Thoughts on "Living Narratives" in Video Games

You may know by now that my background is in writing, and my path to video game design has not exactly been what you might call normal. I played video games as a kid, sure, but my whole life, I wanted to write books. My life has been a series of intersecting stories and characters both fictional and real, and I was intoxicated with the idea of creating my own stories, my own conflicts and characters and world. This fascination unsurprisingly carried over as my focus gradually shifted from writing to designing video games (I still write, by the way), and I find myself just beginning to figure out game design at a time which has been referenced by many as "the narrative moment" in video game history. Coincidence? I think not. Opportunity to do some really cool stuff with video games and narrative? Definitely.

The thing is, a lot of times, we are victims to our own beginnings. Maybe this is the narrative moment for video games, but so long as we hold to old ideas of storytelling, character, and conflict, we'll keep pumping out the same uninspired plots, the same hackneyed personae, the same lifeless simulacra that seem to dominate the game industry these days. If we are to access the full potential of video games, we have to complicate the narrative and take full advantage of the affordances of the medium. Well, so what does that really mean? Certainly, it means having good graphics and great sound and all that, but more so, at least for narrative games, it means non-linear narratives, complex characters, even more complex character interaction algorithms, and simulated intelligence. Obviously that's a lot to tackle, but my thought is that even if we don't figure it out all at once (or ever), we're a lot more likely to get a lot farther, a lot faster, if we start now and fail fast. We need writers in the game industry; we need game design concepts in the literary world. We need connection and collaboration and courage to keep trying, and I'm afraid nothing else will do.



Now that I'm mostly done with my rant, I wanted to touch on the idea of non-linear narratives, because it's something I've been interested in and working on for the past couple of years. Ken Bioshock franchise, gave a talk about non-linear, systematic storytelling not long ago, and I think he has some good points, but I don't think these kinds of change within the industry will come from "within" the industry per-say. I think it will be the nobodies who have time to try and time to fail who will at last figure out how it all works. In my personal studies, I've taken a page from Joseph Campbell, who popularized the idea of the hero's journey, and from Vladimir Propp, a literary theorist who essentially proposed that narrative is composed of many small narrative chunks. I think the problem we are having with stories is that we are looking at them too connectedly, and aren't really leaving room to understand them as distinct moments. We see the rich colors of the story as a whole but fail to discern the beautiful narrative threads, each unique and essential. If we are able to break story down into these finite narrative chunks, we become able to assemble grand stories in a way that is fluid, efficient, and which in time can be done entirely through procedural generation.

Joseph Campbell's concept of the hero's journey has become

the foundation for almost all modern storytelling. It subdivides

the basic plot into twelve different steps, each leading the main

character toward an eventual transformation/rebirth. Campbell's

work has helped me to understand that even human creativity is,

in some sense, procedural, and we use patterns and models just

like a computer would have to.

The problem is that up until now, we've looked at events as just events rather than as interactions between characters. We see a chase scene and think, "Jack is chasing Jill" rather than "Char. A (filling the role of _______) is in pursuit of Char. B (filling the role of ________) with the the motive of ___________." Obviously that seems a little bit cludgy, but the reality is that it simplifies actions into fluid roles which could potentially be assumed by any player or NPC, and the motives become yet another variable. Jack, for example, could be chasing Jill to kill her or because they are playing tag or because Jill dropped her wallet at the store or because they are part of a group of street performers. In any case, by simplifying even simple interactions like a chase into roles and variables, we put them in terms that even a computer could understand.  I love the idea that in creating such stories, we are not so much authors as we are enablers of authorship. 

In any case, I'm currently working on systematizing my own classifications for story actions, building on Propp's general premise, and it's been difficult but fun. I'm excited for the future of storytelling, and I'm excited to be a part of the movement toward new, living stories. Do I think it will happen within the next couple years? Not likely. But will it happen? Most certainly. That's the future of narrative.