CHAPTER 02

      DO GAMES NEED STORIES?

      “Let us now discuss the proper structure of the Plot, since this is the first and most important thing …” Aristotle. Poetics.

      ARISTOTLE IS CONSIDERED to be the first story guru. He knew the importance of story structure to both the comprehension and enjoyment of the story, play, or poem. In Poetics he analyzed the method of creating plays and poems—the dominant storytelling forms of pre-Christian Greece—charting the role of the protagonist (main character) as his or her story unfolds in front of an audience. Aristotle probably never imagined a world where the audience of a play might become either the protagonists or the coauthors of the play. Yet this is what happens in video games and other forms of interactive storytelling.

STORY MATTERS

      At this point, let’s address and discard one of the stalest canards in game development: Stories don’t matter to games. Story, narrative, setting, and world are as crucial to a video game as gameplay, character design, art direction, sound effects, or music. Try to imagine playing a game with no gameplay, character design, art direction, sound effects, or music. What would that be? Digital tic-tac-toe? Would you enjoy it? Would you play for very long? Would you tell your friends about it? As lifelong writers, we get a little impatient when we hear someone declare firmly that “games are not a storytelling medium.”

      Of course games can be a storytelling medium, just as books can be a storytelling medium. The fact that some books are phone directories doesn’t negate The Road, On The Road, or Oryx and Crake. We game creators should stop thinking of our medium as being one monolithic, homogenous whole. We should also stop thinking as one monolithic, homogenous hive mind. Games tell stories—they just do so in ways that differ from linear media. A game player navigates what Juul calls “the half-real zone between the fiction and the rules.”¹⁸

      However, not all games are equally story-driven. Generally, story matters more in representational (more realistic) games than in presentational (more abstract) games.

      Story Is Very Important …

      In action/adventure game franchises (Tomb Raider, Uncharted, God of War), a compelling narrative is crucial to the gameplay. These games send their player characters into exciting and dangerous new worlds where they search for treasure, solve puzzles, and fight enemies. Players know at every turn what Lara Croft or Nathan Drake are after, and the narrative framework helps them to make better gameplay decisions. Developer Naughty Dog takes a very cinematic approach with the Uncharted series by putting the audience in the game by using filmic camera angles and jump cuts during the gameplay and cut scenes. More than any other series, the Uncharted franchise delivers on the decades-old game marketing cliché, “It’s like playing a movie.”

      In a shooter game, it’s important to know what the player is shooting at, and—perhaps more importantly—why. The game narrative supplies, or helps to justify, rich variations of enemy types, weapon types, and player goals. Even a game whose story would seem to have a very thin plot (Left 4 Dead) plunges the player into a rich environment populated by hordes of monstrous zombies—and only three other characters to ally with.