Becoming the Storyteller

The below is an article written for D-Pad Magazine giving some thoughts on storytelling techniques in gaming, find the original here.

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If there has been one thing that has become most notable in the times since videogames emerged into the hallowed third dimension, it has been the focus on story and storytelling. There once was a time when all the story you needed was simply to know that a certain princess was in another castle, or that you were charged with protecting Earth from the alien invaders which are conveniently falling from the sky. Not that the idea of telling a story through gaming is entirely a new convention, but with the advent of full motion video, cut-scenes and cinematic devices it has become an expected and prevalent part of all big budget high profile releases. With these developments have come advances in the way games play out; now tightly-scripted linear games are common, with an emphasis on telling a thrilling, singular story through your actions. Games such as Half Life and the early Call of Duty games are heavily cited as implementing a lot of these features successfully, using the environment, and immersive nature of the first-person viewpoint to pull you through a compelling and thrilling adventure.
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Whilst gaming is a highly immersive and interactive medium, this can often work against it from a storytelling point of view, the autonomy you have over your character becomes the most difficult thing to guard against, and so restrictions have to be put in place to maintain the illusion; NPCs will be invulnerable, or your firing capacity will become restricted when not in combat, only specific doors at specific times will open, bosses and enemies often have to be killed in specific ways and you have no real say in the way events will play out. You are a pawn in a virtual movie, your actions often very limited and it can be very difficult to try and tell a dramatically interesting story, when the only real actions your character can perform are navigating an environment and firing weapons, perhaps with a little puzzle solving in the middle. Any actual character development has to be left for the cut-scenes over which you have little to no control and there is often a strange cognitive dissonance between the two.

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Take Uncharted 2 as an example; in the opening sequence of the game Nathan Drake finds himself incapacitated thanks to a gunshot wound to the stomach. He stumbles along, dragging his feel clearly in a bad way and it limits your abilities as you play in this regard. However through the course of the game you suffer hundreds, if not thousands of gunshots to no ill-effect. The re-charging health system lets him shrug such injuries off, until the cut-scenes of course. Similarly whilst the game spins an entertaining tale with well rounded characters, there is no escaping the fact that in through the course of actually playing the game you, as Drake, are responsible for killing upwards of 1,000 enemies, a fact that is completely counter to the character and realism elsewhere forged through the story. It’s perhaps a natural limitation of gaming’s current desire to ape the cinematic form of storytelling, but ultimately games aren’t films and I sometimes feel that in trying to be they take away much of what makes gaming so unique and interesting an art form as it is in its own right. The very freedom you have as a player, that so many stories seek to limit, can itself be a source of interesting and unique stories, not in the grand sense of a novel or a film, but a much more personal experience, arising from the combinations of player choice and gaming systems.

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My recent, possibly unhealthy, obsession with From Software’s brilliant but brutal Dark Souls, is what brought this topic to mind. The game is extremely story-lite in the traditional sense, at the outset you are given very vague instructions and let loose in a world where pretty much everything wants to kill you (and will probably do so, many times). But what makes Dark Souls so compelling, is the way that you create your own story simply through the act of playing. My adventure through Lordran will be different to anyone else’s, the scarcity of checkpoints and fiendish design make exploring each new location a nerve-wracking and absorbing endeavour. You can’t help but recount the time that you nervously ventured in a new area, were immediately ambushed but somehow survived. Undeterred you crept on taking out enemies until, with the smallest sliver of health left, you reach the safety of the local bonfire, who’s outline you glimpsed from across the level. It is a tale so vivid and unique because you made it for yourself. Maybe someone else took a different route across the map? Maybe it took then a few attempts to reach the same place, by which time they had memorised the layout? Maybe they found a shortcut, or played the whole game and never even found that bonfire. There are no checkpoint markers, no on-screen objectives and so everything you accomplish feels incredibly rewarding. It’s a mini-adventure that you made yourself, the lack of knowledge and information that the game gives you leaves the act of discovery on you, the player, and it results in an experience that feels truly special.

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Even the way you build your character, in this and other more open world RPGs such as Fallout 3 and the upcoming Skyrim allow for these same storytelling opportunities. Some of the best moments of Fallout for me were not the pre-scripted quests or storylines, but the random encounters experienced out in the wilderness. The sense of character and place really made me feel like I was building something through my actions in the world, the people I got on with and the people I opposed. Even within the quests the differing options allowed you to act as you want, and construct your own stories as you go. Such melding of game systems and design is not as straightforward or easy as building a game around a fixed narrative, and both certainly have their place, but the experience you have of blazing your own trail, and taking what you want from a game is one not possible anywhere else. Ultimately these mini stories and anecdotes about your exploits in a world are what tend to stick in the memory, because you are acutely aware that you aren’t just experiencing the same scripted sequence as everyone who bought the same game.

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There are other games experimenting with different storytelling techniques, Heavy Rain for instance, which had a scripted linear plot, but with many divergent points based upon player decisions and performance, which seamlessly moulded into an experience that felt complete but also player driven. One of the best things about the game was not only how wrapped up in the story I got, but the discussions afterwards with others who had such a variety of different experiences. Characters that died in one game lived on in others, whole events and scenes either played out differently or didn’t happen at all. It was a brilliant gamble, and one that I hope more games take in the future.

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Gaming has the potential to be so much more than a cut-scene delivery system, the interactivity with the players gives an immediate investment that other media can’t replicate, all it needs is developers brave enough to do things differently. With the advances in AI and open worlds it isn’t hard to envisage a time when games adapt to your behaviour and performance, truly tailoring an experience that is truly unique and meaningful for each and every player. As it is we are so often the passive participant in other people’s adventures, but more and more I look forward to the day we become our own storytellers, and forge our own paths through these virtual worlds.