What Every Game Developer Needs to Know about Story

The importance of reversals

As you can see in the brief summary of classical story structure, each act is driven by a reversal. When the hero accomplishes the ordeal before him, the reversal is what keeps him going forward instead of resting on his haunches.

A reversal can happen through action (somebody shoots a cop's partner, and that changes everything) or by a revelation (Luke Skywalker finds out that Darth Vader is really his father). The revelation is much more powerful. The important thing is not to cheat. When Danny Glover's character pulls the trigger at the end of Lethal Weapon 2, he's causing a reversal through action. He "revokes" the bad guy's diplomatic immunity. But it's a bad reversal, because he could have done the same thing ten minutes into the movie. Don't do that. Your audience can smell cheating.

What a good reversal does is expand the story's universe. Everything you knew was true, but now there's more, so the world is flipped on its head with this new knowledge. The important thing is to make this convincing within the world of the story. If you can pull this off well, twice, and everything else goes well, you're going to have a great game.

This classical story form is universal, but many of the practical details of storytelling work very differently in plays, in novels, and in movies. You can be sure there will also be differences in games. To find out how games are different, it pays us to look at the ways in which other forms are different from one another. Looking over these, we see a couple of trends.

There are different types of conflict in story. There's internal conflict, which is what goes on inside your head. There's interpersonal conflict, which is between people. And there's external conflict, which is conflict with society in general or the physical world. So if you're shooting at an oncoming space ship, it's external conflict; if you're shooting at your ex-husband, it's interpersonal conflict.

Here's why this is important: While it's possible to have any kind of conflict in any form of story, certain story forms to certain forms of conflict more naturally than others.

• Internal conflict happens most naturally in novels.
• Interpersonal conflict happens most naturally in plays, and in soap operas.
• External conflict happens most naturally in movies, and in games.

Now all this is theory until you look at another relevant fact: these different levels of conflict are expressed with different levels of visual and auditory storytelling. This directly affects how you handle dialog in your game.

We see movies, but we hear plays. Movies are 80% visual and 20% auditory. Plays are 80% auditory and 20% visual.

Movies with talking heads are boring. But at a play, we listen to the pleasant music of the dialog while our eye is free to wander across the static box of the set.

How does this work in games? Like movies, they are primarily visual. Gamers don't tolerate a lot of dialog, with one exception, which I'll get to in a moment.

So, the evidence is mounting to throw out our original premise, that games aren't movies. In fact, they have a lot in common with movies. They're the closest cousin we have among the story forms. But they're not at all the same.

Here's where games get revolutionary. Through all forms of story, writers have been trying to create heroes that the audience can feel empathy for. We, as viewers, may not always like the protagonists, but we have to be able to relate to them, to feel their pain, to cheer them on.

Now, for the first time, the viewer is the protagonist. What does that do to the empathy problem? And what effects does it have on other story elements, such as dialog and pacing?

Well, in a sense, the empathy problem is now solved, but it has been replaced by a more difficult problem: the storyteller has lost direct control of the hero. How do you define character if you're not making the choices? The answer is open-ended: writers and designers need to find new Zen, passive-aggressive ways to think about this, and to create webs of choice that are still channeled into compelling stories. We've done a little of this with branching outcomes, but that's nothing compared to what's possible. Even with a linear story structure, we can create a world in which there are several interesting ways to make the one correct choice.

One of the biggest consequences of the protagonist flip is that pacing can be drawn out in ways we've never seen in a story before.

Let's say you're playing a trench warfare game set in World War II. You are the hero, stuck in a foxhole with bullets whizzing over your head. In a movie, you would watch a three-minute scene of this, and then get bored. In a game, it's your ass in there, and the bullets are flying at you. If you're pinned down in there for twenty minutes, so be it. The adrenaline is pumping. This is life or death.

But the dialog? The dialog generally shrinks, even from the level of our very visual cousins, the movies. Players who are wrapped up in action don't have a lot of patience for talking.

There is an exception: when dialog acts as a game mechanic, as in RPGs like Jade Empire or Knights of the Old Republic, players will embrace huge amounts of text. It's part of the flow of the action then. That works.

How does all this work in practice? Let's look at a little game called Halo through the lens of classical story structure.

Good stories have good bones. Even a fairly thin story like Halo is structurally sound at the act level. Is the character deep? Not very. He's a witty badass. It's thanks to Cortana that we see even that much of him. But it's got real reversals that drive interest in the game, and here's how they work.

Once upon a time, there was a genetically enhanced super-soldier.

Act I: Halo is a computer that the Covenant want to use as a weapon, so the humans, led by you, the Master Chief, have to get there first and activate its defense functions. There's a clear conflict: You versus the Covenant. And it's spurred by an inciting incident: The Covenant have attacked your ship, and you've had to take off in the equivalent of a minivan before the ship explodes. You have no idea what happened to Captain Keyes.

Act II: As you fight the Covenant along side the Marines, you walk into a room wher e a freaked-out Marine shoots you, and you have to kill him. That's a great moment of choice, even in a linear plot.

You also see Covenant corpses that you didn't kill.

	The Flood presents an interesting reversal in Halo and again in Halo 2.

Then you meet The Flood, which try to eat both you and the Covenant. Reversal: The conflict isn't as clear as you thought. It has expanded, and caused your world to change. Some of your friends are now your enemies, and there are new enemies.

Act III: You are "assisted" by a hovering machine Librarian in turning on Halo's defense system, so you can use it against the Flood.

Then you find out from Cortana that you've been tricked: Halo is a machine that wanted to kill the Flood, yes, but also all othe r life forms. Now you have to destroy Halo itself. Reversal: The conflict has expanded again.

You have to destroy Halo. That's an important point for all stories, and it just got even more important. Aristotle complained about the Deus Ex Machina, the machine that swept the hero away so the writer didn't have to think of a way out of the predicament.

Your hero has to cause the ending. He can't just watch it happen. If that's always been true, it's true in spades when the hero is the player.

The old adage for writers in every previous form of story has been: Show, don't tell.

Now there's a new rule: Do, don't show.

We want our players to experience as much of the story first-hand, as the main actor in it. If there's ever an opportunity to create the story through the player's action, make that choice. If there's a part of the story that must be out of the player's control, then show it. Just telling part of the story is always your last choice, even when you're doing exposition. The priority, then, is Do, Show, and Tell, in that order.

Here's an obvious statement that people still miss: Writers are essential to game story. Now lots of folks will agree with that statement. What they miss is the nature of game story; they fall for the old "story is dialog" confusion, and they wait to bring in the writer after the story structure concrete has set. "Paste on some dialog, buddy, and make it clever!"

No, no, no. Don't do this.

If the writer's job is not just about pasted-on dialog, but also the deep construction of the story, that means the writer needs to be involved with the beginning of the project.

Common sense, right? Well, only after you know what story really is.

Here's the other half of the game story riddle: The writer isn't everything. If we understand the story-conflict connection, we need to also understand that the principle of antagonism might be planned by the writer, but it's created by the designers, and implemented by the programmers.

The designers will always be the most direct allies of game writers in their craft. It's the designers who are in charge of the forces of antagonism, which are the essential elements of character development and plot advancement.

Of course, it's the art and audio people who control the most perceptible parts of the story's setting. Creating a world that players believe is a critical part of good story. If you had the script to Casablanca, but it was cast with bad actors and badly filmed, you would no longer have a great story. You'd have a well-written story that had brilliant structure and dialog, but one that was screwed before it was completely born.

Programmers work with everybody to keep the story alive in what the novelist John Gardner would call "the vivid, continuous dream." Sloppy NIS programming or awkward animations or inconsistent world behavior just breaks the dream. Creating this world so no one notices the code is the hardest job of all.

It's not news that games are a collaborative effort. What I think development teams need to learn, though, is that even the story part is a collaborative effort.

The writer's job is to know all the details that I don't include here. Everyone else on the team, though, needs to know at least the basics I've outlined in this article. The development team has to speak a common language about story. If we all do, we stand an excellent chance of making games that will leave the last generation in the dust.

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