JOSH LUNDBERG is listening to your audio journals
There are many ways to tell a story in a videogame; linear, non-linear, cutscenes, full-motion video, loading screens, pre-level briefings... the possibilities are almost endless.
The quality of a story is usually featured in reviews, but the manner in which it is told isn’t.
Ever since playing Half-Life I’ve had a fascination with storytelling methods in videogames, and I rarely understand why the easiest ones are so often employed.
By far the most commonly used is the cutscene: simply adapting the cinematic style to work for sequences between gameplay that serve, almost exclusively, as the exposition in games. Exposition is where information is laid out for an audience to ensure there is no unintentional ambiguity regarding the narrative. It’s usually where goals and objectives are laid out and characters meet and depart.
The subtext - the unsaid, the inherently understood - is typically included in gameplay where we develop a more nuanced understanding of what’s happening - but that’s if a game is made well.
In terms of game storytelling I think the Half-Life method of constant restriction to character perspective and no cutscenes is the best the medium has had to offer so far.
Control is very rarely taken away, and although games like Call of Duty have, since Modern Warfare 2, attempted to remove expositional loading screens and add more story during gameplay, they usually remove player control during these sequences.
It removes the immersion, and for me personally, player agency.
It tells the character where to look. But in a first person game I am the character. And I don’t want to have my head grabbed and pointed around the place.
It’s not that there’s actually an objectively superior way to deal with storytelling – I think it very much depends on the experience you’re trying to give your audience.
I would say cutscenes, loading screens and other methods fail to embrace unique possibilities videogames have in the realm of storytelling techniques.
Games like BioShock place a great deal of the burden on the player when it comes to gaining a full understanding of the world they’re in, and how it reached that point.
The original game did this, best of the three, with audio devices that would overload players with exposition and minor stories here and there. It added texture, and texture is key to immersion.
It’s not a new technique, and wasn’t in 2007, but it’s a great one.
The information a single flyer stuck to a wall in a game can give players is sufficient to avoid several cutscenes worth of storytelling. We’re not dumb, we’re just not given the opportunity to look and explore often enough. We’re thirsty for narrative that spills out of a game as we control it, because there’s plenty of games with traditional storytelling to be found.
It’s extremely difficult to direct a player in a way that makes the story of a game unmissable, but I think there are plenty of developers out there with the creative capability to find a solution we haven’t seen yet; something that communicates to us in a way no other game has before. A game in which somehow, without being bashed over the head with blatantly obvious drip feeding and hand holding we somehow ‘absorb’ the story by simply playing it.
As creatures, humans are phenomenal at deciphering huge amounts of information from the tiniest details. Want to tell players they’re in an evil science lab which conducts abhorrent experiments? Just put some dismembered limbs about the place in jars. Don’t say, “be careful they do horrible experiments in there” in a cutscene or over the ever-present radio communication to your off-screen ally.
I don’t play nearly enough indie games to know how narrative communication is being experimented with – and I’m sure it is – but I’d like to see it start happening in the AAA titles. I was somewhat disappointed by Wolfenstein in that way, since I wanted it to remind me ‘I was the first of my kind’. I wanted it to show me it had power – not only in strong gameplay, but in an ability to tell me a story without detracting from the very perspective it pioneered.
It’s a big ask – an unfair ask – but that was my only gripe in an otherwise brilliant game.
The Bethesda approach of clicking and listening is tried and true and while it keeps us in character and provides us with ample information it is still simply an extension of older techniques prior to 3D rendering. Clicking on books to read is yet another way of absorbing story, but it stops gameplay and takes you to another interface.
The worlds of Elder Scrolls and Fallout are extremely rich in lore and narrative, but it’s infrequent that the player can passively learn – you are frozen in place listening to someone explain everything to you as though you were a child.
Although the mod team can’t be credited with the brilliant method of storytelling, I think these feelings have been brought to the surface by a recent play through of Black Mesa. It left me thinking the only problematic aspect of the series is the silence of Freeman. While it’s a series trope I love, I can’t help but feel it stems from the desire to not force a voice down the throats of the player – to maintain immersion:
‘I am Gordon. You are Gordon. We are Gordon.’
And despite the extremely linear nature of the Half-Life and Portal games, no two people will have played any of those games in an identical pattern – they’re too immersive not inject your own timidness, boldness, inquisitiveness or whatever you happen to possess.
If the technology existed where we could talk to non-player characters with our own voices, I think that’s what Valve would have gone for.
As always it’s a subjective, creative process – but one I think could see elevate the medium to a place no other method of storytelling can ever match.