Videogame stories have come a long way since the times of text crawls, but have they gone in the right direction? Paul Walker-Emig speaks to devs about the challenges they face when telling us their tales
“I think videogames are pretty terrible for telling stories,” Jonathan Blow, the man behind Braid and The Witness, tells us. A provocative statement and one that we expect most players and developers would react to with hostility, but he puts forward a compelling argument.
Blow suggests that games that place a large focus on story are ‘inherently confl icted’, pointing out that a game’s story and mechanics often clash. “The story of Bioshock presents to you this supposed dilemma,” Blow says, picking out an example. “You need to kill these Little Sisters, and take away this resource that you can use to get strong and survive, but at the same time, you want to care about them, because they’re just little girls who don’t deserve to be mistreated. So you have this decision,” Blow continues. “Do I be altruistic and take care of them and save their lives, or do I do what I need to do to make it through the game and survive? The game is trying to say that. But at the same time, the designers of the game thought it was important for the game to be balanced,” he explains. “No matter what you do to the Little Sisters, you’ll always get about the same amount of resource and players notice this very quickly. The author of the story says, ‘these Little Sisters are very important and you should care about them,’ and on the other hand, the author of the game’s design says, ‘well, you can pretty much do what you want, it doesn’t matter either way.’”
In Blow’s view, there’s too much focus on those elements we traditionally think of as comprising a game’s story and not enough attention paid to what a game’s mechanics are telling us outside of that. “Any system communicates something to the player,” Blow says, “whether you as the author of the game intended to communicate that thing or not. The gameplay does this regardless – it’s not necessarily just the story or the visual assets.”
Blow might not think that videogames are a particularly good vehicle for story, then, but he accepts that they communicate something to the player nonetheless. There are two questions that ask themselves in relation to Blow’s statements. If developers can communicate with their audience through mechanics, does that not mean that we might just have to think about telling stories in videogames in a different way, rather than writing off their ability to do so entirely? Secondly, are the problems that Blow points to with videogame storytelling obstacles that cannot be overcome, or are they issues that have to be acknowledged and worked around creatively?
Greg Kasavin of Supergiant Games, the team behind Bastion and Transistor seems to lean towards the latter. “I think there’s limitless territory to explore when it comes to using game mechanics to tell stories in games,” Kasavin says. “It’s very fertile ground, though also tends to create some big challenges both in a game’s design and during its production. But to me, it’s the entire point of making games.”
“Pacing is a big challenge for games whose goal is to deliver story in a traditional way,” Kasavin says, pointing out that interactivity takes some control out of the hands of the storyteller. “That storytelling style can be at odds with how games tend to put up obstacles for the player to overcome. It’s frustrating to get to a point in a game when you’re anxious to know what happens next in the story but hit a difficulty spike you can’t get past. Conversely, there are stories that start very strong but tend to fall by the wayside as the game’s mechanics take over, and lose your motivation to keep playing,” he continues.
So, how should games deal with that? One solution is to avoid the cinema influenced, linear approach to telling stories. Take the likes of Minecraft and DayZ, for example. They “have a lot of world context but no authored story content, yet nonetheless they generate rich story-like experiences personal to each player,” in Kasavin’s words. “Chasing after the visual fidelity and storytelling techniques of cinema begins to yield some diminishing returns when it comes at the expense of good visual feedback or interactivity,” Kasavin continues. “Interactivity is the aspect of games that most sets them apart as a medium so I think trading off that interactivity for the sake of cinematic presentation ought to be done with a great deal of care and restraint.”
That doesn’t mean that Kasavin thinks we should throw cinematic storytelling out the windowentirely, pointing out as he does that there’s no one solution as to how videogames should approach storytelling. “I think there will always be room for a broad spectrum of types of stories in games,” he says. “You can have these very cinematic, authored experiences like The Last Of Us.”
Indeed, for Techland writer Rafał Orkan, who worked on Dying Light and Call Of Juarez: Gunslinger, it’s important for developers to think about how their method of storytelling should be tweaked to ensure it is appropriate to the kind of game they are making, rather than relying on one catch-all solution. “In more linear games, creators can afford an almost movie-like plot,” Orkan explains. “You can precisely predict the pace at which the story will unfold, shape events and anticipate emotions that will accompany them.”
The same approach doesn’t work for open-world games, however. “You’ve got to forget about controlling the timing or pace,” Orkan says. “Writers for openworld games have to avoid many traps and invest as much time in designing the story as to overcoming those obstacles. For instance, will a fast and aggressive player understand the story in the same or similar way as a person who plays slowly and carefully? Will a character’s motivation be clear to someone who spends most of the time on side-quests and goes back to the main storyline after long breaks?” he asks. “There’re many more such pitfalls, so whether you like it or not, when you write a script for an open-world game, you have to change your approach to storytelling.”
From Kasavin’s assertion that there’s “limitless territory to explore” when it comes to storytelling, though to Orkan’s suggestion that “our medium demands a variety of inspirations and a broader look at the art of storytelling,” our interviewees seem to agree that there’s room for evolution in videogame storytelling. Certainly, we should expect more than what Blow describes as “the typical triple-A” approach. That is to say, “cut-scenes interrupted by gameplay bits that get you to the next cut-scene,” which, in Blow’s view, “sucks”.
What are some of the ways in which we can expect videogame storytelling to progress, then? Surely, if it is to improve, developers have to acknowledge the potential confl ict between mechanics and story highlighted by Blow at the start of this piece, think more carefully about how mechanics can be used in service of storytelling, and experiment with how the two can be used together.
Take the way Transistor gives each of its Functions (or abilities) a narrative context and encourages you to experiment with them to learn more as an example. “Throughout Transistor’s development, we were looking for ways to compel or even force players to experiment with different Transistor Functions, as opposed to getting into a comfort zone using the same Functions over and over,” explains Kasavin. “At the same time, it was very important to me from a narrative standpoint to build up the Transistor’s significance in the world, and the significance of the various Functions in the game.
“Connecting the player’s experimentation with the Transistor’s Functions with the discovery of more background information on the world just made a lot of sense to me as a subtle reward for greater investment,” Kasavin says. “It’s an aspect of the game that came together late in development but I’m very glad it happened.”
“My narrative experiment at Techland was Call Of Juarez: Gunslinger,” Orkan says. “Our starting point was the concept of a narrator who used a retrospective story – told live throughout the game – to communicate the plot to players the same way he did to his in-game listeners. We soon realized we could expand that concept even more, so we incorporated our gameplay mechanics into the storytelling,” explains Orkan. “We made the game’s world change according to words of the unreliable narrator or his listeners, who can’t help but interrupt him: either by elaborating on some parts of his story or contradicting him and telling their own versions of the events.
“In Gunslinger, narration and gameplay are inseparably connected and one cannot exist without the other. I believe video games are in need of such experiments,” Orkan concludes.
Surely, this move towards ensuring mechanics and story enhance and reflect one another is crucial to the growth of videogame storytelling and the direction in which things should be heading? Perhaps, but as Blow points out, ironing out conflicts between story and mechanics is easier said than done.
“It’s like pressing bubbles out of wallpaper. You press one down and another one pops up over here. You end up changing aspects of the story that don’t fit the gameplay and changing aspects of the gameplay that don’t fit the story. triple-A production models make this very, very difficult,” Blow continues, arguing that it’s just not practical to make significant changes to a game that’s been developed at great cost over a number of years. “Good luck convincing a team to make huge sweeping changes because some solitary dude says that there’s a conflict between the gameplay and the story,” Blow says.
A challenge it may be, but whether it’s one that can be overcome is open to debate. Fittingly, each of our interviewees tells us a different story when it comes to the conflicted state of videogame storytelling, its future and the prospect of addressing the kinds of challenges outlined above.
For Blow, “storytelling in games is in about the same place it was in the Eighties, except now our cut-scenes are much more frequent and in high resolution.” He seems to suggest that the future lies in thinking about how rules of interaction can be used to express themes, rather than focusing on telling stories per se, for which he suggests other mediums might be better suited.
Kasavin, on the other hand, has a more positive outlook on the potential of videogames to tell stories. “I think great storytelling has existed in games for as long as games have existed,” he says. “When I was a little kid playing Ultima IV and Karateka on my Apple IIC, I saw first-hand the potential of storytelling in games. I think today there’s a larger and broader appreciation for what higherquality storytelling in games can do, and I think there’s a greater focus on the craft, from the writing to the voice acting and so on,” he continues.
In Orkan’s view, the kinds of developments outlined by Kasavin place videogame storytelling in a stronger position that it’s ever been. “In my opinion, the improvement is noticeable” he says. “The role of storytelling in games is taken more and more seriously; plot is no longer just a background for gameplay but very often one of key pillars of the production process.”
Orkan also sees plenty of room for improvement in videogame storytelling, however. He says a positive trend is evident in the medium’s increasing willingness to “tackle important issues”, but sees other areas that requite attention. “I personally believe sexist traits are still present in stories, so I believe liberating female characters from those old clichds should be one of the priorities for videogame storytellers," Orkan tells us. However, he goes on to suggest that “freeing oneself from such thinking patterns is not as easy as it may seem.”
That last statement seems particularly prescient to us. We may well accept that videogames need to experiment with new forms of storytelling and take a much more sophisticated approach to marrying mechanics and story, but, to paraphrase Orkan, for videogame storytellers to free themselves from the traditional thinking patterns and modes of doing things may not be as easy it sounds. Here's hoping the industry's finest are up to the task...