic mutation is inherently unpredictable and chaotic doesn’t mean we shouldn’t pursue the limits of the theory of evolution. Again, Gaynor’s point of view isn’t wrong, we should definitely endeavour to allow players to experience richer stories that they feel are unique to their actions. It’s just that this view keeps us from fully considering the larger picture of storytelling in games.
L.B. Jeffries – Non linear reactive stories
Jeffries is definitely a wild-card, but I like that. I think it’s definitely by getting away from our preconceived notions of games and stories that we’ll make progress in this field. The application of tarot card reading, an ancient “storytelling” art, to storytelling in games is really fascinating, but isn’t the answer to the overall problem.
Jeffries suggests that just like tarot cards take advantage of our mind’s natural inclination to create meaning, to take chaos and enforce order on it, so too could these principles take the chaos of player agency and allow the player to infer their own meanings:
A series of reactions like someone crying for help if you shoot them or a dog following you if you feed it could be created in response to the player. Rather than worry about how these relate to some grand linear story, simply leave them as short vignettes that connect and relate to one another through A.I.
This, I believe, is a fantastic approach to storytelling in games, but it doesn’t need to come at the expense of a grander story. With enough forethought, the vignettes could easily combine to form a larger dynamic plot, or else help reinforce a dynamic plot told through other game mechanics, art, environments, sounds and haptics (yes, I will hammer you with this string of potential storytelling vehicles every chance I get).
