Gaming Stories: How Games Succeed and Fail at Storytelling
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The document discusses the history of different mediums for telling stories and how video games have evolved in using stories. It argues that while early video games did not try to tell stories through gameplay alone, Donkey Kong showed how gameplay could convey a narrative. However, games are not inherently a narrative medium and trying to directly adapt stories from other mediums does not work well. The best stories in games come from the unique experiences of players interacting within the rules and uncertainty of games.
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Gaming Stories: How Games Succeed and Fail at Storytelling
- 1. Gaming Stories John Scott Tynes Redmond Digital Arts Festival 2011
- 2. What is a game?
- 3. Voluntary Separate Uncertain Unproductive Governed by rules Make-believe A Dead French Philosopher Defined Games As
- 4. That sounds pretty good
- 5. Games Voluntary Separate Uncertain Unproductive Governed by rules Make-believe Map This to Stories Stories Voluntary Separate Uncertain Unproductive Governed by rules Make-believe
- 6. But Wait What About Uncertain Governed by Rules
- 7. No. We’d be here all day
- 8. What media tell stories and when did they start?
- 9. Prose Fiction Epic of Gilgamesh (1900 B.C., Sumer) Theatre Myth of Osiris and Isis (2500 B.C., Egypt) Comics Histoire de M. Vieux Bois (1833, France) Film & Television The Great Train Robbery (1903, U.S.A.)
- 10. Videogames ?
- 11. When did videogames start trying to tell stories?
- 12. TITLE DATE DESIGNER 1958 WILLIAM HIGINBOTHAM Tennis for two Oscilloscope Game
- 13. Does that videogame try to tell a story?
- 14. TITLE DATE DESIGNER 1958 WILLIAM HIGINBOTHAM Tennis for two Oscilloscope Game
- 15. TITLE DATE DESIGNERS 1975 TOMOHIRO NISHIKADO AND DAVE NUTTING Gun Fight Arcade Game
- 16. Does that videogame try to tell a story?
- 17. TITLE DATE DESIGNERS 1975 TOMOHIRO NISHIKADO AND DAVE NUTTING Gun Fight Arcade Game
- 18. TITLE DATE DESIGNER 1981 SHIGERU MIYAMOTO Donkey Kong Arcade Game
- 19. Does that videogame try to tell a story?
- 21. TITLE DATE DESIGNER 1981 SHIGERU MIYAMOTO Donkey Kong Arcade Game
- 23. How do videogames try to tell stories today?
- 24. Cutscenes WHEN THE GAMEPLAY STOPS, THE STORY STARTS
- 25. Half-Life 2 Gameplay Cutscenes NOT ACTUALLY GAMEPLAY BUT YOU CAN STARE AT THE FLOOR IF YOU FEEL LIKE IT
- 26. Dialogue Trees SEPARATE MODE FROM MAIN GAMEPLAY
- 27. Interactive Fiction NAVIGATING A STORY THROUGH CONVERSATION AND ACTIONS
- 28. Gameplay as Metaphor ACTION EXPRESSES THEMATICS
- 29. That Was Great, I Guess We’re Totally Awesome! High five, bobcat!
- 30. Except that we mostly suck lol wut
- 31. These are not the stories of a new medium
- 32. Games Voluntary Separate Uncertain Unproductive Governed by rules Make-believe Remember the Dead French Philosopher? Stories Voluntary Separate Uncertain Unproductive Governed by rules Make-believe
- 33. Each medium tells the stories it’s best at
- 34. Moving stories across mediums requires adaptation
- 35. What is wrong with this picture?
- 36. Games Voluntary Separate Uncertain Unproductive Governed by rules Make-believe Games Are Not An Intrinsically Narrative Medium Stories Voluntary Separate Uncertain Unproductive Governed by rules Make-believe
- 37. What is wrong right with this picture?
- 38. What is the story of football?
- 39. Is this the story?
- 40. Is this the story?
- 41. Is this the story?
- 42. Is this the story?
- 43. Is this the story?
- 44. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.
- 45. Why is football so awesome?
- 46. Games create experiential narratives
- 47. True gaming stories are about how we play games
- 48. It is our stories as players that most resonate
- 49. One game + many players = unique stories
- 50. There is more to story than this
- 51. There’s you
- 52. Stop making this
- 53. Start over
Editor's Notes
- Roger Caillois in his book Man, Play, and Games examined the role of games in human society.
- They aren’t the same. Games have very uncertain outcomes and are rules-based activities.
- Not going down every narrow-exception rabbithole.
- Brookfield National Laboratories Push button to hit ball, turn knob to change angle of hit No scoring or ending but implicit in the design
- Not recognizable as a story
- American version was first microprocessor-based videogame First videogame where you controlled a human character
- No more of a story than Monopoly Gameplay metaphor is not sufficient
- Does Donkey Kong tell any more of a story than Gun Fight does?
- What’s in this image that is different from anything that came before?
- She is a character with dialogue who is present in gameplay but whose only purpose is to communicate story.
- Similar: Gears of War’s “attention moments”
- Classic Bioware style. X-Files game was an interesting road not taken: choose a dialogue line, or an emotional response, or a clue to prompt a response
- Galatea: Very rich conversation with a statue Zork: typing as gameplay Planetfall: Floyd the Robot, AI sidekick traveled with you, died memorably Bad Day on the Midway: stream of consciousness thoughts, click on one to explore/share/react
- Braid uses gameplay to explore the irrevocable nature of decisions and our desire for the wish-fulfillment of turning back time. Bioshock uses gameplay to explore objectivist themes of free will and the apparatus of control.
- We must be doing story games right with all those examples!
- This is us defining games by how they resemble stories in other media.
- That’s why when we move a story from one medium to another, we call it ADAPTATION. So what stories are games best at telling? Film: human drama, spectacle Comics: dialogue, pacing Prose: subjectivity, language Theatre: human drama, language
- We’ve got Star Wars comics, Star Wars novels, Star Wars TV series — it’s the perfect example of how a narrative can be adapted into all kinds of media. And there are plenty of Star Wars games, right? So games by their nature are just another medium and we can freely adapt Star Wars into games, right?
- There are tons of games that don’t adapt narratives at all well. Football is one of them. You’d never use football to tell a story, would you?
- We need to define stories by how games tell them, not define games by how they tell the stories we already know
- Let’s go back to that example. Football makes no sense as a narrative adaptation. But it is a game, an immensely popular game. Maybe we should look a little closer.
- The player on the field, each hard-fought yard, each desperate pass and tackle. That’s a pretty good story.
- The narrators doing play by play and offering insights and color commentary, shaping a game’s worth of discrete actions into a larger context and conveying the action with all the drama and human emotion that storytellers can muster. That’s a pretty good story.
- An entire season of play: Cinderella stories, underdogs, surprise upsets, unstoppable champions. A season of football is a vast narrative followed as avidly as any soap opera by an audience of millions. That’s a pretty good story.
- A single team across decades of life. Kids going to see the team with their dads, growing up fans, taking their kids one day. Memories and nostalgia, hope for the future, drama and betrayal, dreams and tragedies. That’s a pretty good story.
- Michael Vick, a single player. Promising early success, a personal vice that undoes his life, crime and punishment, then a controversial absolution and redemption. That’s a pretty good story.
- In fact, football is PACKED FULL of truly awesome stories that captivate millions.
- The real story of a game is what happens when you play through it.
- What you did, what went wrong. The play by play. Not the narrative told by the designers.
- Stories about players playing games are the ones we all talk about.
- And games enable a vast canvas of such player stories.
- Adaptations across media are just people reselling us a story they've already told.
- Because the truth is that Tennis For Two *was* a story. The story of two players, two knobs, and a bouncing ball. Who won, who lost, who surprised who. All games are stories and all players make stories. That doesn’t mean that designers do.