Many games strive to convey epic, emotionally gripping stories. After all, such well crafted tales enrich a game’s overall experience with significance, player connection, and thematic implications. Supporting features such as music, visual design, and character development can all beneficially contribute to a masterful story. Lately, however, games have steered away from these subtler aspects of storytelling for the more heavy-handed approaches of drawn-out cutscenes and lengthy dialogue. Like film, games can rely on cinematic movies for storytelling, and like books, games can similarly depend upon dialogue. It becomes an issue, however, when games emphasize these two approaches of storytelling instead of their most unique aspect: gameplay. No other artform - paintings, movies, books, etc. - can tell a story through gameplay. Despite this competitive advantage, games have shifted away from storytelling through gameplay due to the wide appeal of beautifully animated cutscenes and the relative ease of writing dialogue. Because games’ most unique and central component is their gameplay, they should convey meaningful stories through such gameplay, rather than just through cutscenes and dialogue.
Playing the backstory
Injecting storytelling into gameplay remains the best approach for games to involve the player in their tales. Developer Yacht Club Games knew this while developing the now iconic Shovel Knight and Plague Knight. These two games heavily rely upon gameplay to communicate their respective stories. Shovel Knight, for instance, weaves an empathetic story of the heroic Shovel Knight facing danger to save his beloved Shield Knight. The game occasionally features a heart-wrenching moment of gameplay where the player must catch Shield Knight as she falls helplessly. These sporadic moments are intensified by the increasing amount of enemies that intervene upon each return to the tragic scene. The player can easily get distracted with defeating enemies for their gold, subsequently forgetting that Shield Knight will soon fall. These perilous moments help the player relate to Shovel Knight because they imply how Shovel Knight lost Shield Knight due to unimportant priorities. This allusion to the characters’ backstory helps cement Shovel Knight’s motivation to amend his past wrongs by saving Shield Knight. And because the player experiences these desperate scenes firsthand, he/she relates to and more easily adopts Shovel Knight’s motivation, thereby resulting in heightened player commitment and engagement. Such heightened player states resulted from personally-directed gameplay, not uncontrollable cutscenes or dialogue.
Yacht Club Games’s Spectre Knight follows this trend with its playable backstory sections. As a game, Spectre Knight conveys a regretful story of sacrifice. As a character, Spectre Knight portrays that narrative with occasional gameplay interludes. In these divergences from the main story, the player controls a previous Spectre Knight before his fall from grace. A tinted visual palette wordlessly differentiates these backstory moments from the current narrative, intuitively informing the player that they occured in the past. From these backstory scenes, the player likely wonders how Spectre Knight diminished to his current undead and enslaved self. Gameplay answers such curiosity as the player directs the previous Plague Knight to develop friendships, overcome selfishness, and ultimately arrive at the point where he relinquishes his being for another. Although dialogue explains this shift, gameplay enables it. And from such gameplay, the player once again enjoys a greater sense of commitment and engagement to the narrative and character relationships. Shared gameplay with these characters makes them feel like partners, rather than strangers. Many games incorporate backstories into their narratives to explain plot or characters; few, unfortunately, infuse gameplay into such backstories for a more relatable player experience.
Player-directed emergent storytelling
While designers can structure their gameplay to generate compelling stories, they can also entrust that power of story creation to the player. This responsibility may appear daunting, but with creativity or open-mindedness, the player can synthesize his/her own narrative from gameplay. Super Mario Maker’s approach of applying the player’s creativity to level design helps illustrate this point. Many players aimed to simulate the heart-pounding thrills and story of Indiana Jones. To do so, several stages in Super Mario Maker reenact the classic scene where a boulder chases Indiana Jones. With the context of the level’s title relating to Indiana Jones, the player readily understands that Mario represents Indiana Jones and that the relentless enemy that chases him symbolises the boulder. As a result, the player relives the classic story of Indiana Jones stealing an ancient artifact to only trigger an outlandish booby trap. No interrupting cutscenes or dialogue are needed because the gameplay simulates the intended story. This is one example among thousands of how Super Mario Maker’s designers enable players to successfully design stories for other players through gameplay.
In a similar vein, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild utilizes player-directed gameplay to allow the player to synthesize his/her own story. Just like almost any design aspect of Breath of the Wild, player choice reigns supreme. In terms of storytelling, this design philosophy takes the form of optional choices that the player engages. As the player chooses to fight a Stone Talos, unlock more of the map, tackle Shrine challenges, search for Korok Seeds, etc., he/she creates his/her own story. Of course, Breath of the Wild does feature a main story that is segmented across the map, but player-directed storytelling occurs in-between those main story sections. The game is set up to enable organic stories, such as, “Remember when I was searching for that Shrine before I was spotted by a Guardian?! I just barely made it to the Shrine in one piece!” Designers did not program these specific stories. Instead, they programmed various elements that naturally trigger memorable events that player choice evokes to tell mini stories. When strung together, these numerous mini stories create a larger narrative that is more important that Breath of the Wild’s main story because it is the player’s story. With that ownership comes a connection to the game, once again all through gameplay.
Designer-directed emergent storytelling
Some games are so open-ended in their design that gameplay communicates the intended story. Designers of the relaxing game Flower relied upon gameplay to silently tell its message. No cutscenes, dialogue, or context is given in Flower’s story. On a surface level, the entire game is simply about controlling the wind to make flowers bloom. And the player can experience the game in that storyless way; however, designers sneakily sowed a story into the game’s overarching gameplay. This narrative of gameplay tells a story of mental health, anxiety, and growth through its level and gameplay progression. At first, the game safely introduces the player to the controls in a welcoming and sunny environment. Gameplay of satisfyingly blooming flowers fittingly accompanies such thematic choices. In future levels, though, the blue sky is replaced by a gray thunderstorm clouds that electrifies metal objects. As a result, the player can now take damage by touching said metal. This gameplay introduction of damage introduces the stress that represents neuroticism while the darker color palette and music similarly lower the player’s subjective wellbeing. Such feelings are fortunately removed in the next level when the player gains the gameplay mechanic to destroy metallic obstructions. As a result, the player flourishes as he/she breaks apart the previously intimidating obstacles. Viewed as a larger whole, the story paints a picture of mental illness and its eventual overcoming. Flower’s highly personal tale could be completely overlooked if the player does not dissect the gameplay’s mechanical elements, which is why games’ stories should not be approached solely through cutscenes and dialogue.
Poor storytelling through gameplay
Some games largely ignore this design philosophy of solely telling or at least partly enhancing a game’s story through gameplay. Enter the visual novel. This form of “game” is a story told through text. They could be essentially reduced to books, but the added images, audio, and occasional gameplay moments help bring their stories to life. And some visual novels reach critical success, such as Detroit: Become Human. With a blend of psychology, theology, philosophy, artificial intelligence, and cognitive science, this visual novel foretells of a future where androids serve humanity. That is, until some of those androids recognize their consciousness and subsequently demand their freedom. With this story, the stage is set for a gripping time. Characters, voice acting, cutscenes, and plot pacing are all top notch and profoundly contribute to a memorable tale. Gameplay, however, does not. Detroit: Become Human only has four kinds of gameplay: walking, activating/choosing dialogue, scanning the environment, and engaging quick time events. This is the game’s entire arsenal of gameplay diversity, and it remains shallow, repetitive, and largely unimportant. The gameplay is not included to entertain the player, but to prevent constant dialogue or cutscenes from boring the player. As a result, Detroit: Become Human is a terrible game. But its story makes it a wonderfully entertaining and intellectually stimulating experience. As with all visual novels, story is prioritized over gameplay. More importantly, though, their stories are rarely told through gameplay. Thus, visual novels are hardly games, let alone entertaining games. Games require gameplay, which is why visual novels’ lack of strong gameplay often results in them being poor games. Visual novels would become more engaging, memorable, and enjoyable, however, if they shared their stories through their gameplay in addition to dialogue and cutscenes.
Conclusion
Humanity has been telling moving stories for thousands of years. Only relatively recently have video games been introduced. As a result, game designers are still learning how to effectively tell stories in this new medium. Because games offer gameplay - a method to engage the audience’s input that no other media has quite captured - designers should utilize such gameplay to present their stories. Failure to do so is a choice to not utilize games’ most important and valuable asset. While not all games should be entirely conveyed through gameplay, valuable additions of narratives through gameplay help elevate stories by presenting them in an original method. If storytelling is as important as the story itself, then gameplay should be the next storyteller.
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