Story Telling in Gaming
I don’t think video games always need to tell a compelling story to its audience (the players). A great story isn’t a prerequisite to make a good or successful video game. In fact, you can have both a good, successful game with practically no story at all beyond gameplay objectives. Look at Minecraft, Fortnite, League of Legends, Call of Duty, just to list a few. Hell, there are even great games where you can skip the majority of its story and still have a good experience (Breath of the Wild, no Divine Beasts, anyone?)
Yet, video games present an entirely unique mechanism to story telling not accessible to its media counter parts (movies, books, music, art). It all starts with the players hands.
We can’t really talk about stories in video games without looking at some of the history. In 1974, the first tabletop RPG known as Dungeons & Dragons was created, bringing about a customizable story and character game that could change per play-through. This then became inspiration for video games with more than just a single objective (like Atari’s Pong), and Rogue in 1980 is widely considered one of the first video games to incorporate those RPG elements.
Early in the 80s and into the 90s, video games began incorporating story driven aspects, some via the classic text based dungeon crawlers, some minor backstories given to now historic franchises such as Super Mario, Link in The Legend of Zelda, and then JRPGs like Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest.
You don’t need a full backstory of the history of video games to understand the impact a well made video game that intertwines story telling with gameplay, however. Good story telling elements like character development, world building, empathy, and pacing are all consistent things regardless of the format. If you followed my play-through of the Final Fantasy 7 Remake on Twitch at all, you’ll know that one of my biggest gripes with that game was it’s pacing. The original is one of the best video games of all time, and the story, while not perfect, had a lot to do with it. In 1997 when the original released, elements like the death of a main character, an unknown enemy, manipulation, and secret antagonists were relatively new elements in a video game. As a player, not seeing Sephiroth for a large part of the game creates a tension and aura of mystery that builds into a great payoff towards the end of the original Shinra arc, before the rest of the game and world really opens up. Most, if not all of that was lost in the remake due to, 1. as players we sort of already know the story even if there are changes, and 2. being that it was the first of a multi-part remake, what was once an opening story arc from a whole game now needed to become it’s own full length arc. While the gameplay for the most part was fun, the story fell flat a bit and there were sections that didn’t really add to the story. Imagine entire chapters of filler content that didn’t develop your main character, other enemies, or the world. Sounds like a bad read, right? That’s essentially what happens in FF7R.
These elements are significantly more amplified in a video game, however. If you are watching a movie or TV show, some filler episodes that don’t necessarily impact the overall story line can still provide character development, and at the very least some viewing entertainment. In a story driven video game, you lose some pacing and run the risk of the player not caring about the story anymore if done incorrectly. It’s the reason why open world games that try to incorporate cinematic main plots struggle to retain it’s audience’s attention (see Red Dead Redemption 2, Assasin’s Creed Odyssey, or any Rock Star game). It’s not about open world vs linear games, it’s about the opportunity to tell a compelling story and sticking with the best format for that game.
When you try to tell a deeper story in a video game, the gameplay needs to make the player adopt the persona of the main character(s) in order to build a connection to the story and events occurring. You’re no longer just a witness or audience member in the way a book or movie delivers a story, so the elements used to increase immersion need to change accordingly. I know this sounds redundant, but that’s done best through gameplay, not necessarily a bunch of cutscenes. You have these massive AAA titles establishing a dramatic plot, such as being the Dragonborn in Skyrim that needs to save the world from an impending apocalypse. Yet, because of the open world gameplay, you go off for dozens of hours building a homestead, doing side quests, hunting rare creatures, looting precious materials to build higher quality gear, only to get back to the main story and having the “what was I supposed to do again?” All the momentum of the story is lost. Pacing.
Then you have games that do it right. Naughty Dog has sort of established itself as the AAA king of story driven games that don’t forget about the gameplay. A video game should still be fun to play, after all. They explored cinematic type game play with the original Uncharted, but in my opinion, Uncharted 2 is the game that established a good story, cinematic game that married fun gameplay with it as well. It didn’t feel like you were being guided through an interactive story where you just move a character to a point and have the story happen, which is a risk that story driven games can fall into. It’s the single player experience that still appeals to the mainstream, where a cinematic experience is blended with gameplay. With Uncharted 2, even though the primary progression requires you to go through predetermined paths, gameplay opens up during the many high octane gun fights that allows you to approach the action in a multitude of ways. It’s that second part that becomes so important because while the destination remains the same, how you got there can have variances and it immerses the player further, earning the payoff of story and cutscenes.
That lead to what I believe to be Naught Dog’s masterpiece in The Last of Us. I won’t go crazy about this here because I talk about it so much everywhere else, but that game also showed that a great story can have great gameplay without the Hollywood blockbuster type scenes from the Uncharted series, instead opting for deep world immersion as you have to stealth through levels against enemies, scavenge and use your materials wisely, all while giving you a reason to care about the story and the characters themselves. Damn, that game is so good.
Other times, instead of cutscenes, dialogue, or voice acting, some games use gameplay and progression elements to tell its story. Indie games like Hollow Knight, Celeste, Undertale, & Bastion are great examples of this. Granted, as a player you have to pay a little bit more attention because all the details aren’t handed to you in the way that traditional linear action titles do, but they’re great examples of payoff earned through gameplay that allow you both to progress, master the game mechanics, all while uncovering more of the story through that gameplay itself.
The biggest issue that video games have in regards to story telling is pacing and difficulty. You can drop the difficulty but then the pacing becomes too fast, progression feels less earned, and you regress into a guided story experience like having someone else read you a book or watching a movie. On the other hand, if pacing is slow or gameplay is too difficult, developers run the risk of frustrating the player to the point that the story becomes lost in the sludge of trying to get past a pesky boss or level. It’s not an easy thing to deliver a gripping story along with fun mechanics, but when it’s done right, there truly is nothing quite like it.
