Gamasutra--What Every Game Developer [and Writer] Needs to Know about Story

What Every Game Developer [and Writer] Needs to Know about Story

Increasingly, story is a hot item in games. Partly, this is because the quality bar is rising in this relatively young art form. As games evolve, people want more depth, not just higher polygon counts.

More to the point, game developers want to sell their wares to more people. Selling them to the same ones every time doesn't lead to a lot of growth. It's clear we need to tap into something more universally human.

And story is a universal human experience.

So how do we approach story in games? Well, to answer that, we need to look at what has worked in other story forms, and what is unique to the new story form of games.

Let's start with a statement everybody can agree on: Games aren't movies.

But that by itself doesn't get us very far. To figure out what games are, it's helpful to back up to an earlier problem: Movies aren't plays.

In the early part of the 20th century, moving pictures were a curiosity, an amusement. They had their addicts right from the beginning, to be sure. But they didn't become a substantial lasting art form until they discovered two related things:

1. They are a form of story, not just a new toy.
2. Their particular form of story differs from all previous forms of story, and has other things in common with all forms of story.

The same is true for games.

The first attempts to make movies into real stories failed. They failed because they were conceived as filmed plays. A camera would be set up about where an audience member would sit in the middle of a theater, and the play would ensue.

It didn't work. Early film makers didn't take into account that the human eye wanders all over the fixed box of the stage during a play, and a camera that does any less will bore the film audience to tears. They also hand discovered the rich tool set of camera angles, close-ups, far shots, and all the language of film we now take for granted. Generally speaking, they hadn't discovered what this particular story form was good at.

And frankly, neither have we in games.
Common misperceptions

There are a number of places where we've gone wrong in game stories so far. Most of the problems spring from two basic misunderstandings:

* Story is dialog.
* Story doesn't matter.

Sure, story is partly dialog. And a cake is part frosting. But here's a large fact that I'll elaborate on in just a moment: Story is....more article and Part 2