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Analysis: Plotting, Emergent Narratives, and 'Story Spaces'
by Tom Cross
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June 18, 2009
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[In a game design analysis, writer Tom Cross rounds up a variety of perspectives on the "new" storytelling in games, examining views on narrative from Blade Runner through to 'story spaces' and beyond.]
Bloggers, gamers and game designers often discuss the future of video games as they’d like to see it. Some of the more intriguing conversations they’re having concern emergent narratives, authorial control, and story making as opposed to storytelling.
Notable bloggers and game designers Doug Church, Michael Samyn, and Steve Gaynor, have argued that traditional narrative modes of in-game storytelling need to be replaced with newer methods. Church (albeit back at GDC 2000!) argues that we should "abdicate authorship"++ altogether.
However, Gaynor and Samyn argue, in their more recent and suggestive articles, that video games are a medium uniquely able to create a new tablet for user-created content, termed “story space,” and that the narratives that come from this will be “emergent.”**+
This article will examine the assumptions and statements already made about these topics. Next week’s article will conclude by exploring their flaws and strengths, and ultimately the potential, both good and bad, of their ideas. A final article will bring my discussion to its conclusion, using an older game to point the way forward for narrative in games.
For Church and Gaynor, plain old “narrative” is outdated. According to Gaynor, it’s not what videogames are best positioned to do anyway, being a rigid, static structure of author-generated, pre-arranged meaning. To them, sticking to old, narrative forms in videogames just hampers designers’ creativity, and worse, the result is stale and uninteresting to gamers. We are, in other words, tired of the same old thing. For gamers today, narratives and stories are almost always jokes. Even the well-made ones painfully telegraph their intentions hours in advance and never do anything really surprising.
Gaynor suggests as an alternative what he calls “the immersion model of meaning,” and contrasts it to linear, “cinematic” techniques:
The immersion model of meaning arises from design focus along two primary axes: providing a believable, populated, internally consistent, freely-navigable gameworld for the player's avatar to inhabit, and robust tools of interactivity that allow the player to build a personal identity within that gameworld through his own actions.*
While this is perhaps an immediately compelling rhetoric, it rests on a dismissal of narrative as “linear” that fails to account for what narrative really is, generating a straw man “cinematic” model only to banish it as quickly as possible.
Without a robust definition of “narrative,” the supposedly unwieldy thing at the center of the old method of video game meaning creation, the “immersion model of meaning” signifies next to nothing, because it’s not clear what job it’s taking over from, or what kind of “meaning” it is setting out to produce or replace.
 Making Thing Clearer
According to Gaynor, the problem is that games attempt to recreate filmic narratives. Here, he explains what’s wrong with this:
"Video games are already capable of doing these things [associated with emergent narratives]; they are far less capable of providing the authored pacing, composed framing and predictable event flow of film to convey a linear narrative, and yet this is almost always a central focus in character-driven games. Embracing the immersion model of meaning requires the designer never think of the game as a story, but as a place filled with people and things that the player is free to engage with at his own pace and on his own terms.*"
The problem with this definition of the “immersion model of meaning” and narrative is that it requires us to assume that “narrative always consists of something as rigid as “authored pacing, composed framing, and predictable event flow” (predictable to whom? On what bases? Etcetera). Narrative does not have to be linear. In fact, in my view, when it is treated properly in video games, narrative is multi-noded, self-reliant and fluctual, the opposite of linear.
In the video game medium, very often a narrative consists of multiple actors, who all follow their own desires and attempt to achieve what they want, dynamically rather than statically. In a game like Westwood’s Blade Runner, this kind of system is modeled procedurally. Actors exist in the simulation, acting independently from the player, and only when the player actively inserts themselves into the path of the actor (or the path of a series of repercussions instigated by that actor) does the player become aware of the actor.
It is by no means a complete or fluid simulation. Many characters still wait to be activated by the PC, and cannot continue with their agendas without being triggered. Still, the illusion of NPC autonomy is present in Blade Runner in a way not seen in other games.
 As Long as Androids Pretend to Dream...
This is narrative, and it is not static. Narrative is a system of occurrences, each with their own meaning. The reader, viewer or player witnesses or experiences these events, and concludes that they are connected or related to each other, both in their beginnings and their endings (and the decisions and events that connect the two). Clint Hocking points out on Gaynor’s blog, “I think it was EM Forster who said "The King died and then the Queen died is a story, but the King died and then the Queen died OF GRIEF is a PLOT."
Hocking’s language is usefully suggestive because it reminds us of Peter Brooks’s argument, in Reading for the Plot, that “plot” is not just a static, reified “thing,” separable from the totality of the story that we read or view, but the center of any story. Plot is the “design and intention of narrative, a structure for those meanings that are developed through temporal succession” (Brooks 12).
Narrative is thus a whole whose parts imply each other’s existence. Readers, viewers and players of any narrative see it for what it is, and are thus interested in following the narrative to its conclusion. Narrative does not need to be linear. To assume that the multiple narrative threads simultaneously existing in a game (more advanced than Blade Runner) are something other than narrative is both incorrect and unhelpful.
While this article will examine the broader, initial claims (and calls for action) implicit in the desire for new kinds of storytelling, and in particular the narratives that are supposed to emerge from story spaces, it is meant to introduce a wider critique, one that addresses our preconceptions of what “narrative” and “linearity” mean in games today, and in what we hope they will be in future, less heavily scripted (and thus artificially “storied”) games. I think that there is an alternative to Gaynor’s extreme vision of authorial retreat and emergent game narratives.
There’s a future for “emergent narratives” not just in story spaces and their ilk, but in further developments in narrative proper. Thus, I want to claim that “narrative” is and always will be distinct from the kind of storytelling that we will see in story spaces, and that the future that both narratives and story spaces have in gaming will allow exciting, “emergent” narrative forms in both categories, not just the more freeform, less scripted world of story spaces.
I also think that there are crucial aspects of storytelling that can only be accomplished with the aid of narrative, and can’t with largely user-generated content from story spaces. But to make this claim, we need more fully explore what’s meant by “emerging narrative” and “story space,” and get a better sense of what narrative really is, and how it differs from the first two.
 How Far can the Story Space Take Us?
Story spaces (as defined by Gaynor) are a notion that allows for more flexibility, more player decision and reaction, and thus (one hopes) player-video game connection. Story spaces are new—they have all the flavor of narrative, but none of the obvious, clunky structure, because while they may be organized and scripted by the designer, they allow the user to create stories unaided.
In a story space, a designer steps back, creating malleable, highly reaction-capable NPCs and environments, and creates as wide and deep a field of interactions as possible. The player can then create stories far more meaningful than any a set of canned branching narrative might provide.
Story space for Gaynor is the possibility provided by a certain kind of game design. As he says:
"Fictional content--setting, characters, backstory-- is useful inasmuch as it creates context for what the player chooses to do. This is ambient content, not linear narrative in any traditional sense. The creators of a gameworld should be lauded for their ability to believably render an intriguing fictional place-- the world itself and the characters in it. However the value in a game is not to be found in its ability at storytelling, but in its potential for storymaking.**"
For Gaynor, a world that follows a path of multiple, interconnected, possibly unrelated settings, people and histories is just “fictional content.” It is, when implemented in a non- structured, non-restrictive, non-linear way, the ultimate space within which to have unique, “storymaking” experiences. I think that Gaynor is right to name these elements as key to making interesting gameplay experiences and sessions, but that his definition of narrative and “storymaking” are underexplained and overemphasized.
It’s nice to say that we’ll give users tools to make stories in the future, and that video games are bad at delivering already-written stories (as Gaynor does), but it’s confusing and misleading if we don’t have a clear idea of what narrative is and what story spaces might do to dislodge narrative from the control of the author and give it to the reader.
Without some idea of what we’re talking about, that rhetoric is just rhetoric—empowering-sounding and exciting, to be sure, but not helpful in trying to understand what games do now and what they might do in the future.
You can see where the terms “emergent narrative” and “authorial control” become important to this argument. Authorial control is what the designer needs to give up in order for this amazing new set of experiences to occur. Gaynor believes that once this control has been given up and a believable, deep, and rule-bound world has been created in its place sans narrative shackles, “emergent narrative” can occur. While the designer’s craft is as important as ever (especially when creating a world that obviates the need for structured story nodes and narrative tracks), it needs to be lighter, more deft, and less obvious to the player.
The new stories and narratives a player can create in such a game space are the emergent narratives so key to these arguments. An emergent narrative is the sense (and story) that a player would create using the stimuli provided by this hypothetical game. From these actions and reactions the player creates her own story, her own emergent narrative.
Assumptions and Assertions
Supposedly, if content comes from the user, then the designer disappears into the background, letting the user run with the storytelling tools the designer has given her. Ideally, Gaynor writes,
"Video games at their best abdicate authorial control to the player, and with it shift the locus of the experience from the raw potential onscreen to the hands and mind of the individual. At the end of the day, the play of the game belongs to you. The greatest aspiration of a game designer is merely to set the stage.***"
This is an admirable goal, but Gaynor makes a universal claim about video games and video game design that isn’t always true. Not all video games benefit from abdication of authorial control. I think that multivalent, independently acting narrative nodes could be combined in one complicated game to provide the illusion of a fictional world completely at the power of its own citizens. A designer would create these myriad actors so that each one had a purpose, place, and reason for being there.
Thus, the advent of a carefully scripted and directed NPC upon the scene is not the illusion breaking, transparent thing that Gaynor rejects, but the entry of one more narrative node to the mix. This is a goal aspired to by many games, approached by few, and mastered by none. No matter how much credit we give the most forward-looking of games, they fail on fundamental levels to provide the bright future described by these writers.
They fail not just because they haven’t attempted to produce Gaynor’s new storytelling, but because the vision Gaynor puts forward, as exciting as it is, isn’t storytelling, and isn’t the future of videogame narrative. To a certain extent, that’s Gaynor’s point—in with the new, out with the old, and good riddance. But like many polemicists entranced with a new idea, Gaynor supposes that “narrative” was an old category that has to change into the vaguely imagined “story space,” failing to see that videogame narrative in the older, proper sense—stories—is a different thing from what he’s envisioning.
The future of narrative, in short, is not story space. Story space will happen, and should, but it would be limited to think that the two can’t coexist, or that narrative can’t go to exciting new places on its own terms. As I’ve suggested, the failure to imagine both possibilities, either/or rather than both/and thinking, is typical of the heated rhetoric of novelty, in video games as in any other art.
But, as in other fields, we owe it to ourselves as self-conscious gamers to understand a little better the reality of what we’re being presented with, and sort the value of story spaces out from the totalizing rhetoric that sees story spaces as the only future of game narrative.
In my next column, I’ll examine the possibilities for the future of narrative in games, and how that future relates to Gaynor’s conceptions of narrative, story space, and plot.
Below are the relevant articles, along with related reading (from Michael Samyn of Tale of Tales).
* The Immersion Model of Meaning
** Storymaking
*** Being There
+ The Challenge of Non-Linearity
++ A Peek into Game Design
[Tom Cross writes for Gametopius and Popmatters, and blogs about video games at shouldntbegaming.wordpress.com. You can contact him at romain47 at gmail dot com.]
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Thank you for that! I'm dead tired of the prevalent one sided thinking that goes on regarding this topic.
Nice read.
"For gamers today, narratives and stories are almost always jokes. Even the well-made ones painfully telegraph their intentions hours in advance and never do anything really surprising."
Which well made ones? =p
Now, I'm not smart enough to figure out how it's all going to work - and certainly can't see it on some of the big franchise titles - but I'm very open to new ideas in storytelling.
pJ
"Even the well-made ones painfully telegraph their intentions hours in advance and never do anything really surprising."
In that case, I wouldn't consider those "well-made." It's subjective, but I can list a few games with plots I found to be particularly engrossing and provocative. They're mostly Japanese games since my favorite genre growing up was JRPGs; but I also believe because they're more or less linear and have fleshed out protagonists. Some of these would include: Xenogears, Final Fantasy VII, Metal Gear Solid (particularly the first and third), and Lufia 2. There's also Suikoden V, which has a fairly bland protagonist but terrific supporting characters.
Now there are very enjoyable methods of storytelling in Western games, but they tend to be much less emotional due to character customization (and, therefore, lack of pre-scripted depth). Exemplary titles include a few from Bioware (KotoR, Mass Effect, NWN) and Bethesda (Oblivion, Fallout). In these titles, I don't feel there is a wide variety in emotion. Generally, what you feel and think most of the time is, "My character is awesome!" (When he is doing the "right" thing or when he is doing the "evil" thing and mops the floor with a room full of bad guys)
Linear storytelling, I believe, packs a much stronger punch. But there are places and other purposes for alternate methods of plot unveiling/creation.
In Japan, I don't think the gamers think of storytelling in video games as a joke--at least, not nearly as much as the Western market does. Perhaps that's the problem, a cyclical gamer to developer to gamer idea that story is secondary.
IMO with your references you are spot on. Those games are indeed games with well crafted plots that I never considered to be jokes. As to how these plots were delivered is up for further discussion though.
I'm currently struggling with trying to make a graphic adventure that has a "blank slate" protagonist. It's proving quite difficult because this seems to make my protagonist non-interesting. Just like you stated, I have resorted to making those around the protagonist more thought provoking. I don’t want this to be my only option though, so I’m trying to come up with some ideas on how to make the blank slate protagonist more appealing...
Perhaps I won’t be able to have my cake and eat it too.
"Let's strive for variety and keep experimenting with new ways to achieve the story-gameplay balancing act. "
Agreed!
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It would also be nice if the high profile discussions on the topic also took this stance instead of the "This is the future way of games all other styles are outdated and don’t work" route.
Thus I imagine it would be very difficult (read impossible) to craft a "pure" form of story space, because it would be almost unrecognisable to players, it would be a city with no higher powers or corporations, no police force, if anything I would say that story space is thus a completely abstract concept. I would say that in practice narrative and story space will have to live side by side. In the future I imagine we will have highly crafted worlds in which the player will have the complete choice of interacting with the existing narratives, or crafting their own tale that will coexist and be given context by those other narratives that form the basis of a believable world.
Allow me to express this a different way, if you wanted your story space to be that of a city, the city by definition must have narrative, even if that narrative is emergent. How did that city come into being? Why are some buildings larger than others? Why are they placed in the locations they are placed? The simple fact that a city exists implies pre-existing narrative. So even if your city is generated dynamically, with a bunch of random NPCs that are then generated with a completely random but realistic personality, and are then given goals and aspirations and thus set out to full fill those aspirations, there will be narrative that exists as soon as the player even touches the world. It's merely unpredictable, and unknowable. It's the Schrödinger's cat of video games, with the story space merely being the point before the player even touches the game, the point at which everything exists merely as potential.
Either way it's a cool concept, and if I've misread this please inform me of my mistakes =D
CAUTION!: This is LONG, but not a rant. I wanted to contribute and talk about some of the fundamental issues of story in games that may have only been lightly discussed here.
In the eternal story/interactivity conundrum you have the aforementioned push/pull of player control versus design control. They idea of story spaces in which essentially a very complex and developed stage is set where the user can interact with elements of the stage at will to create their own unique story, is an intriguing one. You would think that this is the perfect solution to the problem. Players create their own unique, presumably ideal, story on their own terms. Narrative and interactivity both served. Right? Right!
Of course it's never that simple and there are fundamental problems with this approach, most of which have been addressed here. I'll get into a few that could be elaborated upon. They are character, time, integrity of experience and the fundamental goal with entertainment.
An objective observer might ask why we're having this debate at all. Why are we trying to fit a square peg in a hole of continually variable size and shape. Linear narratives tell stories exceedingly well and interactive games give players freedom to shape their own experiences on their own terms. You would think that linear narratives and interactive games would happily go in their separate directions, each honing their crafts to their ultimate expression. But since their inception games have tried to incorporate narrative into their experiences. Why? Just about 99.99% of people on earth love a good story.
People get into people. Even the most anti-social introvert could go on for days about their favorite movies, books, shows, etc and the characters make the stories what they are. The most epic, intriguing, enthralling plot is nothing without engaging characters. However, if you introduce great characters to a simple plot you can have storytelling magic. Look at movies like Clerks or Reservoir Dogs. Two guys in a convenience store and a heist gone bad. With that you only have the characters and their interactions to rely upon, but they are so well done that they make for some of the best modern cinema.
You could do this in games, but then you would be making a movie. Some games unashamedly try take their best stab at it (see MGS 4). The opposite direction is perhaps the MMO, where you have vast worlds with lots to do with tons of characters to interact with, both in a functional (NPCs) and more meaningful way (other players). I could imagine a story space where both masters are served, with incredibly intriguing characters that you could choose to interact with or not. But with that freedom you may never meet these characters and they would never be involved in your story and when the player character is the requisite blank slate you could effectively have very little interesting characters or personal interactions. Could you imagine telling a story like that to someone? They would be checking their blackberry within the first 30 seconds.
Time is the next issue. You've heard about it being all about timing. It's true and it's alluded to in the article. And it's all about timing in two senses. First, what if Luke and Ben get to the cantina after Han has already left? No Falcon, no Death Star, no Princess, no medals, right? Well maybe. Luke and Ben are determined so maybe they find a way to get to the Alderaan system with some other dashing smuggler. But maybe they don't and even if they do, it’s not Han.
Second, what if Star Wars was like 4 hours. We spend the first hour on the moisture farm, with Luke, his aspirations, his boring life, etc. We don't get to the Death Star until hour three and at about 213 minutes in the Death Star blows. Could still be a great film. Could be better than the original. But one, it wouldn't be Star Wars and two, chances are it would be interminably boring. With the story space you have all of these potentialities and more. You have chances for incredibly engrossing and fabulously mediocre experiences.
Which leads into what any designer or storyteller should be primarily concerned with. That the user have a good time, or the quality of the experience. I'm sure advocates of the pure story space have formulated some solutions to this, but how do you make sure that the player has a good time, much less a great time, when they have free reign over the story space? They have the freedom to interact with or not interact with anyone and everyone, and to do everything or just a small subset of things. I suppose you can "corral" the user to doing the best things, or interacting with the coolest people, and doing so at the right times, but then the dreaded hand of the designer becomes apparent, as though the hand of the author isn't apparent in great linear narratives.
We know when our strings are being pulled, whether they are gameplay strings or emotional strings. But the thing is, for the most part we don't care. Good storytellers know that the goal is getting at "Truth" not "Reality", and they know that we will suspend our disbelief for the sake of the story and the meaning of it. The player/reader/viewer/whatever is more concerned with having a great experience than thinking about whether this event, conversation or scenario is some writer/designer contrivance. Whether it's Return of the King, Rambo 3 or Halo 3 we know what's going to happen. We want it to happen and that's why we're happy when it does. Of course you can have higher aspirations ala The Lion in Winter or Ico, but essentially the same rules apply. The hands of the creators can always be found if you look hard enough.
And finally we get to what the heck gets us to sit down in front the silver screen, TV screen or monitor in the first place. To be entertained, to be scared, to be thrilled, to be moved, to have an experience. Opinions and desires vary as to what this entails. I personally hate having to "create my experience", thus I have a difficult time with Will Wright and I'm inclined to let Hideo Kojima ramble. But I know that there are people who will go to town with their Spore creatures, their StarCraft maps and their Neverwinter Nights scenarios. The game world has room for both pleasures.
However if we're going to be talking about story, then we have to talk about story and that means plot, characters, timing and almost always, meaning. Meaning, is a much longer discussion though, so I spared you brave readers who have made it this far. I think a good balance can be reached between freedom and structure in ways that have yet to be discovered. That's part of why we're discussing these things. But until someone creates the Infinitely Variable Great Story Engine (which I actually believe will happen some day), we will have to strike a balance. Story spaces are a good idea, but they will need to be strongly guided and orchestrated by the designer for the foreseeable future if we are to have consistently engaging story experiences.
@ Patrick Doody: It goes without saying that the reality of designing games is different than what I write about here. But it's good to know (and not surprising) that people like you care about these things, and are thinking about new ways to make games.
@ An Dang: I think that the problem you identify is huge (cyical gamer/developer-cycle), although I think that some non-RPGs (from other places) like The Witcher or Drake's Fortune have interesting characters and stories (although The Witcher has *huge* issues, and Drake's Fortune is an exercise in genre-perfect recreation and refinement, not telling a new, too-meaningful story.
@ C M Williams: this 'It would also be nice if the high profile discussions on the topic also took this stance instead of the "This is the future way of games all other styles are outdated and don’t work" route' is everywhere. There's a lot of "this is the way it is" stuff out there, and it's often vague or works on shaky, hasty assumptions.
@ Christopher Wragg: You're definitely on to something there, to deny the heavily structured and pointed nature of even the most "open" games is short-sighted.
@ Shawn Rettig: Your point about timing and meaning really get at what I'm saying (among other, bigger things you address). I think that the Infinitely Variable Great Story Engine can and will exist, and I think that you're right to point out the issues of timing and "happening" between characters in a narrative, of what happens and what doesn't, and why. It can't all just be "storyspace," not really, not if you want (as I desperately do) more interesting, meaningful, "true" encounters.
Narrative is a collection of events. The audience witnesses these events and concludes they form a related whole.
A story space is an interactive environment where events happen. The player experiences these events and concludes they form a related whole.
They aren't the same thing. Let's talk about how these things work together.