Introduction

In this series of posts, I want to take a slight deviation from technology experimentation to delve into a topic I’ve been thinking about a lot recently.

I don’t play video games too often; but, when I do, I usually gravitate toward games that have a strong narrative with interesting characters. (Incidentally, this is also the type of movie I like, which I’m sure isn’t a coincidence.) The problem is that there aren’t many games that fall into this camp. Traditionally, game play and mechanics come first, leading to an insipid story — if there even is one. In some cases, this approach is perfectly fine. That’s especially true for mobile games where you want to allow a player to jump in and out of a game session quickly. Mobile games also can’t assume they have a player’s undivided attention.

In games where the developer does make an attempt at a story, there are a few questions that need to be answered. What is the balance between story and gameplay? Is the story just a frame that justifies the gameplay, or is there a message being conveyed? What affect does the story have on the gameplay? Do you allow a player to interact with the environment while story or character development is taking place, or is story relegated to “cut scenes” only?

But to me, the most important question is: does the player get to interact with the story?

Video games allow for story interaction in a way that has been impossible to explore in the past. Movies and books are predominantly a passive experience, and while there has been some experimentation with interactivity in these formats, they usually prove to be too expensive or unwieldy to pursue in an interesting way. Perhaps the best example of this is the “Choose Your Own Adventure” series of books. By telling the reader to jump to certain parts of the book, the author allows the reader to decide where the story goes next. But a book can only contain a certain number of pages, and thus a certain number of ideas — ultimately, the end result is a series of choices that all funnel to the same result. The illusion of choice quickly evaporates.

Drawing from these early attempts for inspiration, video games have followed a similar framework when adding interactivity to their games. The result, therefore, is similar: your choices seem to have an immediate affect, but subsequent play throughs reveal that few of those choices actually yield a different outcome.

Thankfully, developers who care about interactive storytelling have continued to explore the advantages that technology brings to this space. For example, choices can be much less intrusive: not only is there no book to root through for a specific page, but the player doesn’t even have to realize that a choice has been made. Even more interestingly, video games have memory. While a book can make some assumptions about how they go to that spot in the narrative, those assumptions usually only have a scope of one or two choices back. A video game, in comparison, can theoretically remember anything. There is a stack of choices that the author can mine for data, allowing them to subtly change the details of wherever they are in the story.

In the next part, I want to explore some examples of games that have pushed these narrative boundaries. After that, I’d like to talk about how this concept could be taken to the next step — and what that might look like to an author or developer.