Interview with 4 game writers on the future of storytelling.
- rebeccaphillips-iad
- Nov 15, 2014
- 13 min read
Entertainment Editor at IGN AU - Lucy O’Brien
There is an old but still pertinent argument that storytelling in video games is the last great bastion for the medium to conquer. That game developers working in the 'mainstream space' have traditionally struggled to utilise video games as a storytelling medium, struggled to harmonise play and Hollywood-like narratives, and struggled to inject real meaning into their games without rendering the player a frustrated passive participant.
In the last year alone, successful narrative-driven indie games like Gone Home and The Stanley Parable have set high standards that are impossible to ignore, while drawing a line between ‘indie’ – traditionally the space where unique, new stories are told - and ‘mainstream’ is becoming increasingly redundant as these smaller games grow in popularity and prevalence.
Naughty Dog’s Neil Druckmann (writer of The Last of Us), The Fullbright Company’s Steve Gaynor (writer of Gone Home), Rhianna Pratchett (writer of last year’s Tomb Raider), and Davey Wreden (writer of The Stanley Parable)
Do you think 'mainstream' games will ever move away from the powerful influence of Hollywood? Should they?
Davey Wreden (The Stanley Parable):
“As long as Hollywood is making money, mainstream games will continue to be produced that imitate it. More than Hollywood, mainstream games follow the powerful influence of money. Games tend to imitate Hollywood because Hollywood makes money, so my suspicion is that as long as Hollywood is making money, mainstream games will continue to be produced that imitate it.”
We’ve seen some very powerful examples of reductive storytelling this year – e.g. Gone Home, Papers, Please. If the length of your game wasn't dictated by publisher/consumer demand, would you think 'less is more?'
Davey Wreden (The Stanley Parable):
“When a game has the freedom of a longer play time, it can afford to be sloppier because the player's attention is more spread out across many elements. But a shorter game bears a greater burden to make each moment count since there are fewer of them! … The constraint of cutting your game down to only the elements that REALLY matter, this is a process of learning what the core experience of your game really is. Games that navigate this process well often shine with confidence, and moreso they tend to respect the player's time, taking you out of your world just long enough to show you something really wonderful.”
Neil Druckmann (The Last of Us):
The great thing with our medium is that it’s not beholden to any specific length. 'Consumer demand' is just kind of an arbitrary thing: when people buy a game for $60 they expect a certain amount of hours. But we’re moving away from that now. We can charge what we want for a game and release it through all sorts of digital distribution models, so if you want to tell a short story you can, and if you want to tell an epic story you can… When we did the Uncharted games, we always just outlined a story, an experience. And then we started making that experience, and it ends up being however long it ends up being…
In games we tend to say too much. We over explain things and use too much dialogue. We don’t leave enough to the imagination of the player as far as storytelling, about who this character is and what happened in this world, and I think that’s such a wonderful storytelling tool, especially in interactivity where you can kind of pick and choose what you’re looking at or interacting with, where the player can fill in the gaps. No matter what your game is, less is more is always a good approach.”
Looking broadly at the industry right now, do you think developers are starting to reconsider the kinds of stories video games can tell?
Steve Gaynor (Gone Home):
I think it’s based both on developers recognizing that players are willing to engage with more, different kinds of stories and characters, and on designers relying on more and different kinds of techniques to tell stories than they ever have before. The breadth of stories being told, and the WAY they’re being told, has never been greater. I think a lot of that comes down to the financial freedom that indies have now to make a smaller scale game and sell it online and sustain themselves that way, but this change is happening in AAA games like The Last of Us as well.
Neil Druckmann (The Last of Us):
We're trying to find our voice, trying to find what kind of mechanics we want to explore, what story we want to tell. We generally tend to stray towards some kind of action - we like strong mechanics and we like some kind of mastery within those mechanics. But we keep exploring ways to tell a better story within those mechanics.
Through the indie scene you’re seeing these varied stories – Gone Home and Papers, Please are great examples of stories we didn't used to see in video games. And because those games were successful, you’re going to see more writers encouraged to branch out. In the triple A space, so much of it is about marketing… If something isn't already successful, the territory becomes pretty hard to explore, whether it’s a protagonist or a theme or a genre. But indie games are going to allow triple A games to do it. We’ll be able to point at something and say "look at how successful that was, now we can do a bigger and more expensive version of that kind of story."
Rhianna Pratchett (Tomb Raider):
There’s also been a bit of exodus of AAA developers going back into the indie realm with the lessons of big game development fully learnt and a burning desire to push the boundaries on their own terms. I think we’re going to see some interesting things emerging from that.
How long are we going to keep telling variations on stories about 'men with guns' in the mainstream space?
Steve Gaynor (Gone Home):
Well that’s probably a forever thing. There will always be a market for incredibly huge blockbuster titles (much the same as Hollywood will always lean on big-ticket movies that rely on spectacle and scale to sell tons of tickets). I don’t think AAA (or experiences driven by gruff men killing enemies) will ever go away. The field will just get smaller. Only the studios that are really the best of the best at making games with budgets in the tens of millions will be able to survive - but they will survive. There’ll just be more, different stuff coming from smaller studios at the same time.
Davey Wreden (The Stanley Parable):
My guess is as long as they continue to sell. Same as with games with zombies or a cube-based re-buildable world or matching 3 things. Perhaps if enough of them come out the market becomes flooded and crashes and then 'men with guns' doesn't sell as well as it used. We can only dream...
Rhianna Pratchett (Tomb Raider):
The industry isn’t going to ditch guns anytime soon. Not completely. They’re just too heavily entrenched. However, I do hope it starts expanding its verbs and finding new ways for players to interact with worlds, characters and game mechanics. From a gamer perspective I can’t help but think that it would be nice to sometimes travel to these amazing, exotic and imaginative locations, and not have to shoot the locals in the face.
As for the ‘men’ part – Again, I think 2013 was a pretty good year for female characters, both NPCs and protagonists. Although in gaming terms ‘pretty good year’ means that there were some, and they were cool, interesting and well thought out, rather than anything approximating equality. As well as more female protagonists (and antagonists) I hope we start to see a broader spectrum of representation in age, ethnicity, sexual and gender orientation and ability. You only have to look at TV shows like Breaking Bad, Luther or Orange is the New Black to see how popular a bit of diversity (or as I like to call it, ‘real life’) can be. On top of that, I still think there’s a lot of scope in broadening the way games approach depictions of masculinity, which is still extremely narrow in scope. It would be nice to see a panel about gender in videogames and it not just be about one gender! Because, frankly, they could both use work.
Neil Druckmann (The Last of Us):
The simple answer is: as long as it keeps selling. Those are the games that tend to sell the most. It’s not like there are no other options out there, but Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto sell the most games by far. It gets to the point where you have to resist market research and take risks. Look, with The Last of Us, Joel still fits that description: a man with a gun. But I feel we took plenty of risks with Ellie, and how we marketed the game using Ellie. So I think the ‘man’ part of it will eventually change. I mean you’re starting to see it already – Telltale's The Walking Dead: Season 2 stars Clementine, and the Last of Us DLC we’re working on right now stars two teenage girls.
As for the gun part – the violence – the easiest way to create threat in a game world is to have a human being hold a gun, or drive a car dangerously. So as long as we keep creating games where the core mechanic is action, and we’re trying to create physical conflict, that’s the go-to thing. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Look at movies. How many great movies have guys with guns? Look at Saving Private Ryan, sure it was another war movie, but it was a different kind of war movie. And look at cop shows – there were so many, I’m sure people were asking “how many more do we need?” But then, how many more cop shows did they get through before they got to The Wire?
In saying that, I’m still torn about it. On the one hand yes, it’d be better if we explored more and tried to get away from that. Try to see if we can still keep our games exciting and engaging with the least amount of violence we can put in them. With The Last of Us, we went past our comfort zone by including fewer combat encounters than we had in our previous games. And with our DLC, we’re trying to go even further past our comfort zone. There are a couple of long stretches in the DLC where there’s no combat, and we’re trying to keep you engaged in other mechanics. It’s going to be an interesting test for us to see how people will react to it.
In your opinion, which game from the last ten years told the most important story? (Interpret ‘important’ as you wish.) Why?
Davey Wreden (The Stanley Parable):
I guess I'll interpret it as “important for me personally.” Radiator by Robert Yang is probably the game that convinced me to begin making games, it was so effective at telling a personal story in a short period of time without any sort of conventional gameplay. This was what convinced me that a shortform narrative-driven gameplay experience truly had the potential to be as compelling as any other kind of game out there.
Steve Gaynor (Gone Home):
Probably Portal, for the way it was told and how it related to the player. Clearly it was an inspiration for us on Gone Home - it’s only a few hours long, you never meet another character, everything is told through environmental storytelling and disembodied voice, all the characters are female - and I think the confidence for them to make a game like that and release it in 2007 was really important and brave. Forging a connection with those characters and that place entirely by being there and standing in opposition to GladOS as a singular presence, all with a humor and subtlety that almost no other game even attempts, was just phenomenal, and I believe set a lot of things in motion as regards the future of video game storytelling.
Rhianna Pratchett (Tomb Raider):
I’d probably say BioShock because it heralded somewhat of a sea change in the way the industry looked at and prioritized storytelling. Here was a game with first-person shooter mechanics, which was also trying to tell a compelling story about the human condition. And it sold. No longer could publishers say that story wasn't important to players. Okay, so sometimes they still do, but we know it’s nonsense and have the figures to back it up. BioShock wasn’t just creating a game, either. It was creating a world. And a world where you could see the stories literally dripping off the walls. It really hammered home the importance of environmental storytelling in a big way. It really built on what Half-Life 2 did ten years ago.
Neil Druckmann (The Last of Us):
This was a hard one; I wanted to pick Ico but realized I was outside of the ten year mark. So for me, it has to be Half-Life 2. I think what Valve did with Alex Vance kind of redefined how you tell a story in a video game, how you create a believable NPC. I remember being blown away by how real she felt, and how I felt like she re-contextualized the world for me. I remember seeing her fight with someone, and then we’d leave that area, and she’d be telling me secrets about that person. It gave me feelings similar to the ones I have with my real world friends; it made me realize so much of the power of storytelling in games comes from NPCs. And at the end of Episode Two when Alex’s dad dies, that’s the only time I’ve ever cried in a video game. So f*ck you Valve for not finishing that series! (laughs)
Do you see social responsibility becoming more and more important to video game writers – for example, the inclusion of minorities, female protagonists, less token sexualisation?
Davey Wreden (The Stanley Parable):
My biggest hope is that it's a response to a broadening audience of video game players, and vice-versa. Like, if you've got people out there who want to play your game who actively feel alienated because of its content, aside even from moral reasons, you're leaving money on the table! The unfortunate reality is that money is going to play a big role in how this plays out, until a trend emerges of mainstream games producing money on diverse representations of characters it's hard to see the social responsibility taking hold on a broad scale. Until then we'll probably see a pretty jarring schism between that unchanging industry tone and smaller games becoming much more radically diverse without the watchful eye of a board of investors.
Rhianna Pratchett (Tomb Raider):
Actually, I think it’s always been important to video game writers, who tend to be quite savvy about this kind of thing if they’re worth their salt. However, it hasn't always been important to publishers (who tend to like proven methods) and other team members high up the food chain, who maybe don’t care, don’t see the point or perhaps just don’t know how to do it right. Writers and other professional storytellers don’t have a history of being in charge in this industry and so their influence can be limited by time, budget and how they’re included in the team.
It’s nuts that we’ve reached a situation where representing female characters (let alone minorities) is considered ‘social responsibility’ and not, you know, depicting half the world’s population. I often feel like the gaming audience is so much more diverse than the characters represented in the games that they play. We’re lagging behind all other entertainment mediums in this regard and we really need to step up to the plate rather than curmudgeonly defending our piece of lawn from the pesky kids.
Neil Druckmann (The Last of Us):
It seems like it’s becoming more important to the industry as a whole. And I like that [game-makers] can’t get away with stuff scott free anymore… but as long as those [kinds of] games still sell, I’m not sure how much people will change. I think as long as we’re honest as writers, the other stuff will come naturally. Instead of trying to find what’s cool, or what will sell, you’ve got to think: what’s honest to me? What can I say that feels personal and unique to me as a writer? Then you start asking yourself the hard questions. Is this character here just as a trope? Or do I believe in this character? Am I thinking of the story from this person’s perspective? Do I have a cast of characters who are fleshed out, who are here as a reason? And if you think like that, you’ll avoid all that surface old stuff people put in there just to sell more units.
What trends do you want to see happening in video game writing as we move into a 'new generation?'
Davey Wreden (The Stanley Parable):
The biggest thing I want is for a broadening sense of what constitutes “gameplay.” For example, when you play a game, if you are surprised by something, is the sensation of being surprised in and of itself a form of gameplay? What about the sensation of being denied something you were expecting? What about being utterly helpless? These don't need to become genres or anything, but I think there are thousands of little experiences hidden in the cracks between “gameplay” that would make beautiful games all on their own if only more people had the confidence to call them legitimate.
Rhianna Pratchett (Tomb Raider):
Writers (alongside Narrative Designers and Cinematic Directors) need to be hired earlier and properly integrated into their teams, be they onsite or off. It’s getting better, but we’ve still got a long way to go until it’s the industry standard.
I’d also like developers to start realising that storytelling isn’t just something that the writers do, but something that covers a much wider slice of the team, from game mechanics and art, to level design and music. Inspiring a team to realise that they all have a part to play in supporting good narrative is vital if we’re to raise ourselves up as a storytelling industry, rather than just the odd studio here and there.
Neil Druckmann (The Last of Us):
I want studios that make story-based games to start taking their stories more seriously. And that doesn’t mean hiring a big shot writer from Hollywood; it means that story becomes integral to making your game. I don’t see how you can achieve that without having an in-house writer that sits next to the designer, helping them make their levels, talking with the engineers about where we can tell the story more dynamically, pushing at technology. And I want writers to feel more empowered, so they can tell more personal stories. I think many big studios tell 'story-by-committee', and in doing so they can lose a certain voice. You can tell personal stories within a group – a lot of people shared the vision of Breaking Bad, for example - but I think you still have to approach it with a united love for the characters.
And personally, I’d like to see more female protagonists. And hopefully with the Last of Us being a success, with Gone Home being a success, people can now point to examples and say “hey look, that didn’t affect sales, the girl was on the box and in the commercial and it still sold well, so maybe we can do that too.”
JAN 2014
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