Thought/Process: Building Better Wor(l)ds

How does story happen in videogames, if at all?
5/9/2008 12:52 PM | 0 Comments | Page 2 of 3

"When the last round of the Roger Ebert vs. Video Games grudge match was flaring up, I wondered aloud (in a IM to N'Gai, I think) if what bothered Ebert was the way that games attempted to place players in something akin to an authorial space... Videogames are an interactive medium, after all, and moreso than in other entertainment forms, what you wind up getting isn't just what the content creators intended but what you put into it as well. The end result emerges as a gestalt experience that changes with each different user."

So, while it can be argued that Portal doesn't have a story or I can have issues with the story Assassin's Creed does present, I think there's a kind of narrative created by playing these games. The way I split the difference on Croal's "fundamentally non-narrative" thesis is to think about whether a title seems designed to deliver an experience or a narrative as its primary function. There's been lots of buzz online lately about how necessary writers are to game design. Thing is, the two aren't mutually exclusive and I think that mapping particular games to an experience/narrative axis could be helpful for understanding specific titles and videogames as a whole. I started thinking this way after meeting comics writing genius Grant Morrison at this year's New York Comic Con. During a brief conversation, the Scottish-born writer said, "I keep on waiting on videogames to get punk rock, y'know? Where some guy at home can create a crazy world for me to visit." Punk rock wasn't about delivering a narrative through song lyrics, rather it aimed to communicate through its visceral experience. Again, that's not a hard-and-fast rule where experience and narrative are mutually exclusive.

To me, Rez and Every Extend Extra, newer offerings like Everyday Shooter and echochrome, and indie games like The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom and Crayon Physics Deluxe either minimize plot elements or do away with them altogether, but the experience of besting the brain-teasing aspects of all those games still leaves you with a story to tell. When you consider the stand-up arcade games of yore like Dig Dug, Pac-Man and Donkey Kong, the whys and wherefores of controlling a character barely registered. Of course, as games evolved, the opportunities to tell bigger stories grew and the traits of other media seeped in.

Croal's jumped into the fray of the "writing for games" discussion with an analysis detailing what he calls the Three E's. I think we can add a fourth E-type called Encompassing Narrative to Croal's list. It's the province of the player in an ecosystem created by player and game, allowing for varying percentages of experience and types of narrative in the game itself. Within the Encompassing Narrative, those narrative types all serve as a platform for individuated experiences to jump off, with the experience creating singularly specific story bursts.