[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?
Michael Abbott, catching on to this crazy confluence of ideas about games and narrative, has proposed a Narrative manifesto by quoting from some of “the most thoughtful and articulate members of the games community” on this very topic. I applaud the effort, and certainly feel strongly that our anti-status-quo way of looking at things needs a call to arms, but I can’t help but feel that the whole story and games thing is misunderstood. It’s not that the people that Michael chose to quote are wrong. What they say is true, but they miss the larger point, or muddle the concept of narrative in games. Rather than a manifesto for narrative in games, Michael has done a splendid job of collecting the kinds of viewpoints that serve to confuse the issue of narrative and games. Yes, I’m going to disagree with thoughtful and articulate members of the games community that are better known, better liked, better experienced, and hell, probably better dressed than me. I hope you don’t think me pompous.
Patrick Redding and Clint Hocking – Dynamic story architecture
Patrick and Clint are of the opinion that it’s all about the player and that the designer should just get out of the way and stop worrying about crafting a story: “the designer builds a system, but the player authors the story”.
There are hints of truth here, which is what make this viewpoint deceptively convincing. Designers definitely build the system, and players definitely act out their own story, but the key distinction is that the player’s story is constrained and controlled by the system. In that sense, what the player is actually doing is acting out their own plot to a pre-defined story.
The Sims is considered a powerful example of a game that lets players author their own stories. But really, what they create is a version of a specific kind of story: a story about suburban life, friends, love, marriage, getting a job, having a child, etc. The system of The Sims provides the building blocks necessary for a player to create their own version of this story, but they’re limited to the story the system provides. They can’t create a story about a Sim giving up their meaningless, commercialistic life, moving to India, joining an obscure religious sect and living out their dream of an ascetic life… until one day! Carla (from back home) finds you and begs you to please! please come home! … unless that’s an expansion pack I haven’t heard about yet? The reason players can’t write that story is because the building blocks that The Sims provides the player don’t include these potential story events. The “story” of The Sims is pre-defined by the game’s mechanics, by the system’s units and rules.
It’s in this sense that I believe designers have a whole heck of a lot of control over the story experiences of players. Absolutely, interaction and agency allow the player to affect the outcome of the game, and every player will experience a different “story” based on their actions, but all of this will happen within the confines of the system. They’re not really changing the actual story, that’s set by the system, what players do when playing the game is author the plot, or the way the game tells them the story. It’s like this: I can tell you the story of the Lord of the Rings over lunch, I can read it over the course of roughly 1500 pages, or I can watch it over the course of 11 hours and 23 minutes. Each telling omits, adds and even slightly changes the small details of events, but in the end it’s all the same story.
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.
Games make storytelling more complex since the potential variations on the telling are virtually endless, you might even have a branching story with multiple endings, and the player is inherently unpredictable, but in the end, no matter how you play it, you’re playing the story set up by the game’s mechanics, art, environment, sound and haptics. Once designers realize this distinction, they’ll be in a better place to realize how they can manipulate their game design to better relate a potential story.
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.
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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.
