CHAPTER
Fifteen
The Future of Storytelling in Games
By now, you should be familiar with the basics of story structure, character development, and the history of storytelling in video games. You should also have a clear understanding of the main types of interactive stories used in games and the strengths and weaknesses of each. Finally, you should have a better understanding of the traditional vs. player-driven storytelling debate, which stories players enjoy most, and why. All that’s left is to take that information and use it to look ahead and see what game storytelling may be like in the future. But first, let’s quickly recap what you’ve learned.
Game storytelling has evolved considerably since the early days of Donkey Kong and Colossal Cave Adventure. The simplistic stories of early games have led to large, complex tales that can rival any found in books or movies. Furthermore, the importance of stories in games is continuing to grow. Though genres traditionally known for their strong storytelling, such as RPGs and adventure games, continue to lead the way, well-crafted stories have become a key part of many other types of games as well.
Over the years, writers and designers have experimented with many different ways to make the player a more integral part of the story. This experimentation has led to the development of several different types of game storytelling. Interactive traditional stories are more writer-focused and don’t allow the player to significantly change the main plot in any way (though the player may have considerable freedom in other parts of the game). Multiple-ending, branching path, and open-ended stories, respectively, give the player greater degrees of freedom to affect and change the progression and outcome of the story; fully player-driven stories merely provide a setting and leave the player free to create a story of his or her choosing. However, there’s considerable debate as to whether giving the player more control leads to better and more enjoyable stories.
Those who support highly player-driven storytelling say that traditional storytelling has long since reached its peak. However, the use of interactivity can grow and evolve the art form by allowing writers to explore many different paths and plot progressions while allowing each player to fulfill his or her greatest desires and become an active participant in the story. This power to change events and explore different possible outcomes lets players ensure that the story progresses in a way that they’ll enjoy and helps strengthen the bond between the player and the character. Therefore, it’s important that game writers and designers abandon their focus on more traditional storytelling methods and look toward the future.
Supporters of more traditional storytelling argue that storytelling has lasted so long in its current form precisely because of how perfect that form is. Games using highly player-driven forms of storytelling are difficult to make and require a considerable amount of time and money in order to create extra content that most players will never even see. Furthermore, what the player wants most isn’t to be a part of the story, but to be entertained and/or engaged by the story. And the more control players have over events, the more likely they are to make a mistake and turn the story down a less interesting path. At the same time, the ability to go back and change the outcome of major events significantly reduces the emotional impact of those events, as players know they can always go back and try again for a better outcome. Because of this, it’s better to give players a strong illusion of control (by granting them a large degree of freedom during exploration, battle, and/or other part of the game) rather than giving them any actual control over the story.
In the end, both sides’ arguments are based on assumptions of what players want and enjoy most in a story. According to my own research and surveys, games’ stories are very important to players, affecting which games they buy, how long they play their games, and their overall satisfaction with the games as a whole. Though a moderate number of gamers find the idea of player-driven storytelling interesting, it’s rarely a deciding factor when purchasing games. Furthermore, the vast majority of players still prefer games that use interactive traditional storytelling. In fact, the more player-driven the storytelling style, the less popular it is among gamers. This lends considerable support to the arguments supporting more traditional storytelling in games and shows that, in the end, what players want most is simply a well-told story, even if they don’t have any control over its outcome.
The game industry is always looking toward the future, which is necessary when many games require years of development time. So the big question is what game storytelling is going to be like next year; three years from now; or five, ten, or twenty years from now.
First off, I should note that predicting the future – even the future of a single medium or technology – is difficult. Many brilliant minds have tried to do so, and although some predictions have held true, the vast majority have failed to hold up. Many people are simply either too optimistic or pessimistic to accurately judge how things will progress, and even the most realistic and well-researched predictions can be thrown off by an unexpected development or roadblock. So, with that in mind, let’s take a cautious look at what the future of game storytelling might hold.
The Most Popular Types of Storytelling
Interactive traditional storytelling is currently the most popular form of storytelling in games, and this seems unlikely to change in the foreseeable future. Video games are certainly the most convenient way to tell many types of player-driven stories, but they’re far from the only way. Writers have experimented with player-driven storytelling many times in the past, including things like the Choose Your Own Adventure books, interactive theater, and more recently, with video games and other digital media. But although some of those experiments did prove fairly popular, they in no way threatened the dominance of traditional storytelling. Storytelling in video games seems to be playing out in much the same way. Although more player-driven forms of storytelling have their supporters and have been used in some very successful games, they’ll remain a relatively small part of the game industry. Due to the influence of games such as Mass Effect, Heavy Rain, and The Sims (all of which provide very different yet popular takes on player-driven storytelling), games using player-driven storytelling certainly aren’t going to disappear anytime soon; in fact, it’s quite likely that their popularity will continue to increase. However, their costs, challenges, and limitations aren’t going to go away, either.
In the end, the carefully designed structure, characters, and pacing of interactive traditional stories will continue to dominate the industry and attract the attention of players. Just as Homer, Dickens, and others continue to enthrall us to this day, perhaps some of the best game stories of today will become the classics of future generations. Although it’s quite possible that newer technologies like motion con-trollers and 3D displays will create some changes in the way that we interact with games, the basic foundations of storytelling itself will remain constant, just as they have throughout the thousands of years of change and developments that have come before.
The Most Important Thing
As Josiah and I were busy doing the last wave of edits on this book, I was attending a conference on the Digital Narrative. While there, I sat in on a discussion given by writers working in games as well as other interactive media, and the one thing they all agreed upon (amazing, actually, that there was even that singular thing – sometimes writers can be a bit opinionated) was that the limitations imposed on writers by the technology were finally for the most part a thing of the past. Budgets will always be an issue, of course, but these three writers agreed that for the first time in years, the technologists didn’t need to sit in the story rooms putting the brakes on the writers any longer and that the technology was indeed now as flexible as the writers needed it to be, thus enabling them to tell the kinds of stories they wanted to tell. Additionally, these writers had also finally gotten their own technical chops up to speed, so they knew how to create within those technologies. And to their collective sigh of relief, they now once again had control over their stories instead of having the tech control the stories. But the questions remained, “What kinds of stories work best in this new interactive medium?” and “How do we tell those kinds of stories in the most compelling way possible?”
That’s where this book comes in, and that’s where my co-author’s research and advice are so valuable. Writers have universally struggled with this new idea of handing over varying degrees of story control to the player, not because of an ego thing (well, not for the most part, anyway), but rather because they fear that certain types of story moments will be lost in translation. They fear that players – even the most well-intentioned players – will avoid painful story moments just because they are so painful (and because in the new paradigm they can be avoided). But often it is precisely those very painful story moments that give the story its power.
At the conference, a number of us were talking about this issue after dinner one evening. We mentioned the risk of writers in interactive media yielding authorial control too much; when they do so, the story tends to drift toward vanilla. Two examples immediately sprang to mind amongst our group: the ending David Chase crafted for the Sopranos series, and more recently, a small moment on the most recent episode of Mad Men.
We believed that both of these moments, as delivered by their authors, were not the kind of choice average audience members would have picked, had they been in the driver’s seat; the first because the nature of the Sopranos ending prevents it from being a player choice (once that option exists for the players and is explained to them all, the power from that option would have been drained from the choice; it’s a form of Catch-22). Can you imagine? (“You have the option to end the game now, right in the middle of the dialog, or continue.”) The second was not a likely popular choice because the average Mad Men viewer roots for Don Draper (well, okay, if not “roots for” Don, then at least doesn’t root against Don) and to see him make a decision that the viewer expects to end badly when an obvious better choice is right there in front of him is so painful to watch that the player, if playing Don, would almost always avoid that choice.
I mentioned to the group that for me, watching that moment in the episode, knowing that Don would screw up that opportunity, I literally fast-forwarded over that moment so that I didn’t have to listen to him say those words. That story decision by the Mad Men staff was inevitable and painful and delicious, all at the same time. It was akin to watching someone you love fall back into addiction, even though that person has tried to kick the habit.
These kinds of moments are the ones that writers fear will be lost when we lose absolute authorial control. But let’s examine that fear for a second. Is that true? Will we lose those moments? Or will they just morph into some other kind of equivalent game moment? In addition, does the player truly want to abdicate the writer’s contribution?
Regarding the first point, there was a question in a session at the conference: “What about suspense? Where will suspense go when players control the story? If the players are making all the decisions, how will the writer surprise the players?” One way this seeming conundrum can be solved is through gameplay, substituting the suspense of fighting and trying to defeat, say, a boss, for the kind of suspense a story can bring. The player won’t necessarily miss the feeling of suspense, because that visceral emotion is present in the story – just not in the traditional sense the questioner was thinking of. So, often the missing emotion morphs into something similar but different. And we writers must adapt; instead of twisting the plot in a way that ratchets up the surprises and the suspense, we build the stakes of the upcoming battle in such a way that when the battle finally arrives, the player is almost painfully aware of the rewards of victory and the perils of defeat. This challenge is on us to solve; the key is to be aware that players crave those kinds of emotions in their stories.
The second issue is where the players have indeed spoken, and Josiah has related their opinions. The conclusion of the survey for me is that what game players who love story really want most is to be the hero in a traditionally structured story, the kind of story they have seen and loved their whole lives – to take up a sword and slay the dragon, rescue the princess, solve the crime. Those archetypal stories have been told and retold for millennia because they have the kind of power that comes from emotional truth. They resonate with us now and have resonated with our parents and ancestors for the most important reason of all: they teach us how to live our lives. They contain these deep emotional truths, and we long to hear them again and again, helping to light our way as we struggle to understand the meaning of this life we all live. For that is what stories always do: illuminate our path, if even just a tiny bit.
Whether the story is read in a novel or is seen in a movie theater or comes echoing down the street to us from a puppet show in a nearby circus matters not. Games are just the latest wrapper for story; we writers can and must find new ways to deliver what the audience craves from us and not become distracted by the technology or abdicate our voice.
Writers: continue to be true to the heart of the story and honor your voice, for contained in your voice are the voices of Aeschylus, Shakespeare, Byron, and Miller. Your voice is their voice; it always has been and always will be. That is what the players want from us most.
—Chris
How much do my predictions about the future of game storytelling really matter? Assuming that I’m right, and that interactive traditional stories will continue to dominate, does that mean the industry as a whole should forget about player-driven storytelling and focus entirely on interactive traditional stories, because they’re the most popular? Or, if I’m wrong and player-driven storytelling experiences an enormous surge in popularity, should we forget about more traditional forms of storytelling? Of course not!
Unfortunately, many people in the game industry have a tendency to think that there’s a best way to do everything, and that once we find that magical best game type, best story format, best graphical style, and so on, that will be all players will ever want anymore and every other type of game should go away. Over the years that I’ve followed the game industry, I’ve heard notable figures make many such claims, including that no one will play anything but RPGs; RPGs are a dead genre and no one will buy them anymore; players only want 3D games; big-budget games will be replaced entirely by small downloadable games; no one will want to play any game without motion controls; no one will want to play any game that’s not online; and so on, ad infinitum. More recently, a lot of people have been saying how game consoles, big-budget games, and hardcore games are all going to go away because everyone will just be playing social networking games on Facebook. Game stories are no exception to this behavior. There are some, especially in the pro-player-driven-storytelling group, who are sure that any day now all players will suddenly decide that they like only stories of one type and will never play games using other forms of storytelling again.
Yet despite all these predictions, here we are today, and none of those things have even remotely come to pass. RPGs are still very popular, but so are many other genres. 2D games are still being released on every platform and many have sold millions of copies. Small downloadable games are a big market, but haven’t hurt the sales of big-budget games in the least. Motion-controlled games helped expand the game market, and can be a lot of fun, but show no signs of taking over the industry as a whole. There are plenty of single-player games that lack online features entirely and still sell millions of copies. And, as popular as social networking games are, I haven’t heard of any players throwing out their game consoles or high-end computer because they want to spend the rest of their lives playing nothing but Farmville.
Games, as do all entertainment industries, have their fads and new genres – that’s just the way things go. As I write this, a certain series of teen novels has made vampire romance stories extremely popular, yet I don’t hear any publishing executives or movie producers speaking out about how vampire stories will take over the entire industry and no other types of stories will matter anymore. It doesn’t work that way. Vampires are currently selling a lot of books and movies and may even have drawn a lot of new people to reading or TV watching in general, but sometime over the next few years, the vampire craze will die down and everyone will be excited about mummies or time travel or something else. And just because so many people like vampire romance stories right now doesn’t mean that all the millions and millions of fans of mysteries, sci-fi, fantasy, and other types of stories disappeared. They’re still around and just as eager as ever to buy new books and watch new movies in the genres they like best. And, even after the next big fad starts, all those vampire fans aren’t going to disappear, either.
The game industry is the same way. There are millions and millions of gamers out there with a wide variety of favorite genres, gameplay types, storytelling styles, and the like, and they’re not going to suddenly abandon the kinds of games they love just because some other thing is the current “hot topic” in the industry. And that includes storytelling styles. Fans of interactive traditional stories certainly aren’t going anywhere, and even though player-driven storytelling styles may be considerably less popular overall, there are still plenty of successful games out there that use them. So instead of arguing about which types of games or stories are going to dominate in the future, writers and designers should focus on what they do best: creating the kinds of games and stories they want to create. Chances are good that no matter what type of game and storytelling style they choose, there’s an audience for it. There’s a future out there for all gamers, no matter what types of games and stories they like. It’s time to stop obsessing over the “best” way to do things and start enjoying the diversity.
1. Do you believe that the game industry tends to become too fixated on a single “best” way of doing things? Why or why not?
2. What are some of the most important things you’ve learned from this book?
3. How will you use the things you’ve learned to improve your stories?
4. What are your own views on the future of storytelling in games?