Great gameplay writes its own stories
I’ve had a lot of great conversations recently with friends about Gabrielle Zevin’s wonderful novel Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow. The book focuses on narrative-driven games, and offers a thoughtful analysis of the relationship between stories and games. This makes sense, because Zevin is a storyteller. But it felt incomplete to me. As I discussed with friends, we talked about games as vehicles for storytelling, and it felt like we were omitting the really profound element of Emergent Narrative, which is what makes games so special.
In their seminal textbook Rules of Play, Katie Salen Tekinbaş and Eric Zimmerman distinguish between two types of narrative in games:
Embedded Narrative: pre-generated narrative content that exists prior to a player’s interaction with the game
Emergent Narrative: unscripted stories that naturally emerge from gameplay
Embedded Narrative
This is Zevin’s concept of games as vehicles for storytelling. Great video games like The Last of Us, The Witcher 3, or Gone Home tell Hollywood stories, and do so with skill and taste. Board games like T.I.M.E. Stories and Gloomhaven incorporate written narrative into gameplay to give players objectives and flavor. Many other games contain lore and backstory that can be largely ignored.
Broadly speaking, games do a poor job of this kind of storytelling. For every The Last of Us, there are dozens of games with half-baked, poorly written stories that fail to enhance and integrate with the gameplay. This is probably because games are made by game designers, not writers. And writing is hard!
But gamers don’t really care about the lack of good embedded stories in games. Why? Because gameplay is king, and will always be more important than Embedded Narrative. If The Witcher 3 had subpar gameplay, we wouldn’t care about how good the story is. Terrible storytelling does not detract from excellent gameplay (see: Neon White, Dark Souls), and neither does the complete absence of storytelling (see: Wingspan, Chess, most board games).
Embedded Narratives are nice to have when they are good, but they are rarely good. And they are unnecessary.
Emergent Narrative
Many media forms can tell stories: prose, poetry, visual art, games, etc. The unique, profound power of games is their ability to generate stories. Emergent Narratives are not scripted by writers – they are a natural consequence of gameplay, and have uncertain outcomes. Great gameplay inevitably causes great stories to exist, because games are interactive, emergent systems.
A few examples:
Basketball has no embedded narrative but creates extraordinary stories (an underdog team hits 10 shots in a row to complete an epic 4th quarter comeback) and meta stories (Lebron returns triumphantly to Cleveland to win a championship and right his wrongs). On Rick and Morty, Rick says that sports are “the opposite of story” and he really couldn’t be more wrong. Look no further than the multi-billion dollar industry of sports journalism, or ESPN’s phenomenal 30 for 30 series for evidence.
The first day I played Elden Ring, I stumbled into an innocuous trap that transported me to a dangerous, far away corner of the game’s enormous map. Confused and bewildered, ill equipped for this level of danger, I slowly struggled through terrifying enemies and a dozen deaths to finally escape the cave I was in, and exit into new territory. That story – a story with no script, a story driven by my own choices and experience, and a story that most other players didn’t even experience for themselves – was infinitely more memorable and meaningful than any of the Embedded Narrative in Elden Ring.
We intentionally chose to put no Embedded Narrative into our game Pecking Order. However, my friend group can’t stop telling Pecking Order stories: stories of betrayal, mischief, intrigue, lies, trickery, comebacks, petty vengeance, hilarious spectacle, etc. It actually got to a point where we needed to put a moratorium on telling Pecking Order stories at parties, because people who hadn’t played were getting annoyed. It’s difficult to imagine having written a story so good for this game that our friends would be talking about it years later. But the stories we’ve created through gameplay have left an undeniable mark on all of us.
Good games are story-generating machines. And the most powerful stories in games are not the ones scripted by writers.