| my name is alec robbins. this is where i will talk about my thoughts on game writing. i write games both professionally and independently. depending on the project i'm working on, i'm able to exercise different amounts of what i'm trying to achieve here. my constraints might be budget, time, or even the project goals and the desires of creative leads above me. more than anything, what i've written here is meant to help me explore and solidify my own writing style when it comes to games. i hope you enjoy reading it. |
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you give the player a set of systems they can interact with freely, and through those systems they each experience the game in their own unique way. you cede control as a storyteller almost entirely to the game's design, then trust that this design framework will be able to keep the experience within the tonal parameters you're aiming for. Breath of the Wild has a story that's mostly told via optional flashbacks, and the bulk of the game's time is spent effectively putting yourself into the shoes of a character who is exploring this world for, essentially, the first time, just like you are IRL. it's nice because although Link was alive 100 years ago, the landscape has changed and he's as disoriented as you might be. you're on the same frequency there so Link becomes your true stand-in and anything that happens to him is also happening to you. Minecraft has no written story aside from obscure lore and you can emerge from a session with enormously dramatic tales about accumulating resources, losing them in a surprising reversal, victoriously winning it all back, and returning to your home base a hero. this emergent narrative is as real as any written story and possibly much more special as it can be entirely unique and personal. it lives or dies by the rules of the game's systems and places the design at the forefront in a really exciting way. i even would consider Animal Crossing to fall into this category! the presence of written dialogue there (and there's a LOT!!!) is all in service of overarching systems, and the player is merely participating in a greater machine, acting however they please within its parameters and walking away with very real narratives. the specific dialogue you see in Animal Crossing rarely serves a "traditional" purpose unless a character is teaching you the rules of a mechanic - otherwise, it's meant to just be ambience and texture generated by your choices or random world events. if you ignore a villager for weeks, they might say something to you about it! or move away! if you send them a gift, they might wear it. they might not! you're not fully in control, and that's interesting. a game designed like this is really brave to me from a narrative perspective, and a lot of what we'd normally call writing instead falls onto the designers. Breath of the Wild's story is, on paper, a grim tale about saving a dying land from an evil that's reigned for a hundred years. it's a big leap for the developers to allow players to do something very silly in this supposedly grim context, like catapult an enemy into the air with the kinesis ability and some of the built-in physics. you're entrusting the tone of the game unto the player. and more often than not, the player will appreciate it! if you give them enough cues, they might even play along and become your willing actor! or they might show you an experience you could have never planned for. i really love games like this. |
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ok so there's this game called Brothers that's honestly not really all that remarkable IMO except for one incredible gimmick - it uses the controller in your hands to successfully elicit emotional responses. i'm going to spoil this game so don't read on if you'd like to play it: the general concept is that a pair of brothers discover their father is sick, and decide to travel out into the world and get him the medicine he needs to survive. it's a very simple story. but the *controls* offer up a very interesting twist: you'll control both brothers at the same time. think of it like a single-player co-op game - you control the older brother with the left analogue stick, and the younger brother with the right analogue stick. now, at the start of our story, these brothers aren't used to working together; there's some friction between them. back in real life, it's very probable you're not used to controlling two characters at the same time. that means your hands on the controller may end up moving the brothers on-screen in clumsy ways that actually reflect their relationship in-game. it's a clever way to make your interaction with the game mirror the characters and how they're feeling. you'll use both brothers to solve puzzles, and the puzzles on their own aren't generally very difficult. sometimes you need to have one brother stand on a switch that opens a door the other brother can walk through - you've probably seen a similar puzzle in other games. other times you'll have to use the older brother (who can swim) to carry the younger brother (who can't) across a pond. the narrative doesn't really do anything too exciting for this middle portion of the game, but as you start to become more comfortable controlling both brothers at once, you get the sense that the two brothers are also starting to really get along. that's a pretty unique feeling! but then... BIG SPOILER: near the end of the game, one of the brothers dies. you'll find yourself controlling just the younger brother with your right hand, and after a while you realize... your left hand isn't doing anything. i actually decided to completely take my left hand off the controller at one point. i just didn't need it at all anymore, so why keep it there? rendering part of your mode of interaction *useless* as a way to drive home the death of a character... i haven't seen that done before or since! and then... as one last clever bit of storytelling, the younger brother will come to an obstacle right before he can bring the medicine back to his father: another body of water. you can't swim. you always used to rely on the older brother to swim, and now he's not here. how in the world can you cross? i tried a bunch of different futile ideas - no luck. i kept trying to think of some solution i'd missed but it was becoming clear that one just didn't exist in the traditional way. then, as if by instinct, i decided to put my left hand back on the controller and press the button i would have pressed to have the older brother carry the younger one across... and it worked. the younger brother used the MEMORY of his older brother to learn to swim and push himself past this last obstacle. my left hand was acting as an ethereal ghost of sorts. and it hit me hard! without this moment, i don't know how much this game would stand out from its peers. but of course the WAY in which they decided to tell this story using the medium of games made it really interesting. i think there's probably a pretty limited and specific use-case for this gimmicky-but-effective device, but i want to see more games remember what's available to use. your hands can literally be part of the story! what else aren't we thinking of? feet? i guess DDR has us covered there. i really appreciate when a game does something that can ONLY be done in this medium, and this is a great example. |
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okay so for as big as New Vegas' story ostensibly is, you're really only there for one sliver of a page of the history books. much of the story has already happened before you start playing - tensions between multiple factions are dangerously high and all-out-war is days away. your role in all of this, to put it as simply as possible, is to learn about each faction, help them out to gain favor, then decide how you'd like to influence them (if at all) before they go to war. it's a bit like freezing time and moving everything around to your liking before you snap your fingers and let the flow of time resume. obviously, things still HAPPEN in the game, but all of it is in service of One Big Moment at the end. i'd say this is probably the most exciting framework for an open world narrative i've seen, because it gives the writers a LOT of control over every aspect of the narrative while also giving the PLAYER an incredible amount of freedom to influence it. honestly, Breath of the Wild has the same kind of set-up if you think about it: do as you please exploring Hyrule getting stronger in whichever way you see fit until you decide you're ready to face Calamity Ganon. i think Disco Elysium fits into this framework as well! obviously not every game is a good fit for this structure but i'm excited every time i see it. |
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these are games that i think a lot of people call "story-driven" but are probably the least interesting narratively out of any of them. at the most extreme end of this you have The Last Of Us or the newer God Of War games, where expensive cutscenes and overwrought prestige-TV-style writing overshadow repetitive gameplay meant to fill out the time between bigger narrative turns. in my opinion, some stronger examples of this approach would be Half-Life 2 or Metal Gear Solid 3 where the narrative is overpowering and ever-present BUT the gameplay is so interesting and well-integrated that it works. Half-Life 2 especially always finds very convincing reasons for the gameplay to twist for the narrative's sake (or vice versa) while still keeping things on a good pace. basically, for a game like this to succeed you need both the story AND the gameplay to be singing in harmony, AND for them to not interfere with each other too much. i feel it's pretty rare for story and gameplay in these games to ever intersect in any meaningful way. in fact, more often than not i feel they ask each other to make detrimental concessions or sacrifices: the narrative will need to bend over backwards to justify some new weapon upgrade, or the gameplay will suffer because it needs to service the pacing of the story. i think Death Stranding is a really interesting example of a game whose long, indulgent cutscenes undercut some really innovative, beautiful gameplay. by comparison, I think Portal 2 does a really fantastic job of making the narrative mesh well with the gameplay at all times - though obviously it helps that the narrative is *literally* about putting a character through video-game style puzzle-trials. the biggest offenders to me are things like The Last Of Us or God Of War, which suffer on all counts: both have stories that borrow from Hollywood screenwriting patterns, and the gameplay is mostly just tried-and-true mechanics from other popular games so as not to distract from the Important Story. there's rarely any big risks here at all and even if i like the story i'm generally hard-pressed to call it an interesting use of the medium. these are games made by people who got insecure years ago when Roger Ebert said games can't be art, and then tried to copy their favorite movies to prove him wrong. and also their taste in movies is narrowly stuck on sad-sack masculinity fantasies. and also i guess they're all new parents and that's all they're inspired to write about, who knows. |
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games are silly!!! tonally, they are just usually extremely silly!! old castlevania has you picking up big turkey legs to gain health, mario can die as many times as you've picked up a green mushroom, pokemon evolve when you connect two game boys together with a link cable accessory you had to pay $20+ for. since then, though, a lot of modern games have started working to eliminate this "silliness" and try to work everything in diegetically - some games try to explain how you can come back to life when you die, like the pods in Bioshock (i'll get back to Bioshock in a second). in Dead Space, your health is cleverly displayed as part of some equipment the protagonist wears on his back, so no need for a health bar on the HUD. Undertale, however, follows in the footsteps of stuff like Earthbound that loooooves calling attention to the fact that you're playing a game, and that games are often full of very silly arbitrary rules. you'd think this 4th-wall-breaking might take you out of it - and sometimes that meta-approach really CAN ruin an otherwise effective narrative! - but it can also A) ingratiate you to the game AS a game and B) get you thinking about WHY you're playing a game, two things that Undertale really wants you to think about before it starts to break convention. Undertale, at its core, is offering you the ability to play through a JRPG without harming any enemies, something people who played Dragon Quest have probably wished for after having to kill their hundredth cute little Slime. but it also understands that such an option doesn't matter at all in a game unless you also let players do the OPPOSITE. a choice needs to be a REAL choice to feel worthwhile! as such, you can ALSO play through Undertale the standard JRPG way, by fighting and killing every monster to progress. as a contrast, Bioshock and Bioshock Infinite are both critically-acclaimed games that focus heavily on pessimistically explaining how choices in games are meaningless, even focusing the entire narrative in Infinite on how this nihilistic view manifests as the protagonist's doomed destiny. a big gimmick in the first Bioshock has you blindly following instructions by someone you don't know is manipulating you until it's too late, but... it doesn't offer any alternative. you were never able to ignore those instructions, so i don't really think it gets any real point across. in Bioshock Infinite, a major theme of the game is the concept of choice and whether or not you have a say in anything you do. the final point is "no, your choices will never matter in a video game." and, sorry, Ken Levine, but Undertale has entirely disproven that thesis just by existing. same for any number of games, like the Zero Escape series or any other elaborately branching visual novel. choice requires a LOT of extra development work in a game, and Bioshock may have been better off speaking to the realities of how hard it is to work meaningful branching paths into games with limited budgets and hurried production schedules. i think it was irresponsible or just naive to imply that it couldn't be done. Undertale is ultimately ABOUT games and it wants us to think about why we're making the choices we make. it does this while also actually offering you a real choice that will absolutely affect your ultimate experience in tangible, satisfying ways! it's also doing a lot of other crazy stuff you may or may not like, but that core thesis is a big part of why it took off the way it did. |
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the Souls games are interested in crafting finely-tuned action-RPG gameplay above all else, but they also rely heavily on aesthetic and lore to *reinforce* those gameplay choices. these are punishing games where you'll die constantly and be forced to adapt to relentless enemies and geography. there are brief cutscenes and boss intros, but overall you're dropped into these worlds with very little information and you're not expected to learn too much more unless you really want to go digging. that's not to say the story isn't THERE - in fact, the volume of lore in these games usually stretches far beyond the entire narrative of most other games. even if you never seek it out, you'll see the proof of the story everywhere you look. these worlds are LIVED-IN, and the lore pokes its head out via the environments, boss designs, and general aesthetic. it's all opt-in, except it's also an inescapable blanket. and best of all? in Dark Souls, the lore always *complements* the gameplay. here, the worlds and their inhabitants are just as unforgiving and punishing as the gameplay. there's a harmony going on there that really makes everything come alive, a great pairing of tone and gameplay. for the reverse effect, see Celeste: it's a difficult platformer that wants to cheerily *encourage* you to keep going. the twee cutscenes and colorful aesthetic serve to hammer that home: "don't give up! keep trying!" these games understand how much world and aesthetic can inform and augment gameplay - their art teams are in perfect concert with their gameplay designers. and this marriage doesn't have to be harmonious - think of all the ways *dissonance* between aesthetic and gameplay can be interesting, or even unsettling. |
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- Kentucky Route Zero (clever interactivity in a visual novel/text adventure format) - Mother 3 (the finale weaponizes established game mechanics in an unexpected way in an attempt to emotionally devastate you) - Bit Trip Saga (a series of arcade-style games where each entry is designed to have the specific mechanics communicate ideas about life) - Shadow of the Colossus (a much more beautiful and effective take on Bioshock's toothless "ha ha ha you did exactly what we asked and now it sucks for you!") - Metroid Fusion (flips the franchise's established power fantasy on its head by making your fully-powered suit from the previous game into the overpowered antagonist) - the bit in MGSV where your soldiers get sick - all of Outer Wilds and Obra Dinn: both perfectly marrying puzzle game mechanics and storytelling of course, almost all of the above examples are from bigger AAA or indie developers; for the truly exciting innovations in game narrative, try scouring itch.io. bigger budgets dissuade experimenting and so the innovation mostly gets left to the more-invisible indie crowd, often coming up with amazing ideas years before they appear in blockbuster games. if this is an art form you care about, you should never let them go unsung!!! |
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thank you for reading |