Telling a Story

Blog - 4

Come on come all! Gather your friends and relatives, and take a seat! It’s story time!

Ever since we learned how to communicate, we’ve been telling stories to each other. It was inevitable that developers and creators started inculcating stories into their games. We will look at some of the less obvious and interesting ways we can blend stories into our games.

Story Through Simple Mechanics

Before we carry on, I recommend you to play a short game called Loneliness, which shouldn’t take you more than 3 minutes, click on the link and play the game, then we’ll talk about it after you come back.

First thing we notice is how there are no words in the game itself except for the creator’s comments at the end. The graphics are nothing special and the actors in the game are literally squares. Yet, you may have instantly gotten what the creator was trying to convey, the moment you approached the first group of squares, they all just moved away.

Now, as the game went on, it really was up to the player to try multiple things, did they approach every group? Or did they give up after a while? Or did they not approach any group at all? It reflects on how we think and operate as individuals. All that with just 3 minutes of gameplay and 4 buttons to control the player in a 2-D space, with of course a soundtrack to match the overall emotion of the game.

Another example of this is a game that I recently played, Florence. Needless to say, spoiler alert!

So, in chapter 15 of the game which is called ‘drifting’ , the relationship of the protagonist seems to be falling apart with her partner. In that chapter there is a jumbled torn photograph and the player has to put all the pieces together.

Sounds simple right? It is, but what’s more interesting is the story it tells. The game has pretty much no words, and as the player tries to rearrange the torn pieces of the photograph, they realise that the pieces are actually drifting apart.

When i played this i was blown away, they told such an amazing mini story with such a simple interaction and a basic drifting animation. The story of how we try to save a fleeting relationship as frantically and desperately we can but we really can’t no matter how hard we try. Here’s a video of the Chapter (play from 23:14).

Environmental Storytelling

Another interesting and one of the most common ways of telling a story in games is through the game space itself.

I’ll let Bart Stewart explain what Environmental Storytelling actually is,

“Environmental storytelling is less direct. Instead of explicitly describing events, environmental storytelling shows the final outcome of a sequence of events, then it invites players to make up their own stories about what happened to cause that outcome.” (Stewart, 2015)

For example a beautifully written indie game called What Remains of Edith Finch had amazing environmental storytelling. It’s about a 17 year old girl, Edith Finch who returns to her family's house which is huge and has many rooms in it, as the game progresses the player progressively explores each room which belonged to her family members. Every room is full of personality and the member’s things, every corner of the room has something interesting. I highly recommend playing it to see the attention to detail the developers have put in the game.

Now, it might sound a bit cheesy to say that telling a meaningful story makes a game much more than a game, but it’s very true. The best games in the current market have amazing stories, from AAA titles like God of War and Red Dead Redemption 2 to Indie gems like Celeste, Night in the Woods and Life is Strange. A story motivates the players to play and the developers to make. A story ties the mechanics, the characters and the rules together. A story, more than anything is perhaps the only human element in an ocean of 1’s and 0’s.

References

- Loneliness | Necessary Games. (2019). Retrieved 11 August 2019, from https://www.necessarygames.com/my-games/loneliness/flash

-Stewart, B. Environmental Storytelling. Retrieved 11 August 2019, from https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/BartStewart/20151112/259159/Environmental_Storytelling.php

-Florence: iOS iPhone iPad FULL GAMEPLAY & Walkthrough. Retrieved 11 August 2019, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4U9IVBdII54

Extra Resources

-3 approaches to storytelling in games. Retrieved 11 August 2019, from https://medium.com/@Tarnimus/3-approaches-to-storytelling-in-games-4e62de86ef30

- The warning of Edith Finch: what we love is killing us. Retrieved 11 August 2019, from https://www.polygon.com/2018/1/8/16841956/what-remains-of-edith-finch-year-in-review-cara-ellison

- Orland, K. What Remains of Edith Finch is an effective experiment in storytelling. Retrieved 11 August 2019, from https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/04/what-remains-of-edith-finch-is-the-short-story-collection-gaming-needs/

-What Happened Here? Environmental Storytelling. Retrieved 11 August 2019, from https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1012647/What-Happened-Here-Environmental

-Narrative Mechanics - The Elements and Spaces of Interactive Storytelling. Retrieved 11 August 2019, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_4o8_BBGL7o&t=1274s

- Narrative Mechanics - How Missile Command Tells a Story - Extra Credits. Retrieved 11 August 2019, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQJA5YjvHDU