Games & Writing: The New Frontier Of Narrative (and why EA should be ashamed)

Writing and games have always made for strange, difficult bedfellows.  Chances are, if you're not on the side of those who see games as a new art form, ripe for retelling old stories and telling new ones, then you're on the opposing side, believing that games aren't about storytelling so much as having fun.

Of course, you're both wrong.

Its taken a lot of thought and a fair bit of reading to get my head around how games can work as a new medium - and even more to find a way of explaining it.

The key is in the term "storytelling".  This is a bad word to use with games.

To understand why, we have to look at a brief history of the word.

In the days before the advent of written word and the printing press, "storytelling" was the literal telling of a story from one person to another.  This is the purest form of "narrative", being an orally narrated story.  The written word was a natural extension of this, offering twists on the concept of a narrative (1st person, 3rd person, etc) but still always narrating a story to a (hopefully) fascinated reader.

Then there's the staged performance of stories - plays, operas, etc, and later cinema.  For the most part, these were without a narrator - instead, people were seeing the narrative actually come to life by itself.  Now, the defined meaning of "narrative" and "storytelling" are called into question.  Could there really be a narrative without a narrator?  Is the story really being told, or is this a form of "story-showing"?  They bring more to the table than written or spoken word do, and what they bring with them muddies the waters of definitions for things that were defined back then.

Now we can extend this to today, and look at the mysterious murky world of interactivity that we call games.  Whether we view games as an extension of cinematic narrative or as something entirely separate, they undoubtedly bring more to the table and muddy the waters of definition further.  As cinema was a visual medium that worked best when making use of what it could do - visual metaphor, direction and misdirection, giving us a more visceral experience than the written word ever could - games are an interactive media, and as such the key to making use of them is to look at what interactivity involves and what that means; just as cinema changed narrative from "storytelling" to "story-showing", games have moved the world of narrative from "story-showing" to "story-experiencing".

So games let us experience a story in a deeper way than cinema, performance, written word or oral world - but what does that actually mean, and how do we exploit it?  To put it another way - what the hell is this blog trying to say?

My point is this: while we keep tacking cinematic stories onto tried & tested game formats, turning out the same old control systems and gameplay experiences with new plots and characters, we're not going to achieve what games are supposed to be all about.  We have to be looking at the overall experience and feel of a situation, and how a game can let us be drawn into and experience that, rather than tacking cinematics onto an action sequence and calling it a story.

Case in point: EA's Dante's Inferno game.  The key element of this tale was that it took the form of a cautionary, allegorical tale about the dangers of life.  While a visual portrayal of the demons and punishments Dante watched on his journey might offer a more visceral, moving metaphor than the text itself  - perhaps sacrificing some of the deep reflection and the thoughts of Dante's character in order to give a more instant shock and revulsion - the experience of Dante wandering these lands is one of questioning, and reflection on life - at times filled with fear, other times revulsion and other times sorrow for the poor souls trapped, facing an eternity of torture for their sins.

So EA made it look like God Of War.

*slow clap*

Now, I'm not a professional games designer, so I won't claim I have all the answers, but I think I've proved here that games can serve a purpose in a sort-of narrative, sort-of storytelling way, so the opportunity to adapt one of the greatest texts of all time ought to be a chance for games to really shine and be elevated above the mire of mindless action games with paper-thin characters.  This was our chance to truly experience what Dante did, to be forced to reflect upon all he did - the nature of sin, existence and punishment - and to be reviled, disgusted and yet intrigued, and - hopefully - to come away, as Dante did, a changed man.  There's no reason why Dante's Inferno (the 9 levels of hell) could not be followed by its (less visually spectacular) sequels Puragatorio (moving through purgatory, where souls sat out penance for their minor sins) and Paradiso (the final spirals of heaven, leading up to face God himself and receive The Answer).

So I guess there are two points I'm trying to make here:

#1: Games have a very important place in the sphere of all things narrative related, and could offer a new and exciting experience as long as we stop both treating them as nothing but a cheap thrill, and comparing them to other, incompatible media such as cinema or written word

and

#2: Fuck you EA.

No, really.

FUCK YOU.