Evolving the Interactive Narrative
“It's not that we fail to recognize video games can be art, it's that we presume to know what kind of art they would be.”
Although I’m a narrative designer for video games, a generation ago I wouldn't have chosen this medium to pursue my storytelling ambitions.
For a significant part of their brief history video games were simple, repetitive toys designed to be played in a loud arcade for brief amusement. They were greatly limited by the technology of the time, as any storytelling was relegated to short blurbs of text and pixelated icons. While these classic games were revolutionary and remain relevant to this day due to their elegant and satisfying mechanics, they would have never sparked my creative interest.
Then the introduction of home consoles meant games could then be played for longer within homes, and alongside technological improvements developers had more freedom to experiment with narrative elements, However, they were more or less tacked on, with their purpose confined to logically funneling players from one gameplay segment to the next.
These are known as embedded narratives, defined as “pre-generated narrative content that exists prior to a player’s interaction with the game, often used to provide the fictional background for the game, motivation for actions in the game, and development of story arc.”
As the game industry grew and matured with its audience, narratives were an increasingly important aspect of game design as they began to tackle more serious themes and become more cohesive with gameplay. Players began to be driven to engage with a plot rather than just conquer a challenge, evoking more complex emotions beyond the elation of winning and frustration of losing.
This marked a transition from embedded to emergent narratives, which “arises from the player’s interaction with the game world, designed levels, and rule structure.” In other words, there was a shift from stories being used to show games, to games being used to tell stories.
The standard formula for narrative-heavy games today is still sections of gameplay intercut with breaks delivering the story, although the dissonance between the two has waned. A popular case study for this is The Last of Us, which was recently adapted into a critically acclaimed television series. Critic Andrea Long Chu described the game as “a title whose actual gameplay mostly acted as a system of gates between one narrative sequence and the next.”
She posits that “The question was never whether The Last of Us would make for compelling television, it was why a story with such cinematic ambitions had bothered being a video game to begin with. The Last of Us has sometimes been called an “interactive movie” by fans and detractors alike — a faintly damning term that implies, ironically, a dearth of consequential interaction between players and the game.”
I too would argue that if a game can be so easily transitioned into a passive experience, it probably didn’t take full advantage of all the interactive medium could offer. Not that this makes such games bad by any means, but I do think there’s a misconception that for narrative games to have the prestige of cinema they must curb player agency to follow a cinematic structure.
Chu continued in her review, “This doesn’t mean video games shouldn’t tell stories any more than cinema should limit its focus to the passage of light through a lens. The resistance of gameplay to being narrativized, and of stories to being gamified can never be eliminated, only managed; the first question for any narrative video game is therefore how it plans to forge this formal contradiction into a compelling aesthetic experience.”
I believe these are the growing pains of a young medium, and it's natural to turn to more established art forms for guidance, but it’s my hope that with time this reliance will diminish as we explore our own unique way of telling stories.
So how can this be accomplished? There are a few narratively innovative games I cherish and turn to when approaching such a question.
Outer Wilds is a game about a dying solar system trapped in a mysterious time loop. As the only one aware of the time loop and the sun’s impending supernova, it’s up to you to unravel ancient mystery in order to end the cycle. During the course of each loop, different parts of the solar system for you to discover and unearth more of the story from become exposed or obscured.
The entire story is theoretically accessible from the start of the game and can be discovered in any order across space, although you will need to explore certain narrative threads in order to learn how to navigate the open world. The whole game is one interconnected, morphing puzzle, and each story fragment you encounter brings you closer to solving it.
In Road 96, you take on the role of several hitchhiking teens trying to escape their authoritarian country, with each of their efforts capable of ending in freedom, imprisonment, or death. When one journey ends you begin another as a different kid on the run, which advances the overarching plot of a brewing revolution that culminates on election day.
You follow and shape the narrative through encounters with the same key characters on each journey. A few of these include an undercover member of a resistance group (or terrorist group, depending on who ask) you can turn in for the bounty, a newswoman peddling government propaganda you can charm or sabotage, and a young resistance recruit you can encourage or discourage to become more radical and violent. There are hundreds of these complicated, difficult choices as you scrounge for survival, with each having rippling consequences on not just yourself or the characters you meet but the future of the entire nation.
In Pentiment, you’re an artist who becomes embroiled in a series of murders in a German village in the early years of Reformation, where tensions threaten to boil over if you don’t come up with answers quickly. The clock only progresses when you’re pursuing a particular lead, and many actions and conversations only take place at a specific time, so the choice to explore one clue holds even more weight as it causes another to be lost forever. As the pressure builds with each tick of the clock, you must get closer to deciding which suspect will pay the price for the crime with their lives.
With each interaction you must assess the audience you’re addressing by their temperament, relationships, class, and religious/political beliefs. Those in your vicinity, or sometimes even characters not present but who hear from others, will remember your words and actions. Alongside the player's chosen background, this will have a far-reaching influence on how you are perceived and the path the story takes.
What ties these dramatically different games together and makes them so inspiring is that they each discovered avenues of storytelling only possible through an interactive medium, where seamlessness between story and gameplay created one cohesive whole. These games have inspired me to strive for narratives that aren’t a backdrop or a cut-away but the primary feature of interaction, that don’t overshadow player agency but incorporate it.
I’ve explored this concept in different ways. I’ve created works built around nonlinearity, such as a game where an old man travels between the past and present at the abandoned boarding school of his youth to uncover the experiment he was subjected to that stole his identity. These presented the challenge of having to fragmentize and rearrange story beats and present them to the player in a manner that’s engaging and coherent.
I’ve also made my fair share of choice-driven games, such as one where you take on the role of a soul waiting in the train station to the afterlife, and among others waiting, you grapple with the choice of whether or not to board. These taught me that it’s less important to ensure a player’s choices have a significant tangible effect but rather to make their decisions feel nuanced and important. Whether the gameplay or narrative element emerges first differs from project to project, but I nonetheless try to synthesize the two to be inseparable when I have the creative freedom to do so.
I also try to absorb inspiration from wherever else I can; I can’t imagine creating otherwise. It could be a poem or a memory or a conversation I overhear, I believe anything can plant the seed of your next idea. Some may believe such outside influence would taint their voice, but I’m of the belief that none of our ideas can ever be original. That’s the beauty of storytelling, that even when we believe we’re creating alone we’re blending the art we’ve experienced and the memories we’ve lived and rebirthing them into something new on the shoulders of all the storytellers that came before us.
The narrative on the game I’m currently working on centers on a woman and her children journeying through her late mother’s paintings that abstractly mirror the descent into dementia that took her life. The idea came from an art piece I saw years prior, in which an artist painted self-portraits of himself from the start of his dementia diagnosis until he could no longer draw. It’s a haunting progression of images that stuck in my head, in which the man’s face of images, in which the man’s face slowly became more flat, abstract, and unrecognizable as his mind deteriorated from the disease. When I was recruited to conceive a narrative for a game in which players moved between layers of a painting, the memory of the piece instantly sparked a story.
One of the most unique aspects of games is the extent to which the audience collaborates with the artist in forming the experience. Players have a heavy hand in the camera, the pacing, and in some cases the very direction of an interactive story. Interaction is such an integral part of the work you can’t really understand what you’re making until someone plays it. I’m adverse to relinquishing player control, so I often like to give the player some freedom with how much of the narrative they interact with and try to use cutscenes as sparingly as possible.
I know there are many who play video games with no interest in what I aspire to make, who simply want fun mechanics and see narrative as an obstacle to that. I respect these preferences, but it’s been frustrating that on larger projects I’ve been expected to whittle down my narrative to easily digestible window dressing in order to accommodate the expectations of what video games narrative should be. I’ve had to learn to push back against these boundaries, be confident in my vision, and have faith that my work will find and connect with an audience.
When you compare video games to the much older mediums of film, art, and music, you begin to fully grasp how deep they still are in their infancy, yet already the range of what falls under their umbrella is so vast. The staggering amount of untapped potential is certainly intimidating, but it's the thrill of being surrounded by untrodden paths that makes this field so exciting. Video games are still trying to find themselves and be taken seriously, and while I’m still in the throes of molding myself as an artist it’s comforting to know that my medium is as well.
I have no lofty ambitions to reinvent the medium with my work, but I do hope that in exploring the capabilities of its narratives I can create a few engrossing experiences for others. When I think back on those cherished games of mine, what lingers in my mind most were those deeply immersive moments, where my reality was absorbed by the imagined. The fictional world and my existence in it felt truly real, whether that made me an artist in 15th century Germany or an alien exploring the cosmos. It’s a feeling of pure magic, and to have just one person experience that will have made this all worth it.