Video games have come a long way since the days of eight-bit alien invasions...
From such humble beginnings sprung a bold new medium, one whose vast potential might not have been immediately apparent from its earliest works, not unlike every other artistic medium. Today, though, the achievements of video games have exceeded any debate about their artistic merit, as technological innovations allow developers a greater breadth of tools with which to craft experiences.
That word, “experience,” is at the heart of what makes video games distinct. Rather than function as a passive medium like film, the interactivity of video games place the medium’s audience – its players – within the world of the game itself, the actions and agency of the players moving the game forward. Sure, interactivity itself isn’t unique to games – it’s fair to say that the necessary act of reading marks literature as an interactive medium as well – but where video games are distinct is in how their interactivity works to shape any given text, the choices of the individual player defining the experience as unique from that of any other.
This means that the world of the game must be reactive to the inputs of the player, and the player reactive to the outputs from the game. This push and pull between the player and game is what makes a game an “experience,” as it demands a level of immersion and personal application that isn’t found in any other form of media. The value of a game – artistic, entertainment, or otherwise – lies in the experience it has to offer players, and the act of playing a game is the core of that experience.
While much praise has been aimed at video games' cinematic potential, where they are truly distinct is in how they utilize the player's role as an active agent within a created world
These interactive elements permeate every aspect of a game’s design, extending even to a video game’s narrative capabilities. Not every game is narratively-focused, of course, but those that are have found ways to utilize the player’s interactivity to tell their stories. This allows for stories unlike any found in other mediums, as they are narratives shaped by the player’s role within them as much as they are by the developer’s deliberately crafted plots and contexts.
For me at least, this marriage between the narrative and the player has led to some of the most engaging stories that I've ever experienced. There’s an undeniable power to the narratives of video games, a kind of magic to how they so effortlessly draw us into their worlds and, in doing so, challenge our understanding of our own world, as all art forms should.
Of course, much of this magic can more accurately be defined as carefully crafted systems, meticulously designed so as to create an experience the player is so easily able to get lost in. While every game’s design is distinct, there’s an underlying universality to what goes into crafting the player’s experience in any given game, especially among games of particular focuses, such as narrative-focused games. This universality makes it possible to parse out some of the interactive elements that work to shape the narrative experience of games, as what shines through in the particular design of one game makes its more subtle delivery in other games more apparent.
"While every game’s design is distinct, there’s an underlying universality to what goes into crafting the player’s experience in any given game"
This parsing is exactly what we’ll be doing here, looking at a selection of narratively-focused games whose specific designs make certain elements of interactivity more readily apparent than they would be in other games. These four games will highlight for us the elements of design that developers manipulate so as to tell their stories.
With those elements identified, we will then apply them onto a single game with substantial documentation of the development process, so that we may note how the developers were considering those elements during the creation of their game. Through this, we may see how the combined utilization of these elements work to form that game’s narrative experience, thus revealing the universality of these elements to the art of video game storytelling as a whole.
Through this process, we may gain a better understanding of how it is that games tell unique stories, an understanding with which we may go on to grander questions about the medium as a whole. Particularly, we may wonder at the limits of video game narrative, especially if we’re in fact able to pin down with any level of accuracy the distinguishing elements of games’ interactive storytelling. Does our ability to do that signal that games are, or already have, reached their storytelling zenith? If so, what does that mean for the future of the medium?
But these are questions best saved until the end of our analysis. For now, we’ll focus instead on the games themselves, as each has a lot to teach us, and all of them are worth observing closely so that we may begin to form a greater understanding for the capabilities of this medium. With that said, let’s get right into it…