Game Narratives Are About Antici…

…pation.

I was flattered to be invited to write something for The Game Narrative Kaleidoscope, a collection of over 100 essays about game narrative curated by Jon Ingold at Inkle. There are a lot of really solid essays in there, and it’s all cleverly presented like a choose-your-own-adventure story to let you skip around randomly. Plus there’s now an ebook version!

My essay was titled “In The Moment,” and it’s about how narrative design for interactive entertainment requires thinking of storytelling as front-loaded: it’s less about a series of impactful reveals, and more about building up to impactful moments of action.

The essay was a case of my eagerness to revisit some of my favorite topics colliding headlong with the need to hit a suggested word count. So I’d like to expand on them a little bit here, to see how my thoughts have changed over the years.

The basic ideas:

The transition from traditional, “linear” media to interactive

By far the most writing I’ve done for games was at Telltale, where for most of the time I was there, the mission statement was to combine traditional media (sitcoms, comics, and then later, “prestige” drama series) with an episodic game format.

That meant that the process of narrative design was almost always more like translation than like working from the ground up. Start with a story that you instinctively know how to tell in a traditional format, from a lifetime of watching TV and movies, and break that down into a structure where the player has a feeling of agency in driving the story forward.

Since I’m a Gen-Xer, I’m curious whether the shift has already happened — or whether it will ever happen — so that most of the people working in game narratives have games as their “native language,” not movies and TV. Do younger writers “think in game language,” or is traditional media so omnipresent that it’ll always be what artists are most familiar with?

The difference between Active and Passive Storytelling

The experience of watching an engaging horror or suspense movie is almost totally different from watching a drama or comedy, in a way that makes it feel like game narrative’s closest cousin.

Mystery and detective stories are another contender, especially stuff like Poker Face, which has you re-considering and re-contextualizing what you’ve seen throughout. But there’s still inevitably a point where you’re passively watching a key moment, the reveal that serves as the story’s climax. This is what the artist decided was the outcome.

But even the most forgiving and least discriminating horror fan could tell you the difference between a movie filled with jump scares and one filled with actual tension. You can’t possibly anticipate a jump scare. And the only room for creativity is to play around with the timing and framing, e.g. setting up an obvious jump scare and then denying it or delaying it until later. That’s still entirely in the hands of the filmmakers, though, and doesn’t invite any “participation” from the audience.

I still say that the Final Destination series has the best moments of the kind of active storytelling I’m talking about: scenes where the actual outcome is almost irrelevant. You know exactly what’s going to happen; the only question is how it’s going to happen, and you spend the entire scene in a back-and-forth with the filmmakers as the various possibilities are introduced, rejected, and reconsidered.1That’s also one of the many things that make Final Destination Bloodlines a standout: it plays with its established format, explaining the exact rules of its formula, and then subverting those rules while simultaneously having them play out exactly as expected, in the same scene. (The garbage truck).

It’s easy to think of horror movies as being a series of memorable kills, but the experience is doomed to feel empty if it’s nothing more than the filmmakers showing the audience what gruesome idea they come up with. The thing that makes those gruesome moments really land is the scene building up to each one, where the filmmaker is inviting the audience to think about what’s going to happen.2It occurs to me that Psycho subverts this in a clever way, which I should probably save for a separate blog post.

Outcomes of choices vs the choice itself

Ultimately, these feed into the idea that I’ve been thinking about ever since the days of Mass Effect, which was being marketed partly on the promise that it was so vast, there were entire planets that some players would never visit.

For decades, game developers and players both have been fixated on what I think is exactly the wrong thing: the idea that making games with a greater sense of immersion and player agency means making more stuff. Branching narratives. More characters. More choices. More environments. More character customization.

The most current manifestation of that is the hype around generative AI content. This idea that you can have a system able to respond to practically anything the player says or does. But whether it’s the result of overworked and underpaid teams having months of their work hidden behind an optional dialogue choice, or a billionaire-owned network of planet- and job-destroying data centers, the problem is essentially the same: responding to the player isn’t the same thing as engaging with the player.

Which is why I think it’s important to keep calling back to The Walking Dead, and the creative leads’ (Sean Vanaman and Jake Rodkin) focus not so much on branching narratives for their own sake, but on setting up situations where the choice has maximum impact.

So much external attention3And internal, too, let’s be honest was put on the scenes that played out as a result of one of your choices. I think the far more interesting aspect was the work that went into coming up with the moments of choice themselves. Moments where you had to make an important decision with no good options, and whatever cut-scene that resulted from it was less impactful than the weight of having to make the choice.

And especially when you think in terms of the “rules” of narrative storytelling that we picked up from years of engaging with traditional media, it can be easy to underestimate how much the emphasis on choice is an inversion of the ways that traditional stories typically work.

Typically, in traditional media, you want to gradually build up to your reveals. Drop hints, use foreshadowing, scatter clues around, but you’re laying groundwork for that a-ha! moment, when the artist reveals the answer to the puzzle, the shocking twist, the meaning of the scene or of the entire work.

In games and other interactive media, you still want that feeling of engagement, where the artist and audience are on the same wavelength and have been working together to reveal the meaning. But the timing is shifted. You want to have the player more aware of context at every step of the way, anticipating what happens next instead of just waiting to see what happens next. Every traditional storytelling instinct says to be circumspect and to withhold as much as possible until the end, because otherwise you’re being too obvious and too on-the-nose.

But that’s only possible because in traditional media, the audience is guaranteed to get to the reveal no matter what. That may be improved by the audience being actively engaged, but it doesn’t depend on it. And no matter how much traditional media plays with first-person or point-of-view tricks, there will always be a sense that the audience and the characters are separate. But in interactive media, you pretty much never want the story to move forward with the audience feeling like they’re the ones who are making it move forward.

And in interactive media, you get that feeling of immersion basically “for free;” you have to go to some effort to break the sense that the player is the player character. You never hear anyone (except for the actors themselves) describe events of a movie in terms of “…and then I went down to the basement…” But even with a character as cartoony and well-defined as Mario, you often describe it in terms of “…and then I jumped on a Goomba and found a hidden warp zone.” There is inherently a greater feel of ownership over the story.

It seems like such an esoteric point, but I believe it’s the key to making engaging stories that actively involve the player in the storytelling. Not just simply watching everything they do and then responding with one from a set of pre-determined story outcomes. You can generate as many different story outcomes as you want; it’s still going to feel like watching instead of doing if I haven’t felt actively engaged in the process of reaching that outcome. By having a real moment-to-moment understanding of what might happen, and how the things that I’m doing might change that.

So Much Room For Activities

So I say that the key to immersive, satisfying, interactive storytelling is to think of it as constant engagement, instead of as actions and responses. Always keeping the idea in mind, “What does the player need to know right now, and what is the player thinking about right now?” We all understand the need for the basics: tutorials for the game mechanics, and exposition for the narrative. But I still keep seeing a tendency in game narratives to set up the player with the basics — here is your current objective — and then leave them alone until it’s time for the next story choke point.

Which is better than nothing, obviously, but it still creates this sense of disconnect. My time in the game loop is basically a series of activities instead of active storytelling. I know that my goal is to get to there — that’s the tomb that will contain the ancient artifact, or that’s the power station that I’m trying to sabotage for the next phase of the plan. But I’m also aware that all the good story stuff is going to happen after I get there, not along the way.

This is most relevant to action adventures — Half Life: Alyx and Jedi Fallen Order are the most recent ones I’ve played — but I think it applies to anything with a narrative. I can think of several ways the adventure games that I worked on could have been tweaked to feel even more like the player was making story progress while solving the puzzles, instead of just after solving a puzzle.

And in an action adventure, it’s even easier for me to play armchair level designer. Throw in enemies that I hadn’t expected, who I gradually discover are rival groups searching for that ancient artifact. Put in clues and hints foreshadowing the fact that the bad guys are fully aware that the power station is my target, and I’m being led into a trap. (Which I probably already knew anyway, considering that I’m still only on level 3).

Again, it means inverting the way we traditionally think of narratives, as a slow drip of clues building up to a significant reveal at some point in the future. Instead, spoiling the surprise for the player: giving them even more context at the start, and staying present with them moment by moment as you confirm or subvert expectations along the way.

My gut instinct, from a lifetime of watching TV shows and movies, is that dooms the big story moment to feel like an anticlimax. But in practice, it can feel more like the collaborative process in a writer’s room: you’re not always trying to surprise the rest of the people in the room with your hidden reveal. You’re actively collaborating in coming up with those beat-to-beat moments that make the surprise have the strongest impact.

Return of the Obra Dinn and the Self-Spoiling Narrative

I was already gushing about Return of the Obra Dinn after I finished it, but thinking of what it does in terms of narrative makes me respect it even more. Essentially, it does a complete inversion of the traditional story structure: using the most dramatic and exciting moments as a starting point, and then giving the player the “writer’s work” of putting all the pieces together to build up to that moment.

You can immediately tell that it’s a story told backwards, as the first bodies you encounter on the ship were chronologically the last ones to die. That’s not a spoiler; it gives you a journal and puts them in their places in the last chapter as part of the embedded tutorial.

It’s baked into the premise that because you have a tool that shows you how a person died, you are always going to be seeing the end of their story. The side effect that I didn’t immediately appreciate: it’s an implicit assertion that what’s fun and engaging about a story isn’t seeing how it ends, but in the process of telling the story itself.

You’re not shown these spectacular, dramatic moments as a reward for your deductive reasoning. They’re more like storytelling prompts. How could this have happened? Who are these people? What would have brought them to this moment? The kinds of questions you ask from moment to moment while you’re writing a story.

And your reward for coming up with the answers (i.e. successfully collaborating with the game designer) is a charming and understated “Well done.”

1
That’s also one of the many things that make Final Destination Bloodlines a standout: it plays with its established format, explaining the exact rules of its formula, and then subverting those rules while simultaneously having them play out exactly as expected, in the same scene. (The garbage truck).

2
It occurs to me that Psycho subverts this in a clever way, which I should probably save for a separate blog post.

3
And internal, too, let’s be honest

1 That’s also one of the many things that make Final Destination Bloodlines a standout: it plays with its established format, explaining the exact rules of its formula, and then subverting those rules while simultaneously having them play out exactly as expected, in the same scene. (The garbage truck).

2 It occurs to me that Psycho subverts this in a clever way, which I should probably save for a separate blog post.

3 And internal, too, let’s be honest