Understanding Game Stories: Storytelling, Interaction and Emergence in Video Games
A look at how stories can emerge from play, the important effects this can have, and how we can harness this to make the most of out interactive experiences.
Reposted from my blog.
The Importance of Stories
“Man … is the storytelling animal.He has to go on telling stories. He has to keep on making them up. As long as there's a story, it's all right. Even in his last moments, it's said, in the split second of a fatal fall--or when he's about to drown--he sees, passing rapidly before him, the story of his whole life.”
- Graham Swift, Waterland
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Stories are important to us – they’re how we remember things, and they’re essentially how we experience our lives. There’s something natural about them that is hardwired into how we think. Its hard to deny that stories exist everywhere we look in life - including in games. Hopefully I can show you how games and stories co-exist in a way you might not expect.
In my previous studies, I asked people for stories about games they played, and what I found was that almost nobody told me about the actual “plot” of a story-driven game – they almost exclusively spoke about what they actually DID in the game. When it comes to games, people often debate the issue as gameplay vs story – but when we talk about games, we’re sharing stories about playing games. Think of it yourself - how many stories have you told, or heard, about playing Halo 3? How many of them were about toppling the covenant, and how many of them were about landing a lucky hit with a plasma grenade, or flipping a Warthog thirty times in the air? The truth is we want to tell OUR stories about games.
The Importance of Emergent Gaming
“When we’re at our best [as game designers] we can even create systems that allow [users] to set in motion events that we don’t control, can’t anticipate, and didn’t plan for … and that’s when things get really interesting!”
- Warren Spector
A lot has been said about emergent games – they’re essentially the most “pure” of gaming experiences. Some of the biggest games of today are almost completely emergent. But all too often they are viewed as having “no story” – possibly by the same people who think that you can only have story OR game.
It's an understandable viewpoint. Story is, by its nature, linear. It relates events that have already happened. Any interweaving of traditional story content and interactivity means constraining the output of that interactivity to match the predicted story.
What games can do, however, is provide us with stories to tell. In other words, we're not so much talking about how we tell stories through emergent games, as much as we're talking about turning emergent games into story engines - tools that we play with, and come away with stories to tell.
Defining Our Terms
To understand how these things work, and how this system can be exploited for the benefit of games players, we'll have to understand what the individual elements are. A lot of discussion on story and games becomes confusing, because so many of the terms can be used in different ways. So lets set some definitions down to make this easier:
Story
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This one's simple - a story is a sequence of events. They don't have to be completely related, or in any order. It helps if there is some kind of structure, or if the events of a story are compelling in their nature, but it isn't necessary. "A man walks down the street. A dog poops in the road." Is a story. (Interestingly, how many of you are picturing the dog and man being in the vicinity of one another? Where do you think that idea came from?)
Narrative
Narrative is a little trickier to explain, because it is more of a catch-all term for everything relating to how the story is conveyed.
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OmegaMan
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"The last man alive battles a bunch of mutant vampire-zombie things" could be the story of "I Am Legend", the novel by Richard Matheson, the film "Omega Man" with Charlton Heston, the film "I Am Legend" with Will Smith, or even the wonderfully terrible "I Am Omega" from Asylum films. The differences lie in the narrative structure (how the story is laid out), the narrative devices (the viewpoints from which the story is told) and various other narrative elements like setting and characters.
Plot
Plot is a rather confusing word, often mixed in with narrative, but generally speaking it represents the chain of causality that links events together and makes a story more compelling. Think of the more easily understood use of the term as a verb: "to plot" is to arrange something surreptitously, to create a series of causal events to a singular goal.
EM Forster summed this description of plot up perfectly when he said:
Emergent Systems as a Narrative Device
"The King died, then the Queen died is a story. The King died, then the Queen died of grief is a plot."
Finding the Story
So now we know what we're looking to create from our emergent systems. We've also got some idea that these stories are already being formed in what people talk about from their experiences in games. What we need now is something specific to look for.
Jean Luc Goddard famously once said:
"A story should have a beginning, a middle and an end ... but not necessarily in that order."
Of course, a lot of people have disputed this idea. The anonymous quote often used in response to that (ocassionally attributed to one of Goddard's film students) is:
"My weiner dog has a beginning, a middle and an end, but he's not a story."
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You might be able to argue this point back and forth - but I, given the descriptions laid out above, would say that yes, even the lowly, proud weiner dog can be a story, albeit a rather avante-garde one. You can't deny that the "beginning - middle - end" structure holds true for most video games.
Emergent Systems as a Narrative Device 1a
In this way, most video games follow a standard formula - there's a beginning, in which we're given a great task to undertake. There's a middle, where that task is carried out, and an end when we complete this task.
Emergent Systems as a Narrative Device 1b
We've made plenty of attempts over the years to break away from this format, but for the most part we've just been layering stories on top of one another. We might have multiple endings, but were still telling a stiff, linear story.
Emergent Systems as a Narrative Device 2a
There's more attempts to break out from this formula present in games like the recent next-gen Fallout series: a strong linear story, supported by a number of smaller stories that vary in the strength of their connection to the main story. Some are connected directly, others completely unconnected.
Interestingly, this is the structure of a lot of dramatic cinema, where you'll see a single central story arc supported by a number of allegorical or metaphorical arcs that follow secondary characters - but at its heart, this is still a linear structure. We're closer to the structure of an emergent game, but not quite there.
Emergent Systems as a Narrative Device 2b
In emergent games, there's still a beginning of some kind, but the end can fluctuate so much as to make the middle indistinct. This leaves us with a question of where the stories we tell people after playing an emergent game come from.
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What is happening here is that the player is creating the story themselves based on the events they experience when they play the game. They aren't given a beginning, middle and an end - but when they experience something they want to talk about, they find it themselves.It turns out something like this exists in other media as well. The panels in a comic book, for example, are just a series of images on a page. It takes a reader to scan over them and put them in order for them to become a story. In cinema, we see a character walk down a hallway, then enter a room, and we assume the two are connected - but in truth, they could have been shot on two different locations, in other parts of the world. If you want to get really particular, film itself is a series of still images shown so fast that our brain processes the information as a moving image.
Scott McCloud discusses this in "Understanding Comics" - a book we'll come back to later in the discussion. It's a phenomenon called "implied narrative", and if we want to understand how to harness the power of emergent games to use it, we'll have to know what it looks like.
Visualising The Story
The Visual Story - Bruce Block - Focal Press - 2001 - Diagram 1
The above diagram might look familiar. In this case, it comes from Bruce Block's "The Visual Story", but it could come from any number of writing textbooks - its the standard Aristotelian diagram of the intensity of a good story over the time its told. We can see the structure we saw earlier - there's a beginning (EX), a middle (CO) where the tension rises to a climax (CX) and an end (R). So we know that were looking for something like this in an emergent gaming experience.
If you've read a few academic game design blogs and websites, you might find that the above diagram looks familiar for another reason.
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There's a striking resemblance between the Aristotelian diagram of rising tension, and Jenova Chen's adaptation of the "Flow" concept. Chen posited that players require a balance of rising challenge as their abilities in a game increase. Since we learn to play games (and thus increase our abilities) over time, and an increase in challenge is likely to result in an increase in tension, we can see a correlation form between the structure of the "Flow" diagram and the aristotelian diagram.