Narrative in Video Games and Why You're Doing it Wrong

Sup, people. Glad you're continuing to read my always-updating-and-not-at-all-frequently-abandoned blog. ACA appreciates your continued viewership, even though you're all probably reading this through facebook and don't know what ACA even stands for.

Anyway, I've been doing a lot of thinking about storytelling in video games lately, primarily because a lot of other people have been thinking about storytelling in video games lately and have been posting opinions on it that tick me off. A good example of this game-story-related off-tick I've been experiencing can be seen in this article on Gamasutra. In it, Mr. Darby McDevitt rattles off a lot of complaints about the current state of video game storytelling. They're complaints I've seen in a lot of places, albeit this article lacks the subtext of "My Critical Studies degree is worthless and I'm taking my frustrations out on the world" which tends to accompany such arguments when they appear on message boards. His basic thesis is that the nature of most video games, with the killing and the maiming and the "Oh God my face," undercuts their ability to convey a good narrative with all the juicy pathos of a Hollywood oscar-bait flick. I feel like this article, as well as a lot of articles and message board rants I see on this subject, is missing or at least sidestepping one key point, and this is a point I'd like to attack first and foremost right now.

VIDEO...GAMES...ARE...NOT...MOVIES

I don't mean this in the standard "making fun of Hideo Kojima" sense, I mean this in the critical sense. While the Gamasutra article avoids this particular fallacy, it's not uncommon for me to see people say "The way to tell if a game has a good story is to ask yourself if that story would work as a movie or novel." This is, in my mind, probably the worst way to think about constructing video game narrative. Asking if a video game's story would work as a movie is like asking if a movie would work as a stage play. You're not accomplishing anything by thinking that way. All you're doing is trying to cram a narrative format you don't understand into a more limited one which you can get your mind around.

Video games provide a much more complex framework for storytelling than your standard three-act narrative media. They offer the possibility of branching paths, world exploration, customization, random or procedural worldbuilding, co-operation and competition between audience members, and so much more. Any game that could be 1:1 converted into a movie or novel has severely underused the capabilities of the medium. It makes me wonder if the true problem with video game narrative isn't so much a failure of the creators as it is a failure of the critics. We have a lot of jargon we can use for describing traditional, linear narratives, "acts," "motifs," "deconstruction," "subtext," and tons of other words you learn in film school, but we don't have anywhere near as strong a vocabulary of words to analyze the narratives of video games.

Let's say I'm walking through a game world and come upon an abandoned house. Inside, there are blood and claw marks everywhere indicating some wild animal got in and killed whoever was living there. I look around and, after making sure the wild animal isn't still around, decide to do a little snooping. I open up a cabinet and see a shiny axe. Deciding whoever lived here no longer has use for said axe, I add it to my inventory and continue on my way. What just happened there? What do you call it? If you're a game narrative scholar looking at that sequence of events, how do you break it down? At best, right now that sequence of events would all be lumped into the buzzword of ~emergent gameplay~, but it's way more complicated than that. I had my perceptions and emotions influenced six ways to Sunday in that five minute span. I was curious, then analytical, then cautious, then curious again, then happy at my discovery of the axe, and then maybe remorseful about stealing from the dead. Just because I didn't have a cutscene shouting exposition at me doesn't mean a story wasn't told, there.

When I say this is a failing of critics, what I mean is that the traditional way of things is to allow the audience to derive meaning from what creators make. Consider the early days of film. A lot of it was just people jackassing around with cameras like it was their favorite new toy, shooting visceral stories about gunfights and trains and...more gunfights...and...more trains. And why not? At the turn of the century, gunfights and trains were two of the most awesome things ever. It wasn't until later that people started to take a critical approach to analyzing films. They looked through all the old gunfight and train-based narratives, built a vocabulary to understand why they were so engaging, and thus inspired filmmakers to build on this knowledge to make a love scene just as engaging as a gunfight and an inner-city apartment look just as awesome as any train. (This may be something of an over-simplification, but I hope my point remains clear.)

We've yet to do this with video games, and we never will as long as we try to analyze them through the lens of existing media. You can't just tell someone to "grow up and make art" and expect them to know what to do. Video games are a new form of storytelling and need to be treated and developed as such.

I may make a follow up post in which I go into ways I personally feel game narrative can be improved, but this is really what I wanted to get off my chest. Maybe I'm totally off base here, and if I am feel free to leave a comment, but this seems like fairly obvious stuff to me.