Techniques of Written Storytelling Applied to Game Design

It's been said many times, and that's because it's obvious: game design must strive to become more emotionally involving, and the best way to achieve this is to create resonant characters. It's obvious, but it's only half the story. The characters whom we seek to fill with emotional depth are the non-player characters (NPCs). In games, we have another class of characters: player characters.

At first glance, it would seem that the rich set of techniques available to us from the visual media of film and television is ideally suited to creating compelling game characters. This is true, but only for the NPCs. These techniques are irrelevant to presenting a player character, because a first-person player character isn't presented, it is experienced. It's not empathy that we wish to promote in the player character, but immersive agency. No film script ever had to concern itself with such a task.

Where then do we look for guidance about how to promote an involving first-person experience? Written storytelling has been sharpening its own techniques for centuries. A first-person (or what's called a tight third-person) written account, one in which a character's deepest inner life is exposed, offers more insight into first-person gaming technique than does film, and in this article I will explore these well-understood techniques from a game design point of view.

The Biggie: Point of View

The first and by far the most important technique is the effective use of point of view. Point of view refers to the character chosen by the writer to relate the story. From the perspective of a first-person game designer, the most important kinds of point of view to study are first person and tight third-person. (see the sidebar for definitions).

In written fiction, a sloppy point-of-view will earn your manuscript a one-way trip to the editor's bit bucket. There is a direct analogy to be drawn between such errors in written fiction and in interactive titles. In writing, the reader's empathy is sabotaged. In first-person games, it is the player's sense of agency that is lost.

Let's take a look at some specifics. Consider the cut-scene in a first-person game. The loss of agency is clear because we have taken away the very mechanism by which the player expresses that agency: the fact that the joystick controls what the character sees and does. But the situation is a little more complex than this. A cut-scene in which the player's character is portrayed in the third person does irreparable harm to the player's agency. A player who sees his or her character walking and talking out of their direct control is robbed of their power. The James Bond Golden-Eye tie-in made this mistake with frustrating regularity.

The switch from first-person to cut scene is analogous to switching from first-person to omniscient points of view in written fiction, but in our young medium it is debatable as to whether it is as grave a mistake. A cut scene that does not show the player's character can be very dramatic and does not necessarily defeat that sense of agency. It can indeed heighten it. Recall the closing sequence of Halo: watching the destruction of the ring was made all the more vivid by the knowledge that you, the player, caused it.

Now, we might reasonably expect that the interactive author is free to switch between different first-person points of view at low frequency, just as writers are. This is, of course, true, but we pay a price that is different from that of our literary cousins: if the new point of view presents an image of the other characters the player can control, then, as in the cut-scene, we have again defeated the player's sense of agency. For this reason, it is far more effective to stick to exactly one point of view in a first-person game. If the author does switch, then it is vital that the many points of view never observe each other. This situation leads to a tricky finale: you can't wrap up all the storylines in the same scene at the end of the game.

Point of view is also relevant to the player's audio environment. It's often tempting to have the player's character speak pithy comments that are heard by the player. Two examples that leap to mind are Duke Nukem's famous “Come get some” and Crimson Skies' player character noting “Now we're cooking with gas” after blowing up a fuel dump. This is a clear point of view error in a first-person title.

Show-Don't-Tell

The next technique we will consider is a more subtle one. In fact, most beginning writers, myself included, tend to scoff at its power before they understand it. This method has no particular name, but we can denote it by the phrase “show, don't tell.” These three words are a mantra for working writers, and remind us that the reader's experience is far more vivid when he or she is given credit for their intelligence and is allowed to infer information rather than be told it outright. The power of this process lies in the reader's tendency to infer more than they are told. Readers will always bring their own imaginations to bear on any information they receive, and a conclusion thus derived is bound to be richer, perhaps richer even than the author intended. This is why the effectiveness of the technique is invisible to the author, and likely to be underexploited by the neophyte writer.

Show-don't-tell doesn't necessarily mean that the author shouldn't give explicit information, rather that the important information, the stuff of the story itself, should be left strongly implied by what you do tell. For example, a story that shows jack-booted thugs, tanks in city streets at night, the beaten, downcast look of the citizenry and rifle-fire starting at exactly nine p.m. need not contain an explicit and far less affecting statement such as “the city was under fascist martial law.”

Let's consider how show-don't-tell transfers to the interactive realm. It's fair to say that there are no hard-and-fast rules, but an author who approaches the problem with an awareness of these issues is more likely to be successful. I'll present a list of the issues I have encountered, and my suggestions for addressing them.

Lastly, the writer must always resist the urge to explain. The reader is smarter than you think. Trust the reader to infer more than you show. A conclusion drawn by the reader from the clues you do provide enters their brain through an irresistible path: their own intelligence. They will trust and internalize that judgment far more deeply than the same result painted in pages of descriptive prose. The parallel to interactive titles is direct: avoid sledgehammers when showing elements of setting or character.

Grounding

The term “grounding” refers to the frequent resetting of the reader's imagination into the time and place the author wishes them to experience. In written stories, a lack of grounding leaves the reader guessing where the story is taking place, what time of day or year, how cold the air, what century. This confusion will be nagging the reader's mind, preventing him or her from concentrating on the events and emotions the writer is attempting to portray.

Grounding in games is easier to maintain. There is always a visual presentation on which the player can concentrate and from which the player can infer details of setting. Remember only that the angel is in the details here, that small things such as the state of the paint on the walls, the amount of trash on the floor, the color of the clouds (note how the sky changes accurately with time-of-day in Half-Life 2) can all contribute to grounding and should all be exploited deliberately.

Reaction

Reaction in written fiction is the primary vehicle by which writers evoke empathy. A piece of writing always relates a sequence of events. A piece that refuses to illuminate the impact these events have on the character who experiences them is lifeless. A reader will use a word such as “dry” to describe writing like this, and will display their own reaction by putting down the book. Reaction is one of the hardest things to do well in written stories. Some writers have a gift for it, but others must gain proficiency only by steady practice.

Reaction is a difficult thing to port directly to interactive titles because there is no direct analogy. In first-person genres, the character from which we are most interested in eliciting a reaction is the player. We cannot therefore simply show the reaction. However, we can be aware of the fact that we are seeking to evoke one, and ensure that we employ as many visual and auditory queues as possible. Many of these are well-established in our medium, such as the red flash and visual jolt that accompanies an injury in any first-person shooter. It's still refreshing to come across a new example, such as the temporary deafness delivered by a nearby explosion in Half-life 2, and it's not wasted effort to seek as many avenues as possible.

Authorial Intrusion

One of the surest ways to bump a reader out of your story is to reveal the fact that a person invented that story. Authorial intrusion can take many forms, and can only be rooted out by exposing the work to other readers. Overly florid prose, explicit political statements and exaggerated walk-on characters who serve an obvious story purpose are all good examples of this error.

In games, the author who might intrude is either the writer or the level designer. We need to define two new classes of authorial intrusion for games: the classic types as listed above, and the pragmatic constraints imposed by the fact that we cannot hire enough artists to create an entire Universe. An example is the crate full of rocket launchers that tells the player that a helicopter gunship is just around the corner. This is a form of intrusion, because it reminds us that we are playing in a world that was created by a human being, and we are bumped from the story. Those levels should be tweaked such that the means to defeat an enemy are not visible until after the enemy is met. This doesn't eliminate the problem, but it does push it off to a point where the player is so engaged in a fight for survival that they are less likely to notice they have been bumped.

Pragmatic intrusion is of course unavoidable, but classic intrusion can and should be expunged wherever it arises.

Critique Groups Become Critique Testing

Working writers, even experienced, successful, multi-book authors, always participate in critique groups. The writer will bring in a short (a thousand words or so) sequence from their work and read it to a small group of diverse individuals who will then comment on their reactions to the piece. The reason this is done is again the fact that the reader's reaction is necessarily invisible to the author. Time and again, an author will hear reactions in critique that were completely unintended. If these reactions are negative, and if they are consistent for more than one member of the group, the author is well advised to change what's written.

We can apply this technique to games. All you have to do is sit a stranger down in front of the game and let them play for a few minutes. After which, you ask the player for their reaction. Ask them to describe the story they have witnessed in their own words. Some points to watch out for that come straight from our experience with literary critique groups:

Critique testing like this is separate from general play-testing. Critique testing seeks to unearth bugs in your storytelling. Treat the process as entirely different from technical play-testing, and don't attempt to do both at once.

Some Examples

By way of illustration, I'll give some concrete examples and thereby contrast some interactive titles that have achieved mature storytelling with others that have not.

This list is a good opportunity to assess the efficacy of these techniques. Which experience was the more involving? Which seemed to have the best story? Now think about the actual story, its complexity and power devoid of its vehicle, the game. The difference is in the quality of the presentation, and this arises purely from technique.

In Conclusion: Trust Your Writer!

Writers of prose fiction have been working the bugs out of their presentation technique for a long time, and we can learn a good deal from them. It's true that a skilled writer can break these rules for dramatic effect, but it's a prerequisite to understand the rules first.

Perhaps the best lesson to be learned from written fiction is that a production house should always have an experienced, professional writer on-call if not on-staff, and should always listen when the writer says something that doesn't at first sound important. It might be!

I expect that, as our medium matures, we will see a standardization of accepted technique, and deviations from the well-established methods will be few and far between, used consciously for dramatic effect or to increase usability. I look forward to that day.

For Further Information

There are many books on written storytelling technique. Some good ones:

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