A Look at How We Tell Stories

“Tell me a story.” It is a phrase that embodies pure innocence, that we all uttered as our parents tucked us into bed at night. As we grew older, we replaced the spoken narratives of our parents with picture books. As we grew even older still, those were replaced with novels and we learned to appreciate television and film as artistic media. Now that we are old enough to appreciate the beauty of a good story, we have even more places to find them. Each entertainment medium is capable of telling moving tales, but they are all done in drastically different ways. What is it you want from your stories? And where do you look for them?

Have you ever wondered why novels tend to focus on slower-paced introspective stories, while movies end up being mostly explosion-riddled action extravaganzas? It has to do, of course, with the target audiences of the media, but also the strengths and weaknesses of each.

The beauty of fictional writing is that it, by design, invites the reader to be a part of the creative process. Books are an interesting medium because they are extremely limited by themselves. Long action scenes are often difficult to follow in detail and physical description is usually left to a few short phrases. The image of each character and setting is limited to a handful of adjectives that are always open to interpretation. Even if an author paints a fresco of visual imagery through words, there will always be room for subtle interpretation that can profoundly impact the feel of the stories they host.

Films, on the other hand, leave very little to the imagination. Visually, a fictional character will always look like the actress/actor they cast in the role. This can be to a story’s benefit or not; certain actors bring an excellent interpretation to a character and flesh them out even more than we could ourselves. Other times, poor acting can destroy an otherwise solid piece of writing. On the positive side, action-heavy sequences are a breeze for the audience to follow thanks to “movie magic.” This makes film the desired medium for stories that involve chase scenes, gun fights and naked ladies, where books are usually better at exploring slower-paced, personal stories.

Books can be written in the first-person to give the reader an intimate connection with the protagonist. Even if a book is written in third-person, it often follows the perception of a single character (in what we call a “close third”). If we are already invested in that character due to their being partially formed in our imaginations, this closeness can add a level of introspection that film rarely achieves. First-person, narrative-heavy films exist, such as the film adaptation of Fight Club, and they can be done well, but it is more difficult to identify with a character being played by someone rather than a character who is purely themselves in our imagination.

So why are these musings on a video game website? Because video games are coming into their own as a narrative medium alongside films and books. For ages, video game stories functioned in the same fashion as film stories; characters progressed linearly from point A to point B with canned interactions, but in a video game the player moved them between elements. This works fine and made dynasties out of franchises like Metal Gear Solid or Final Fantasy, but the versatility of games as storytellers is far greater and is finally being realized.

Games like BioShock, Half-Life, the Elder Scrolls franchise and Mass Effect have experimented with video game narratives and, as a result, are crafting a cinematic genre without the walls of actors. In Mass Effect, for example, there is a set of canned interactions and a single main actor, Commander Shephard. For starters, you can customize Shephard to look however you want and then navigate him/her through a near limitless range of events in a multitude of ways. Bioware has even promised that your choices will affect the game’s sequels.

By giving the player complete control of the primary character, we are able to cast the role however we see fit. For instance, I made him look very similar to me and, as a result, I connected with him on a personal level. Another character that we connect to easily is Gordon Freeman; when you play Half-Life, you are Gordon Freeman. By not giving the character any lines and almost never seeing them in the third-person, we feel as though the other characters in the world are interacting with us directly. Half-Life essentially casts us as the main character. So we can’t help but worry when Alyx Vance finds herself in trouble, because it was us she was making eyes at.

When fully realized, video games have the best elements of film and written narrative. They are a cinematic medium that is capable of handling a lot of action without encumbering the audience, while also being able to place the audience in the main character’s shoes. When we see a fictional world from the eyes of a character, we get a new appreciation for it. Where video games excel is that they allow us to not only view the narrative from interesting perspectives, but also, in many cases, influence it.

Oh yeah, she's been looking at you.

One of my favorite franchises of all time is The Elder Scrolls because it allows the player to customize a character’s class and then interact with the world in the exact same way that character would. In other games (like Mass Effect), the character’s class only effects the gameplay; in The Elder Scrolls it affects the very fabric of the narrative. If you want to play as an assassin/thief, you could for hours just play quests and stories specialized for that class. The same is true for magic users and warriors. Not to mention all the class-neutral side quests that can color your hero’s adventure.

Hopefully this trend for rich, engrossing video game narrative continues. While we all do enjoy sitting down to a game of Generic Space Shooter 7, really, at the end of the day, we just want someone to tell us a story.