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 Features
Book Excerpt and Review - Game Writing: Narrative Skills for Videogames
 WHAT IS THE PURPOSE OF GAME NARRATIVE?
On the most basic level, narrative strings together the events of the game, providing a framework and what can alternately be called a justification, a reason, or an excuse for the gameplay encounters. At its best, narrative pulls the player forward through the experience, creating the desire to achieve the hero’s goals and, more importantly, see what happens next. At its worst, narrative merely sets up the situation and turns the players loose to do as they see fit. It achieves these goals through three important techniques: immersion, reward, and identification.
Immersion
The term immersion is frequently heard in the context of games, although it is seldom defined. In general terms, immersion refers to the state of mind where a person is completely absorbed in what they are doing. It has been related to the psychological state of “flow” [Csikszentmihalyi91] and also to the notion of suspension of disbelief [Coleridge1817]; to some extent, the term covers both of these otherwise unrelated notions. The important thing is, when players are immersed in a game, the real world ceases to exist, and the game world becomes their reality.
Narrative provides context for game events, and a sufficiently believable context provides immersion. At their most basic level, most First Person Shooters (FPSs) are the same. Move the targeting reticule onscreen, press a button, and hit the target—that’s the center of the gameplay. Yet the genre has produced wildly divergent games, from the gore-spattered action of Doom (id, 1993) to the gritty historical realism of Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30 (Gearbox, 2005) to the gloom-shadowed fantasy of Thief: The Dark Project (Looking Glass, 1998). The distinctions between these games lie partly in the differences in game mechanics but also in their significantly distinct narrative content. The story provides a way to believe in those mechanics and to give the player a reason to accept the need to perform them.
For example, in Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon (Red Storm, 2001), the player guns down innumerable enemies in a broadly realistic fashion. However, the narrative explains who these enemies are (Russian ultranationalists intent on doing bad things to Eastern Europe), who the player is pretending to be (American soldiers fighting aggression), and what he’s supposed to do (shoot the bad guys). All of this combines to immerse the player in the fantasy and to tell him it’s appropriate and reasonable to do some serious damage to the hostile AI. The narrative contextualizes the situation and the player objectives—“move and shoot” becomes “secure the downed aircraft,” and “stay in one location for a certain length of time without getting shot” becomes “hold Red Square against the last desperate effort of the enemy troops.” Because the action is now attached to the fantasy the narrative presents, it’s a more appealing goal and something the player is more interested in achieving— and willing to work harder to obtain.
Reward
Narrative can also serve as a reward to the player. The narrative events can be revealed gradually, delivered as rewards for achieving in-game goals. When this has been done frequently enough inside the same game, the player will expect to receive another chunk of narrative after winning a boss fight or overcoming a particularly tough challenge.
For example, in God of War (SCE Studio Santa Monica, 2005), the backstory is revealed gradually as play progresses. After players clear out a chapter, they receive another chunk of backstory explaining how the protagonist, Kratos, came to be in such dire straits (that is, engaged in the action of the game) in the first place. These lengthy cut scenes give players no in-game advantage. They give no extra powers, no hints as to how to defeat enemies or unlock hidden advantages. Instead, they just give narrative information—who Kratos is, why he is so obsessed with killing Ares, and how he came to be in the middle of a war between the Olympian gods in the first place. They are rewards, pure and simple, each chapter ending with a cliffhanger that exists to pull the player forward through the gameplay to the next one. In principle, these cliff-hangers drive players to want to know what happens next and thus motivate them to continue to persevere with the game.
Identification
The third major role that narrative serves is that of identification. It lays everything out for the player, telling him what’s what, who’s who, and what the state of the world around him is. By doing so, it gives the players context for their actions, and this in turn provides justification for game actions: when a game asks you to shoot things, it’s helpful to know that the things you are shooting are dangerous terrorists, flesh-eating zombies, mutated lawyers, or something else that you have little or no moral qualms about dispatching into digital oblivion. By laying out clearly what the elements of the world are, the narrative establishes the players’ place in it and the actions they are expected to take as a result. The players, in turn, can take those actions in confidence, knowing it’s what they’re supposed to do, instead of asking “Why am I doing this?”
The narrative provides identification in another sense as well, namely the sense of kinship and desire to become the central character. Players are invited to identify directly with a game protagonist (even more so than when they are invited to identify with the protagonist of a film or novel) because they will actually get to influence or control the game’s lead role. The course of a game narrative should be designed, in general, to make the fantasy of being the lead character more appealing, and to make the lead character more sympathetic. Giving the protagonist a chance to act heroically, behave admirably (in whatever sense of the word you choose), and achieve ever-more impressive victories might be the key to making the player want to be—and therefore want to play—that protagonist.
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