How modern games are offering a whole new spin on narrative by Richard Cobbett
Many years ago, the very smart John Carmack said a very silly thing: "Story in a game is like a story in a porn movie. It’s expected to be there, but it’s not that important." That hasn't really been true since games set their sights higher than "save the princess" and "defeat the aliens." In recent years, though, story has been on the rise. The adventure and RPG genres have seen a resurgence, thanks to games like The Walking Dead and Dragon Age. In Mass Effect, give or take one terrible ending, BioWare created one of the finest interactive SF universes in any genre. From indie games to Tomb Raider to Grand Theft Auto, the modern industry badly wants to tell stories.
Looking in, that can seem strange. With all due respect to most games and their hardworking developers, the average game story isn’t exactly Shakespeare—if we discount the fact that prior to his plays’ appearance in stuffy English Literature lessons, they were largely the disposable, popularist entertainment of the time, and therefore actually not a bad comparison at all. And the members of his troupe appreciated the role of the writer. That doesn’t mean they can’t be effective, and to a large extent just watching or describing what happens does them little justice. The fact that they’re interactive, intimate, responsive, that we get to be the stars instead of just passive onlookers, can’t be overestimated, any more than a roller coaster can be appreciated from the sidelines, or a movie has the same power when committed to paper instead of blown up on a big screen with an orchestral soundtrack, and the gasps and laughs of an appreciative audience. Games aren’t just a new way of telling stories, but a unique one. In the '90s, much money was wasted trying to ape Hollywood. Now, the focus is on what games can do that nobody else can—a far more interesting question, with infinitely more potential.
But story isn’t simply about what happens, but a catch-all term that encompasses much of the experience. A world can tell a story, or simply contribute to one. Take Bioshock Infinite's Hall of Heroes. Its mechanical function is for main character Booker deWitt to get a bottle of magic jollup that lets him throw lightning bolts, as well as having a boss fight. Its real purpose, though, is to offer perspective on the flying city of Columbia and its racist politics—how the Battle of Wounded Knee is presented as a great triumph rather than a national disgrace, and how villain Zachary Comstock has weaponized history by rewriting it in his favor, in a similar way to his co-opting of the Founding Fathers as avatars of his twisted religion. It’s all stuff that could be, and often is, covered by dialogue, but by showing instead of just telling—by allowing us to get hands-on with it and explore it at will—it becomes meaningful. It becomes real.
Elsewhere, more subtly, the story of whole areas is told by their architecture—the contrast of business district Fink Manufacturing to the shanty towns around it; the giant clock that rewrites time as Work and Spiritual Duty, with a tiny scrap of time for Sleep; the demonstration of Fink’s ego as manifest in his own offices; and nods to religious expectations. Bioshock Infinite’s tale of other dimensions can get bogged down in SF jargon, but as a place, it has no parallel. To paraphrase the Superman movie, you believe a city can fly.
THE STORY OF WORLDS
Games are the only storytelling medium that can fully take advantage of this kind of narrative—blockbuster vistas, yes, often, but the camera free to explore and savor the detail instead of just filming it as it shoots past. They can unchain the player from the direct action and allow sight-seeing, vignettes that dig deeper, and mechanics that reinforce a game’s themes.
The Walking Dead, for instance, has your group of survivors starving as they hide from the zombie menace—your character, Lee, in charge of divvying out the last of the food. Pragmatically, it doesn’t really matter who you give it to, but that's beside the point. Having to choose puts you into the mind of someone faced with that awful decision—to balance fairness with need, to focus on the kids of the group instead of the adults, to pick at random, or simply to stuff all of it into your mouth just to see what happens. No other form of storytelling allows for not simply that choice, but for ownership and complicity in what happens as a result. This is especially pointed when you’re pushed into the position of crushing dreams, hurting the innocent, or making bad things happen to good people—acts that can be surprisingly painful, even knowing they’re not real.
BY THE GENRES
Adventures and RPGs have always been the ambassadors for storytelling. Adventures have a library of classics like The Last Express, The Longest Journey, Grim Fandango, and A Mind Forever Voyaging, a text adventure that was pretty much the first "walking simulator," in which you play a sentient computer visiting simulations of the future to foil a political movement that will lead America to destruction. You don’t need to look far to find an RPG with more of an eye on plot than loot, from the philosophically rich Planescape Torment based on the question “What can change the nature of a man?” to Ultima, a series spanning a decade of questions about morality and humanist social upheaval.
It makes sense that they’d have this history, not only with a focus on story but specific mechanics like dialogue trees to help interact with the world. Other genres spent years without the tools to really tell stories, with the exception of rendered cut-scenes, mission briefings, and such, and only a few able to break out of that to do something different. Wing Commander, for instance, was a pioneer, looking to simulate the action on board a carrier during a space war, instead of just the cockpit action, complete with medal ceremonies and meeting pilots in the pub. Wing Commander III, the most expensive game ever at the time, not only did this in FMV, which admittedly hasn’t aged well, but dared to do it with a downright depressing story of failure and betrayal, far from the ra-ra blockbuster style it was attempting to emulate on the small screen.
For other genres, new ideas were needed to make things work. For example, System Shock, a hybrid RPG/shooter, pioneered the audio log method of storytelling, in which you find people's diaries conveniently scattered everywhere, solely because the developers couldn’t think of an immersive way to handle dialogue. It was a clever idea, though its continued use has become something of a crutch. (Hopefully, the ruthless parody of the style in South Park: The Stick of Truth has helped to take that crutch and beat the idea to death with it.)
BEYOND ADVENTURE
Generally, though, most genres have moved into story in the same way—look at adventures and RPGs, borrow their tricks, then start inventing new ones. Strife, for instance, an obscure shooter using the Doom engine, added dialogue and quest systems, but also some advanced features, such as a world built around a hub that changed during the game. At the start, the villains rule from a castle. By the halfway point, you take it over and it becomes your base of operations for the rest of the game—a huge feeling of accomplishment. Grand Theft Auto began by just having canned missions, before expanding out to wider world simulation elements and spin-offs, such as optional missions, territory control (Vice City), and dating (San Andreas), before spinning out into LA Noire with its investigations, and attempting to recreate a real city instead of just the flavor of one.
Often, the big push can come from the strangest places—as long as they’re successful. Action adventure games were largely put on the path by Metal Gear Solid, which showed that you could tell a deep and interesting story within the constraints of something as simple as stealth. For the FPS, the sea change was Half-Life 2, which didn’t create but did popularize the theme park ride style of the genre — setpiece to setpiece to setpiece. It wasn’t until 2007’s Call of Duty 4, though, that the story rather than the storytelling really came to the fore, adding the human side to warfare—in particular, playing as a soldier dying in the aftermath of a nuclear explosion, the dispassionate nature of bombers high above the battlefield, and an intimate sortie into Chernobyl. The effectiveness of these scenes, combined with Call of Duty’s insane sales figures, confirmed that shooters offered interesting ways to tell stories without being propped up by RPG elements.
This, of course, led to the mixed success of Spec Ops: The Line—a mediocre shooter in terms of raw mechanics, but a brave and deservedly cult hit that toyed with everything from the degradation of its main characters’ psyches (early AI barks being professional military talk, descending into gutteral “****ING SHOOT HIM!” level as the game goes on), playing a hero whose weakness turns him into the villain, without him ever realizing, and some shocking individual scenes. The main one involves deploying a white phosphorus attack on what turns out to be civilians, with Spec Ops then forcing you to walk through the frozen agony of the victims in a way that breaks the main character’s mind and sets him on his path to damnation.
One of its most effective techniques, though, is like many modern games: how it handles choice. Mostly, you’re on a rail, with one of its biggest problems being that deploying the white phosphorus is a forced act—if you don’t want to, or you see what the protagonist doesn’t and try to avoid it, you’re not allowed to progress, and the intended sense of complicity is lost.
But on a smaller scale it did some very interesting things— one of the biggest being when you get surrounded by some very justifiably angry civilians, who your actions have likely condemned to a painful death by thirst. You are mobbed. You have a gun. If you start shooting, everyone flees. There’s nothing, however, stopping you from shooting your gun into the air instead—it has the same effect, but nobody dies. It’s a stark reminder of why good people don’t necessarily do the "right" thing under pressure, as well as a rare chance to get into the mind of someone making an unjustifiable decision.
CHOICE AND CONSEQUENCE
Choice, especially with a sting, is one of the most powerful weapons games have. It’s often misunderstood, especially in scope—classically, it’s been a good/evil split that determines which ending you get. More recently, games have bent over backward to tell us that our choices count. Telltale Games is particularly guilty of this, using the same smoke and mirrors for each of its games. Only a few have really embraced it, with the prize going to Obsidian’s Alpha Protocol—an insane web of decisions, characters, and relationships so complex that it factors in people being pleased that you visited them first in town, and bosses you may never meet.
Generally, the idea isn’t to create a game that rewards replay, but to make the allimportant first playthrough adapt around you—to let you say what you want, to give you a sense of power, even if the core plot is locked down, to make decisions more meaningful by having characters respond, and to encourage you to think about what you do. The smartest thing in The Walking Dead was the phrase, “Clementine will remember that”—its story arc being only partly about survival, and more about preparing her for the dangers ahead. Bioshock 2 offered something similar with Eleanor, a grown-up "Little Sister" and daughter surrogate, who learns her morality by watching your actions—your mercy, restraint, cruelty, and avarice all shaping the woman who finally leaves the underwater city of Rapture to bring its terrors and technology to the surface.
Incidentally, these games also began a trend of games mocked as the "daddification of games"— The Last of Us, Bioshock Infinite, Dishonored, Heavy Rain, and others focus on the experience of a father looking after a child, in a theme it’s hard not to see as part of a largely male creative workforce getting older.
Traditionally, choice is picking from a series of options. It’s the easiest way. With the rise of open worlds, and games allowing for heavy customization (crafting, costumes, and so on), more choices become available. Metal Gear Solid V is far less storydriven than earlier games in the series, being focused on open worlds and those darn audio logs.
At the same time, more than it initially seems, it merges with a more personal narrative—the one you create for yourself. Is your Venom Snake going to be a ruthless monster, who ends up looking like a literal demon with blood that never washes off, or more pragmatic? Do you trust characters like Quiet, the underdressed sniper, or put a bullet in her face? When this approach works, story becomes more than just being sat down and told one. It's collaborative, where the developer sets a stage and a framework, and provides a cast, but the player fills the action with comedy and meaning.
This isn’t the same as dropping the player into a world and telling them to make up their own story, but giving them the tools to make its parts more than just pixels and polygons. There’s no processor more powerful than the brain, nor any friendship or loyalty more important than those we choose. Now that a game recreating reality is no big thing, the obvious next step for almost every genre is to dig a little deeper and make that recreation meaningful. From story to worlds to plot, the future of gaming is the future of story. It's an untapped field ready to give us amazing experiences that nothing else can come close to, regardless of whether we choose to interact with them using words, guns, and shovels, or simply sit back and enjoy the ride.