If you go to talk about storytelling to avid gamers, you will generally either be met by a reaction of apathy or excitement about something awesome a character they are controlling did at some point. That isn’t an insult, just a point about how video games tell their stories. The issue I found when it comes to it, is that most don’t even realize that the actual art of telling the story is different from game to game. I’m going to quickly name, and give an example of the three major ones to explain just how important this actually is to making an engaging and interesting game.
The first type of story is what you will see in the majority of high budget games. It’s the most akin to movies, books and is what we think of when we think of a story. I’m going to call them Traditional Stories for the sake of clarity. You have a non-interactive character or characters in a setting that have the story happen. You may have control of a character when fighting or when you are looking around a scene, but you do not have control over what happens. This is simply the story being told as it wants you to see it. Call of Duty, Assassin’s Creed, basically any RPG, often times the mechanics of the games are even ignored in cutscenes, the idea being that what happens in the game isn’t even the mechanics of the actual world.
The second type of story is games that give you full freedom and very little plot. This is the idea that you create a story that you tell your friends about later. This is someone who just played X-Com who goes out the next day to someone else who played it and explains about the 33% headshot that saved the entire mission, or how everyone got wiped out because someone got killed in full cover. This seems easy to explain initially, until you start to realize that the mechanics of the game are directly to what causes the storytelling.
This is the type of story that when you see a game critic or avid gamer exclaim what games story should always be about is talking about. They mean that the mechanics of the game help create their own individual story. From that time in Skyrim to where all of the guards had buckets over their heads and you stole everything to that time you killed the entire enemy team at the same time in Overwatch. They aren’t stories themselves, they are stories you tell from the tools you were given.
There is arguments that it isn’t really a type of story telling, just a type of experience that gets you to talk about it– but I’d argue games such as This War of Mine and Papers Please prove that there’s an artform to creating something to talk about. I like to call this type Player Stories, but they have a lot of other names.
The final type is a bit more complicated, it’s storytelling entirely through mechanics. This is not quite the same as getting a story from the mechanics, but actually telling it by what it is allowing you to do. Brothers a Tale of Two Sons is one of the best examples. You control both at once, and have to solve puzzles using both of them at the same time. You get far more out of how the problem gets solved at the end because of this mechanic. This is also the reason why Bioshock was so shocking to many players. It took away control to prove a point, and gave it back to let you think about it. It’s why so many people tried to figure out what is going on in Braid. Telling the creator’s story through the mechanics is challenging, and very few people have done it well but it is always memorable. I like to call this one mechanical storytelling.
The issue I come up against is seeing everyone argue which one is better. The actual answer to that should be like arguing if an action movie is better than a romance movie or if Harry Potter is better than Lord of the Rings. It’s subjective, not objective. Each one has it’s place, and should be used by the creator to make a better experience. Trying to put a different type of storytelling into your game can be some of the most memorable failures in gaming’s history. Press X to salute a bad idea.
Life of Scripting 