Game Stories

As I have discussed, when writing a story for a game, it is important to stay away from the conventions of linear media, such as forcing players to follow only one narrative and instilling too much character in the players game-world surrogate. Beyond the pitfalls to avoid when creating the game s story, the game s scriptwriter should worry less about the overall plot and more about the situations in which players find themselves and characters with which they interact. Indeed, many film directors are keenly aware of this technique. For instance, in talking about his notoriously confusing film The Big Sleep , director Howard Hawks said: Making this picture I realized that you don t really have to have an explanation for things. As long as you make good scenes you have a good picture ” it doesn t really matter if it isn t much of a story.

I have played countless games where the overall plot was completely lost on me; I simply did not care to follow it. Often in these games, I enjoyed the gameplay, the situations the game placed me in, and the interesting and amusing characters I met there. Since the characters and situations were interesting, it did not really matter if I knew who did what to whom and when. All I knew was that I was having fun playing the game. Often when games try to hit me over the head with their plot through long cut-scenes that go into minute detail about the reasons for the state of the game-world and the character s motivations for every last action, it becomes tedious . Remember that players want to play games . If the story enhances that experience, that is good, but if the story starts to get in the way of the gameplay, that is bad. Spelling out too much of the story is also a common failing of novice writers. Readers, viewers , and players alike are able to figure out much more than novice authors give them credit for. It makes sense for the author of the story to have all of the character s motivations figured out in detail, with all of the nuances of the different twists and turns of the plot detailed in her notebook. Indeed, having a rich back-story or story bible can be a fantastic way to ensure consistency and allow for later changes or additions to still fit with the overall game fiction . But does every last element of this story need to be included in the game? No, what is more important is that pieces players are presented with are consistent and could be used to put together the complete story. Players will not mind if every last plot point is not explicitly spelled out.

In Chapter 9, Artificial Intelligence, I talked about Brian Moriarty s concept of constellation and how it could help to create more interesting AI. Constellation is a natural tendency that game storytellers can also use to their advantage. Moriarty has described constellation in media as the ability of an audience to fill in the holes or inconsistencies present in a storytelling experience, regardless of what form that story may take. For instance, if a storyteller only hints at the true appearance of an evil foe, the image conjured in the mind of an audience member may be far more frightening than what the storyteller might be able to describe to the audience. One can also look at the fan base for a TV show such as Star Trek . The slightest hinting at a bit of story by the writers of the show will lead to endless speculation among the audience members as to what the implications of that subtle hint are, and the fans will come up with their own explanation for what it might mean. This may or may not be the explanation the writer originally intended, but what is important is that it involves the audience in the work to a much greater degree, switching them from a passive mode to an active one. Of course, games are already much more interactive than television, and therefore it makes sense that game storytellers would not tell the audience every last detail of a plot. This will involve the players still more in the game as they try to figure out what exactly the story is all about. And above all, they will be delighted to avoid long expository scenes and get back to the game.

Non- Linearity

Much talk is made of non-linearity in games, and storytelling in particular is a key area where non-linearity can be used to enhance players gaming experience. I feel the goal of game storytelling is to create a story in which players feel they can play a significant role that may affect the outcome. Non-linearity is an essential tool for accomplishing that goal. In a way, in-game storytelling is non-linear. In-game storytelling allows players to talk to some characters and not to others, to choose which signs to read and which to ignore, and to explore the game-world in order to reveal its relevance to the story line, exploration over which players have control. With players empowered to explore the story-space in their own way, some degree of non-linearity is unavoidably created. This was certainly true in The Suffering and with Odyssey before it, where I put a lot of story into the games that many players would not necessarily find, making players exploration of the story-space somewhat non-linear or at least unique to them.

Much of the story in The Suffering needs to be found by player exploration.

One popular way to add non-linearity to the storytelling experience is through a branching story. With a branching story, at various points the decisions players make will have a significant effect on how the story progresses. This may mean if players succeed in defeating a certain adversary, the story will progress differently than if the players fail to kill that foe. In the latter case, it may be that players will have to kill that foe later, or that the foe will summon a force to help him that players will have to confront. Of course, branching stories increase the amount of content that will need to be created for a game, at least in terms of game design and dialog, if not also in art assets.

This can sometimes make this technique unpopular with the cost accountants , who see the creation of such assets as wasted money. What they fail to see is that if the branching story line is implemented properly, the gameplay payoff will be tremendous, thereby making the game more popular and profitable.

Another technique that can be used to inject some non-linearity into the game s story is to allow players to determine the order in which different story components occur. Suppose there are three sections of the story you need to tell. Perhaps the order in which players experience those components is not so important. With a little extra work, you may be able to give players the choice of which section to do first, which to do second, and which to do last. If one thinks of this in terms of the chapters of a game s story, often designers find that, though the first and final chapters of the narrative must happen at the beginning and end of the game respectively, the other chapters in the game can happen in any order. Of course, issues with the difficulty of the sections may arise, since ideally designers want the difficulty of their games to ramp up continuously. This, however, is more of a game design question, and one that clever designers will be able to solve. It also presents problems with the story itself, where the writer must keep those plots discrete so that they can be experienced in any order and still make sense. This may have the negative side effect that you cannot have each of these interchangeable story chapters build on each other in the same way as you could in a completely linear story. Often this is not a problem, however, and the advantage of having players craft their own experience outweighs the drawbacks.

Of course non-linear storytelling in games goes hand in hand with non-linear gameplay; one can hardly imagine one without the other. Non-linearity is explored more in Chapter 7, The Elements of Gameplay.

Working with the Gameplay

One of the most important parts of creating a story for a computer game is to match the story with the gameplay as much as possible. Earlier, in Chapter 3, Brainstorming a Game Idea, I discussed how a game s development might start with technology, gameplay, or story/setting. If you are starting your game development process with gameplay or with technology, these are going to directly dictate which kind of story you can tell. If you try to fight the gameplay or technology with a story that is not suitable, you are going to be left with a poorly told story in a poorly executed game. There are infinitely many stories to be told, and infinitely many ways to tell a given story. Your job as game designer is to find a story and a telling of that story that will work with the game design and technology that you will be using. It is reasonable to alter the gameplay somewhat in order to support the story you are trying to tell. There should be a fair give and take between the two, but in the end you will need to remember that it is a game that you are developing and that gameplay must almost always take precedence.

Damage Incorparated s story was created to fit around the gameplay and technology.

For me, stories seem to naturally fall out of gameplay. I seldom think of a story independently and try to fit it into some gameplay. Instead, I see the constraints of the world with which I will be working, and start thinking of the most interesting content possible for that space. I do not see these constraints as a limitation on my ability to tell a story, but more as guidelines or even sources of inspiration. For example, in Damage Incorporated , long before the game had a story there was a technology and a game design in mind. From the game design, which centered around players controlling teammates in an FPS environment, sprung the idea for the different teammates that would accompany players, and how each one of them would have a distinct personality. What sort of men would be in the Marine Corps of the 1990s? How would they react to a combat situation? What would their reaction be when they saw their commander killed ? These were the questions that ended up driving the development of the game s story. And these questions arose directly out of the limitations imposed by the game design.

Similarly, in The Suffering we wanted to keep the player as immersed in the game as possible, and therefore wanted to have a continuous game-world where the player ran through every inch of it on foot . We also wanted a space where the player could be reasonably constrained without it seeming contrived. Thus setting the game on a relatively small island made perfect sense and acted as a natural and believable physical limitation to where the player could go. In writing the story, I used this to my advantage, building up the mythos of the game around its island setting, to the point where, from a story standpoint, the game is inconceivable anywhere else. Similarly, since we were building an action game, we knew we had to have a fairly large body count, and thus the game s fiction was written to support an endless supply of hideous creatures springing forth from caves beneath the island s surface. In the end the creatures and the island seem to be a natural and appropriate part of the story, but originally they were decisions that were fully dictated by the gameplay.