The art of storytelling dates back to our earliest ancestors, who painted their own stories on the walls of the caves they lived in.
We’ve come so far since then – from cave walls to paper to screens and virtual reality.
Storytelling has existed in video games for almost as long as they’ve been around. The game that started everything, Colossal Cave Adventure, was a text-based adventure game created in 1976.
And although the first game to include storytelling was created 50 years ago, there is still a lot of debate on whether or not game developers should include stories in their games – or if games are even a good medium for storytelling.
I’m not here to tell you whether or not to use storytelling in your game. That decision can only be made by you - based on your goals and what you want to achieve.
Some of my favorite games are nothing but story – such as visual novels and interactive fiction stories, which have no gameplay. There are games that use both gameplay and heavy storytelling that are absolutely wonderful. There are also games with no story at all that are equally as great. And then there are games that fall in-between – games that have some story sprinkled in, but it’s not the driving factor of the game and also not necessary in order to enjoy or understand the game.
That said, I think it is important to know how storytelling can affect players and impact their experience.
One of the best experiences I’ve ever had playing a game with storytelling was the first time I ever played Fallout 3.
Fallout 3 is a post-apocalyptic open-world action RPG. In Fallout 3, you start out as a baby, and as you play through the beginning of the game you watch your character grow and learn. When you’re just a baby, you learn how to walk and explore, interact with objects in the world, and your dad teaches you about religion and scripture.
Fast forward a few years and you’re celebrating your 10th birthday with friends, cake, robots, and frenemies.
When you’re 16, you finally venture outside your home for the very first time. Your home was once a safe refuge, until you learn that everything you ever knew was a lie. Your character is thrust into a new world, which, in some ways – is not as bad as you thought, though in other ways worse.
And the entire time, you’re trekking across nuclear wastelands in search of your dad (which definitely tugged on a few of my heartstrings).
One of the things that also made Fallout 3 so amazing to me was it’s open world post-apocalyptic environment. There is so much detail, and so many wonderful distractions and things to explore. When I played Fallout 3 my first time, only a few minutes after leaving home, instead of heading to the obvious place to go (conveniently marked on my map), I took a detour. On that detour, I encountered a group of starving, irradiated feral dogs, burned out abandoned homes, and irradiated water that wasn’t good for swimming in or drinking.
A lot of the distractions and things in Fallout 3’s environment are curiosity-driven. And one thing the game does is draw player’s through it’s world by encouraging them to ask questions: what is that? Where does it lead? What does it do? Who is that person and what are they all about? There is always something to find, do, or discover.
And that brings me to another aspect of why Fallout 3 blew me away, because on top of this amazing world to explore, you constantly have to make decisions.
You also have to decide on whether or not you’re going to play nicely with others. You can be completely evil and murderous if you want, or you can try to take the higher moral ground and be kind to others.
The clues you can glean from the environment are also amazing. In the game, there are radio transmitters that you can tune in to. If you want, you can even find out where they’re coming from, and travel to that place to see what’s going on. But Fallout as a game doesn’t actually tell the player to do any of this – it’s just in the world for you to find, if you choose to. Fallout 3 is a game where a lot of the story is told through the player taking in the environment and exploring it.
All of this to say that because of the storytelling in Fallout 3, a lot of the times when I played it I felt like I really was part of the Wasteland. My heart would race during fights. And I sympathized with a lot of the characters, especially the down-on-their-luck mutated humans, who were often viewed as “freaks” by the rest of society.
I could not imagine Fallout 3 without it’s stories, lore, history, and backstories of various characters. Without the storytelling, it would be your average, run-of-the-mill open world RPG sandbox game. Which brings me to the main point of this post:
Storytelling in games creates one of the most immersive forms of storytelling experiences out there.
I know that the above sentence is a bold statement, but it’s true. Because players directly interact with games, games have the ability to provide more immersive and unique story telling than tv, movies, and books can.
Books are limited to expressing a story through written word, and the reader has a more active role interpreting the story.
Movies take written word and convert it into an on-screen experience that can be seen and heard.
But video games take storytelling to the next level by allowing players to have agency; by giving players choices, allowing players to set the pace of how quickly the story moves, and taking place in worlds that players can explore and get lost in.
Through choice, pacing, and environment, videogames provide unique storytelling opportunities that can only be created by using videogames as a medium.
However, games as a medium are still very young – video games have only been around for 50 years!
TV and film have been around for slightly longer – about 127 years, as the first black and white, soundless motionpicture films were made in the 1890s.
And books are one of the oldest mediums of storytelling, and have been around for about 1000 years! One of the oldest books written (that we have record of) is Buddhism's Diamond Sutra from 868.
But because videogames are so young as a medium, it is often tempting to compare them to movies and books, and say that the stories in movies and books are better than those found in videogames.
However, videogames are just in their infancy, and nowhere near as mature as books are. We are still learning what we can do with videogames, still testing the limits, and still experimenting with videogames as a way to tell stories. Every year more and more games with compelling and wonderful stories are made.
I’m personally very optimistic and excited for what the future of storytelling in games holds, and looking forward to see what game developers and creators come up with next!