Video Games: The Question of Narrative

Video games have a complicated relationship with narrative, and ever since games began trying to include narrative elements, any discussion about the relationship between the two has become obscure and complicated. The most striking development of late is that discussions about the medium have been forced to arrive at a place where narrative -- "stories" -- are pitted directly against  "systems" -- games themselves.

Some say that video games work better if these elements are distinct; others, of course, disagree. But then, where do we (and, perhaps, where should we) draw the line between these "stories" and "systems" if that's the case? Is there even a line to be drawn? Furthermore, what exactly do video games have to offer in regards to narrative? Is a video game's responsibility to be a game first, or to tell us a story?

If we loosely track the history of video games and their relationship with all kinds of narrative, I think it’s easy to arrive at one simple, absolute truth: video games don't need stories, and stories don't need video games.

This doesn't necessarily mean that the two shouldn't interact -- indeed, it's that kind of attitude that helps perpetuate the dour “almost-art” paradigm that video games are so often forced to live within (an opinion helped to popularity by the late Roger Ebert). However, the issue of narrative has much more to do with the fact that, over time, video games have gotten so comfortable employing the exemplary style of cinema's storytelling that they seem to have forgotten that the medium allows for a lot more than that -- it's become a crutch.

One might easily assume that this is because video games have organically developed alongside cinema and thus have come to rely on cinema as a kind of guiding narrative light, but there's something odd and vaguely misguided about such a declaration, even if criticizing video game narrative as over-reliant on cinema’s forays is, of course, accurate and relevant.

But firstly, such a declaration seems to forget that games were emulating novels and even comics long before they were emulating films (or implying stories through their systems). This is an especially precarious fact to ignore, since both styles still enjoy popularity today (albeit nowhere near as much as cinema-emulating AAA titles, of course). Secondly, such a claim kind of glosses over how quickly games began to attempt telling both implied and explicit narratives through their format, regardless of cinema.

While Tetris had no narrative conceit and Pong was simply table tennis -- the first sports game, some say -- games like Space Invaders, Donkey Kong, and Galaxian (or its more popular sequel Galaga) began suggesting that the objectives of their systems implied a narrative that involved, for example, saving the world or rescuing a princess. Four years after Donkey Kong's release, Super Mario Bros. and other early NES games began telling full-blown narratives within their games.

If we keep moving forward to the SNES era, we get to the releases of games like Castlevania and The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, both of which expressed lengthy, complex stories with multiple characters and existential themes (though Castlevania owes a direct debt to literature). From there, narrative continued to evolve in early RPGs like Fallout and The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall (keep in mind that this "history" glosses over tons of titles that had narrative initiative too). In other words, video games have their own history with narrative that exists almost totally despite cinema -- in large part because video game "systems" often invite emergent narratives just by themselves, but also because the industry had no qualms experimenting with and applying narrative to games from very early on in the medium's history.

Interestingly, the release of the SNES (and other SNES-contemporary game consoles and consoles prior to the SNES) is one of the big things that allowed for the explosion of popular games that were, in large part, emulations of popular films, this being the first truly concrete time that video games consistently existed as an extension of popular film culture.

We can see this most specifically in the Disney platformers of the SNES era -- The Lion King, Aladdin, Toy Story, etc. -- all of which borrowed elements of their byproduct films' narratives (and cultures) and adapted them to the systems familiar to platformers of the era. None of the three followed the exact linearity of their films’ stories, and all of them took the liberty of expanding upon many of the setpieces and characters from their film counterparts in order to more properly define the role of the systems in the game. In simpler terms, they were all video games before they were stories or even adaptations of stories – none of them were more worried about their story than their design, even though they were all derived from very specific stories.

If we jump forward to other licensed games like the Lord of the Rings games that came out around the time of the movies, we see quite a distinct difference: those games (and many others) borrowed actual clips from the films they were based on (as well as numerous actors' voices) in order to ensure that the gameplay was tied explicitly to the specificity of the story it was modeled around. Most gameplay segments were modeled to take place in specific set pieces taken from the films, inviting players, more or less, to recreate scenes from the films, and to fill in gaps with scenes from the films.

Quite a contrast, and one that, while certainly somewhat oversimplified, nevertheless exhibits how the dynamic between video games and cinematic narrative has evolved over time.

Of course, lots of this is due to technology -- who's to say how different games like Donkey Kong would be if different technology had been available at the time it was developed? And, of course, there's no blaming games for wanting to tell better or more intuitive stories, or even for following cinema's example as a way to do this.

In fact, cinematic storytelling can work in a game -- just as much as say, a choose-your-own-adventure text game can work just as well as, if not significantly better than an R.L. Stine novel of the same nature. Modern games like The Last of Us have proved to the mainstream that heartfelt stories can be rendered very well in games that lean more toward being films than they do toward being games (even if I wasn't particularly moved by The Last of Us, but that's neither here nor there). I'd personally include games like Telltale's multiple Game of the Year winner The Walking Dead in that categoy, as well as L.A. Noire, To the Moon, Heavy Rain (though I loathe to say it), and various others. But then, perhaps the issue was never that games can't do cinematic narrative well, it's that most often, they don't.

We've gone from games with absolutely no story influencing their design (Tetris, Snake, Pong) to games where the design exists solely to accompany the narrative these games are trying to express -- games specifically designed to keep players on an extremely thin and linear trail, walking from cutscene to cutscene, conversation to conversation, until credits roll. They're "interactive films" in the same way that text games might be called "interactive novels" or where visual novels might well be called "interactive comics".

The difference between the latter two and most attempts at "interactive filmmaking" through games is that, in text games or visual novels, you're confined to following the format -- there's not much "game" to it -- while in video games that emulate cinema as a primary role-model for storytelling, more often than not the player gets stuck doing the boring things that a film version of the same story likely would have cut around.

It's an odd situation for a video game narrative to be in, having to play out stories over a longer period of time with included bits of interaction and, well, action. But such a direction in modern games is indicative of what sells, after all, even if the cynic in me would love it if that weren't expressly true.

I think of games like Bioshock Infinite, which had lengthy slices of repetitive gameplay that absolutely bored me to death. Playing it made me feel limited, controlled, forced. If there was any incentive to keep playing at all, it was just to see what happened next; as such, I never completed Bioshock Infinite and I doubt I ever will, as I never really cared about what happened next. The worldspace was somewhat interesting, but it rarely invited interaction beyond watching very specific things happen in very specific places. It enforced that you walked from setpiece to setpiece without exception -- it kept you on rails. Oh, and of course you had to shoot lots of things.

But the game never invited me to discover anything it had to offer other than the story it set out to tell, which is fine in theory, but if a game hinges on its narrative to carry players through it, while still insisting on persistent sections of gameplay that rely on dull or derivative systems, then, to me, it's something of a failure as a game.

Comparatively, The Walking Dead doesn't really have this problem (nor do all story-driven games married to what might be labeled as "derivative gameplay" by some cynic like me, such as Dishonored, Grand Theft Auto V, or Batman: Arkham City) because of how fluently and directly it asserts that its story is what comes first. There are no particularly in-depth game mechanics -- the "systems" in the game mostly involve walking around small environments and picking stuff up, or else picking a dialogue choice or very rarely completing a quick-time event in time to further alter the course of the presented story. These systems influence and propel the narrative, because The Walking Dead is a game that's strictly handcuffed to its narrative, and it is because of this deliberate design decision that the narrative works as well as it does (furthermore, its narrative it much stronger than Bioshock Infinite's, but this is neither the time nor place for that discussion). But then one must ask, is it a good game?

That's a harder question to answer if you're particularly specific about both what you consider to be "good" and what you consider to be a "game," but my classification for both includes room for games like The Walking Dead. It's a largely successful example of a video game that employs techniques of narrative drawn almost wholly from cinema and gets away with it because of how self-consciously its game systems are designed to complement such an approach. The "game" elements rarely feel like they're intruding on the obviously more important narrative elements (the exception to this rule, perhaps, being in the earlier episodes where the gameplay segments are a bit too drawn out and particular).

So then, as far as I'm concerned , there isn't much of a balance to be struck between primarily cinematic video game narrative and, well, other games. You either make your game primarily driven by its narrative/cinematic flair and focus your energy on that (which is why I don't object as strongly to the situation with Batman: Arkham Origins that this Eurogamer article opens up with -- if it wants to be a game known for its narrative, then why shouldn't it strive to have the best narrative possible?) or you make a game primarily driven by its systems -- its gameplay -- and focus your energy on making that the best it can be. If there's a responsibility toward narrative in the second example (and there often isn't) it is and should always be secondary.

Obviously, in the best of cases, you don't worry about the trappings of cinema when designing a narrative for a video game, because a video game is not a film.

And that's the biggest issue I have with these current video game narrative trends -- that so many games and specifically game narratives have become reductive because of the presumed assumption that the only way games can tell stories is to have scripted events that show and speak the story directly at the player is indicative of a weakness and shortsightedness that lately seems pervasive in regards to how people choose to design narratives in video games.

This narrative assumption is harmful toward gaming culture at large, which is how the culture industry has arrived at using the damaging "it felt like a video game" film criticism, while video games are often simultaneously  praised for "feeling like a movie" or being "cinematic" (ed: this observation is reflected in that same Eurogamer article linked above, just so we're clear that it's not just my own observation).

Theoretically, the synthesis of everything wonderful that games can do is limited by any tendency to apply traditional narrative trappings to the philosophy of video game narrative. This goes just as much for text-based adventure games, visual novels, and games I've praised like The Walking Dead as it does for experimental narrative games like Thirty Flights of Loving, Proteus, Dear Esther, or Gone Home.

But the magic of video games is that they function on a basic level by forcing players to interact with other worlds that follow different rules than our own. Video games naturally pull players along as they figure out and learn to manipulate these rules as a manner of exploration and experience. This is the inherent meta-narrative of every single video game out there from Pong to Proteus. Stories, characters, environments, themes -- these are all secondary to the most basic premise of what a "game" (manual, digital, or otherwise) really is.

Narrative can and should play a part in (certain) video games, I just wish creators weren't so bogged down in emulating traditional formats when designing narratives for video games. The best video game narratives always tend to adapt the premises of their systems into their narratives. Think of Dark Souls, where the story is all there, but rarely if ever elucidated by anything outside of player exploration and interaction; the same goes for Shadow of the Colossus, the aforementioned Gone Home, and earlier games like Myst.

Equally powerful are those games that exist regardless of story, or else encourage, by their very systems, the formation of stories. Think of strategy games, where the narrative of the player's colony in Civilization IV unfolds as they play, or how the narrative of the player's actions and their dynasty's lineage becomes the central narrative in each campaign of Crusader Kings II. How the voyage of your crew and their survival changes each time you play through FTL: Faster Than Light. 

Think equally of sports games, or competitive games like DOTA 2 or Team Fortress 2, or difficult puzzle/platformers like Super Hexagon, or survival games like Day-Z or Minecraft. Narratives in all of these games are emergent, reliant on systems, or else simply don't exist at all.

The absolute truth: video games don't need stories, and stories don’t need video games, but video games must have systems.

That's what makes them video games. This doesn't mean that games shouldn't seek to tell stories, nor that there's any exact war to be fought between the systems and the stories themselves, but the broadness of video games as a potential storytelling medium should ideally exclude the dull, trope-filled half-movies that so many recent games have turned out to be.

I’ll freely admit that there's plenty of room for emulative narratives in games, but there are so many great novels, comics, films, albums, and otherwise out there already. Video games have no specific need to retread those roads. Don’t get me wrong either, there are loads of fantastic games as well (and let us not forget that some of these fantastic games, as mentioned several times now, are completely emulative of film), but the best ones -- the ones made of magic -- function apart from the art they're influenced by.