61 Frames Per Second

We talk a lot about our favorite stories in video games, regularly applauding the narrative prowess of the creators of Bioshock, Earthbound, and Grim Fandango. Some video games are routinely compared to their filmic counterparts (See Grand Theft Auto 4 and The Godfather). But what interests me most about video games is the medium's ability to allow users to create their own stories. We also talk a lot about emergent narrative on this blog as one of the things that video games can do that other mediums cannot. As Chuck Klosterman says: 

Near the end of Gone with the Wind, Scarlett O'Hara asks Rhett Butler what she's supposed to do with the rest of her life, and he says that (frankly) he doesn't give a damn. Now, the meaning of those lines can be interpreted in many ways. However, what if that dialogue happened only sometimes? What if this scene played out differently for every person who watched Gone with the Wind? What if Rhett occasionally changed his mind, walked back into the house, and said, "Just kidding, baby"? What if Scarlett suddenly murdered Rhett for acting too cavalier? What if the conversation were sometimes interrupted by a bear attack? And what if all these alternative realities were dictated by the audience itself? If Gone with the Wind ended differently every time it was experienced, it would change the way critics viewed its message. The question would not be "What does this mean?" The question would be "What could this mean?"

Steve Gaynor detailed three levels of storytelling in a recent blog post. Consider "High Level Storytelling": 

The player determines what elements are present in the gameworld, and any narrative that happens there is entirely a collaboration between the player and the game's systems. The only fiction determined by the designer is the broad premise of the game's setting, and individual building blocks for potential outcomes. The Civilization series, SimCity, and The Sims exemplify this type of storymaking.

I remember when I used to play Starsiege: Tribes in high school, there was a chat room dedicated to "War Stories", where people would regale their fellow combatants with tales of daring do. I used to love sitting in on these, forgive me, diatribes.

The day was clear and the sky a brilliant blue. The mountains here were of a sufficiently high altitude that the atmosphere was thin and cold but still breathable. The Reflective sat meditating in a lotus position on a cushion in a large, airy room dominated by a huge window of hand-poured teraglass. He wore a thick green robe embroidered with white falcons. Thick silk wrappings covered his feet and legs. He wore archaic spectacles that contained no microelectronics or entek components whatsoever. Their sole purpose was to correct his failing vision. The thought occurred to him that what he truly needed was a way to sharpen his perception of cause-and-effect. He was not certain that the dragon of current events had not already escaped the grasp of the Triad.

Ugh, the dragon of current events. It's fan fiction, to be sure, so quality wasn't always there. But there was something magical about letting players use their imaginations to fill in the narrative gaps to a story that was up until then made up of mostly mindless gunplay. Today, the are much deeper opportunities for fans to imbue their game world with homemade narratives. MMOs and god games like Spore allows players to build a civilization from scratch.

Remember any game related storytelling experiences from your youth? Let us know in the comments. 

Related Links: