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for much of that time games have been made for and played by teenage boys. But we play games at all ages now: Roughly a third of gamers are younger than 18, a little more than a third are older than 36, and the remaining third are in the 18–35 year range. And the gender breakdown is almost even: 48% female, 52% male.4
The audience for games has exploded in the last 10 years, with the advent of touch-screen smartphones and tablets, as well as easy-to-use download stores like Apple’s App Store, Google Play, and Steam. And we can’t forget Nintendo’s million-unit-selling Wii console, whose groundbreaking wiggle stick controllers helped thousands of parents and grandparents to play video games—many for the first time. But while more people than ever are playing video games, not everyone identifies themselves as a “gamer.” (And that’s okay. We’ll discuss this later on.)
With this huge and diverse audience playing games, some Cassandras are now foretelling the END OF HOLLYWOOD AS WE KNOW IT.
It is not. Video games (and interactive fiction) are merely the latest media for writers to use their storytelling skills. We have a generation that has grown up with games. The Xbox has replaced the cable box. Hollywood is not going anywhere, but neither are video games. We believe that—just as television learned from film and film learned from television—it is time to examine the similarities and differences between games and film as storytelling media. The new writers in Hollywood have grown up with games in their homes and in their purses. From mobile to desktop, games are part of the pop culture conversation.
The emerging and the established writer in Hollywood—or who dreams of Hollywood, or dreams of storytelling anywhere in the world—should know how interactive narrative adds to the conversation and adds to the content.
A CRIMINALLY BRIEF HISTORY OF STORYTELLING TECHNOLOGY
Writers have always been drawn to new tech. From cave walls to the printing press—if there is a new way of delivering a story, storytellers will (usually) embrace it. Gutenberg’s press was first used to print the Bible, but many other works soon followed. As books grew less expensive over time, newspapers, magazines, and “dime novels” were even cheaper—as they were designed to be mass-produced and distributed as widely as possible. Charles Dickens—a master of serialized storytelling and therefore the great-grandfather of binge watching—delivered his novels one chapter at a time in cheap, disposable weekly or monthly magazines. Devoted fans of his work and his characters would bark at him as he walked through London: What have you in store for poor Pip?
When radio emerged as a mass medium, writers began scripting radio plays: comedies, mysteries, science-fiction, adventure, melodramas … you name it. Families gathered around the radio each night and listened to stories (and sometimes musical numbers). Orson Welles, who had made his name as a stage director, used this new medium in a legendary way when he staged H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds as a radio play, without telling the audience it was a play. America thought they were listening to a music program when the performance was interrupted with a special news report: Martians were invading the Earth via Grover’s Mill, New Jersey. Welles’s cleverly disguised narrative made use of then-familiar radio tropes to cause a national panic, if only for one night.
Remember those two names: Welles and Wells.
When film arrived around the turn of the twentieth century, it was a novelty. Early projections of trains coming into a station alarmed viewers. Wanderers in penny arcades would put coins into kinetoscopes to watch what we would now think of as animated .GIFs. (BioShock Infinite uses a silent movie within the game to tell part of the story. The machine the player sees it on: a kinetoscope.)
But there were no stories on film … until very short fiction films began to appear, like Edwin S. Porter’s twelve-minute The Great Train Robbery (1903). Audiences (groups of people watching together, rather than the lonely experience of the kinetoscope) sat on benches or chairs in tents, or in theaters. Barely a dozen years later D. W. Griffith’s incredibly successful (and incredibly racist) The Birth of a Nation (1915) proved that longer, “feature-length” movies were a viable means of telling longer, more complex, and multi-threaded stories. Even silent movies needed writers (or “scenarists”). Someone had to conceive the plot and write the intertitles.
Movies came of age in 1939. This was the beginning of Hollywood’s golden age. Why 1939? The years 1939 to 1942 saw the release of a trove of classic films that continue to captivate viewers to this day:
Casablanca
Citizen Kane
Destry Rides Again
Gone with the Wind
Goodbye, Mr. Chips
The Maltese Falcon
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
Ninotchka
Rebecca
The Rules of the Game (La règle du jeu)
The Wizard of Oz
Young Mr. Lincoln
Citizen Kane changed the medium. It set new expectations for cinematic storytelling. Its director? Orson Welles, the same boy wonder who created a national panic with his radio play.
Americans went to the movies in record numbers each week. But things change. Television landed in living rooms, so many moviegoers landed on the couch. Today, not as many Americans go to the movies as they did back then, but more of the world goes. Hence, Hollywood’s appetite for computer generated imagery (CGI) and animation spectacles. KA-BOOM! and SPLAT! are understood worldwide.
Pick up any issue of any magazine that covers entertainment, eavesdrop at a table where writers hang out, look at the original programming offered by not only the broadcast and cable networks, but also Netflix, Amazon and other streaming providers, and you will hear this consensus: we are in a golden age of television. It has never been better. Broadband and binge watching have changed the way stories are told. Audiences love long-form serialized storytelling. Kind of like what Dickens used to do. (Then again, many big game franchises have been providing longform episodic storytelling for, well, a lot longer than Netflix has.)
Television as a storytelling medium did not begin with a golden age. Mom and Dad America did not unwrap their TV dinners and enjoy Breaking Bad or The Sopranos. For decades, many TV shows were essentially radio programs with pictures. (Many very early TV shows, like Father Knows Best and The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, started out as radio programs.) TV’s current golden age—with its nuanced, cinematic storytelling—took close to seventy-five years to get here. For decades, television was the most underappreciated and most often disparaged medium (besides comic books). Theater critic John Mason Brown famously called TV “chewing gum for the eyes.”5 It was unfashionable in smart circles to declare that you might actually enjoy watching television. Does that attitude seem familiar to those of us who love video games?
THE GOLDEN AGE OF GAMES?
We’ve come a long way from the bouncing ball that was Pong. We are now in a golden age of video game storytelling. Thankfully, the technology has plateaued in recent years. In the last generation of high-def game consoles, you could see the nose hair growing out of the nostrils of the zombies that were about to kill you. In the current “next generation,” you can see individually animated legs on the mites on the nose hairs of the zombies that are about to kill you. For most game players, the most meaningful technological advancements of the last decade have been innovative controllers (via touch screens, cameras, plastic guitars, and wiggle sticks), better networking and, by far, the portability and ease of use provided by both smartphones and their app stores.
What’s been so exciting about this is that so many creators have been able to focus on making more immersive and emotionally compelling stories with better gameplay, rather than having to spend so much time learning how to render graphics on totally new platforms. Half-Life, Halo, Assassin’s