Storytelling in Games: Part 1 - The Past and Present

Book sales are in decline; cinema queues are thinning; the art of the tweet is on the rise. Video games, like many emerging forms of digital entertainment, are the latest indicator that the way we consume media is changing. We want different things from our entertainment these days. Humanity is starting to move away from passive forms of recreation – instead opting to 'lean-in', participate and shape their experience.

This interactivity poses a lot of challenges for game designers – and game writers are on the very front line, crafting tales that give you weeks of well paced, though-provoking entertainment, rather than a disposable hour or two in a cinema chair.

IGN Australia approached some of the biggest, most established game development studios in the world to pick their collective brains about the past, present and future of storytelling in games. We'll be presenting their thoughts across three features. Our deepest thanks to these excellent contributions from the minds at Bioware, Quantic Dreams, Treyarch, Team ICO, Irrational, Media Molecule and many others.

IGN: How has storytelling in video games matured over the last decade or so? Has it matured?

Radical Entertainment - Matt Armstrong, Design Director:
Storytelling in games has definitely matured as developers have started to get a better understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of games as a storytelling medium. There was a time when there was a very strong separation of church and state between cinematics and gameplay - the cinematics told the story and then the player played the game and that was just how it was. In the last ten years, however, we've seen a very clear drive towards unifying both areas with a view to creating a form of storytelling that is unique to gaming.

Valve has actually been one of the chief vanguards of this shift, with the Half-Life and Portal games telling genuinely immersive and emotionally involving stories without recourse to a single cutscene. You see something very similar in the Call of Duty series where Infinity Ward and Treyarch have worked hard to bring the telling of the story into the game world and have the player actively "experience" the story as they're playing the game, rather than just being shown the story during the downtime between missions. This is incredibly exciting because we're finally starting to see games establish an entirely unique style of storytelling, as opposed to simply taking their cues from movies and working within the inherent limitations of the medium.

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Ubisoft Montreal - Richard Rouse III, Narrative Director:
I think it has, even if it hasn't exactly been a revolution. I think there have been great game stories told through the history of the medium, but the way we tell stories and the types of stories we`re telling has changed significantly. Certainly it's hard to compare storytelling in Infocom games to something like Portal.

One of the most pleasing developments to me is developers realizing that cut-scenes do not need to be the primary means of telling a game story. Cut-scenes to me still feel like something we`ve just ripped off wholesale from another medium, and they don't play to our strengths. And now that our game worlds look so amazing, we can tell a lot of that story through the environment, through the characters that you actually play with as opposed to ones who are pre-rendered in a cinematic.

The Valve games or BioShock or Modern Warfare show how you can pull off a lot without ever having to yank player control a way. Even the Uncharted titles or the modern Prince of Persia games do a lot of good cut-scenes, but also tell a lot of their story through game play, through the environment, through characters that you spend time with as you play. As we've gotten smarter about cut-scene use, it feels like we`re coming into our own instead of wishing we were working on movies instead.

Ubisoft Montreal - Kevin Shortt, Story Designer:
Certainly it's matured. I think the major shift has been a gradual recognition by the game industry that storytelling is a vital ingredient of any gaming experience. Rockstar had a big hand in that with GTA – particularly GTA: San Andreas. They started devoting a lot of effort into the characters they created for their games…characters with genuine personalities that didn't come from Saturday morning cartoons, and gamers loved it.

We're reaching a point where players want deeper experiences. As the game worlds grow richer and more detailed, we expect the same from our characters and our adventure. Whereas there were just a handful of stories worth noting a decade ago, now we can look to several games each year that have compelling stories and characters drawing us in.

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BioWare - Casey Hudson, Executive Producer:
Storytelling in video games has definitely matured a lot in the last decade. One way to look at the maturity of a medium is to look at how well the content makes use of the unique aspects of the experience. Just like early movies had not yet developed the sophisticated language of cinematic storytelling, early games had neither the features nor the content to really weave the emotional impact of great storytelling with the interactivity of the medium. And with games, interactivity is the core of the experience. The best contemporary videogames are doing really interesting things to bring storytelling subtleties and emotion into the interactivity.

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Eurocom - Rob Matthews, Project Manager:
I think if you look back over the last 10-15 years, there has been a growing appreciation for engaging stories and our industry will continue to mature, both in the stories we tell and the techniques we use.

I also feel that as an industry we've broadened our horizons to include a wider spectrum of art forms alongside film and television as a source of inspiration, we still suffer from tunnel vision at times but I'm optimistic for the future.

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Team ICO - Fumito Ueda, Director and Lead Designer:
I don't think storytelling in video games has matured so much in the last decade. Currently there are two techniques of storytelling. The first is to communicate story to the audience in an organic way (text -> voice -> visual information such as acting). The second is to restrict the amount of information you provide to the audience like Japanese Haiku, and leave the rest to the audience's imagination. Both of these techniques were used in ICO and Shadow of the Colossus that I produced.

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Guerrilla Games - Jan-Bart van Beek, Art Director:
It has matured much more than most people realise. This decade has been the decade of games like Ico, Half-Life 2, Uncharted 2, as well as some of the best RPGs in gaming history. Some gamers have melancholic views of games from the 90's and 80's, as if those were somehow highlights in the short history of videogames.

Of course brilliant games have been made in those days, some featuring not only excellent gameplay, but also good characters and the best graphics of the day. But games start showing their age very, very quickly. In your memory some of those stories may stand out, but if you would replay them again, chances are you be cringing through them all the way. Partially this has to do with the ever rising quality standards within the industry for the top triple-A titles, but it also has to do with a maturing audience that has become very critical of the games they play.

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High Moon Studios - Matt Tieger, Game Director:
As an industry, I do think things have improved. Players get to actively participate in many story critical game events, but we still haven't universally cracked the emotional motivation behind those actions.

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2K Marin - Ken Levine, Creative Director:
I've got a bit of a biased viewpoint here. I think of the medium's maturity as maturing, as it relates to doing things that the gaming media does well exclusively. I'm not as interested in doing something as well as some movie or TV show does, because then why aren't we just watching a movie or TV show? So, yes, we are much better now than we were ten years ago in telling stories OUTSIDE of cut scenes.

2K Marin - Jack Scalici, Director of Production
I still consider a couple of 10+ year old games as having some of the best storytelling I've experienced in any medium, so somebody must have been doing something right back then. I think what has matured is the industry's overall attitude toward storytelling. 10 years ago, it felt like very few companies were even trying. Today, story is no longer an afterthought, and developers finally have people on staff whose only job it is to make sure the story shines… or at least doesn't suck.

What has really matured is the technology. The storytelling tools at our disposal today are far superior to what we had 10 years ago. 10 years ago if you wanted to create an emotionally impactful scene featuring human characters, you had to hire an animation studio to produce it over the course of a few months, and for a ton of money. Now we do it all in the game engine, in a matter of weeks.

We typically look to professional voice talent to bring our stories to life, and I can tell you that actors take games a lot more seriously than they did 10 years ago. A lot of the actors I work with today grew up playing games, so they're often instantly familiar with what we're trying to achieve. You would be truly amazed at how difficult it is for an actor who has never played a game to correctly perform the ubiquitous videogame line "grenade out!"

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Media Molecule - Mark Healey, Co-founder:
Well, I'm not sure I have a good overview, as I don't actually play many games these days, especially long sprawling games with intricate tales to tell. I much prefer casual games, but from what I do know about, it's probably fair to say it has matured, but not that much. Heavy Rain stands out in my mind – that's the first time I've played a game and felt I was playing a role in a movie – but even stories told in movies with actors and scripts are quite often poor descendants of a book – which is the best medium in my opinion for really good stories. I recently started playing a point and click adventure game called 'The Dream Machine' – and have to say that really has me gripped. There seems to be a cool story unfolding in that, but I haven't got that far into it yet.

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Platinum Games - Atsushi Inaba, Producer:
Video games are a medium that allows the creators' control over players' emotions. Stories were not of great importance to older games, but much higher-level experiences are expected today -- the demand for growth in this area has expanded rapidly. I wouldn't call the current level of maturity in video game storytelling ideal; in fact, I think an even higher level of quality will be demanded in the future.

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Quantic Dream - David Cage, Founder:
I don't think that storytelling in games has matured over the last decade. There are many reasons for this: the first one is that video games are still exclusively based on physical actions, whether it is shooting someone, destroying something or jumping on a platform. No decent story can be told where the hero can only do ten basic physical actions.

Games also very often take B-movies and blockbusters as their main reference, which is certainly not ideal in regards to storytelling. Very few people explore drama seriously, or comedy or tragedy, genres that would not work with the current limitations of games but constitute the essence of a good narrative.

In fact, the other reason why storytelling has not matured is because few people value it. Publishers think it is not important as long as there are enough weapons and enemies, some gamers think it is a "nice to have" but not a necessary feature. I think this is really a mistake.

We also have an issue with authors. We usually prefer to deal with programmers than writers, because we feel they are more "under control". An author may come back with an idea, which could definitely be an issue… What matters is what you tell and what the audience feels, much more than how many particles you can display in a frame.

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Telltale Games - Dave Grossman, Senior Designer
Studios are getting pretty good at creating a mood, backing it up with both presentational elements and gameplay. The characters you see on screen are better actors, at least physically and facially speaking. And designers are thinking increasingly in terms of fancy literary concepts like Narrative Structure, Context, Subtext, Theme, even Metaphor. Metaphor! There's a lot more to good storytelling, and plenty that we're not doing very well yet, but these things excite me nonetheless.

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Treyarch - Dave Anthony, VP of Production:
I believe the most significant stride is in the realization of a consistent believable performance. Until the last few years there would likely be a jarring transition between the game world and a video sequence. Nowadays in-game graphics are rendered so realistically, combined with nuance in animation and AAA Hollywood talent performing, it has transformed storytelling to be at least on par with what mainstream movies have to offer.

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Visceral Games - Steve Papoutsis, Executive Producer:
As gaming systems have advanced so has the ability for game developers to tell stories. Back in the day games would have text that popped up to tell the player what was happening. Now we have full VO, full facial and body motion capture, and surround sound, not to mention the amazing visuals teams are able to create. These elements have allowed game makers to dig deeper into narrative and really start delivering compelling stories.