Article written by Rory Hawkins.
When it comes to characterisation and plot, books will never be surpassed by any other creative medium. In reading, narrative turns into digestible human experience. Even put through radio, audiobooks or eBooks, nothing can replace the pages between your fingers. But what these do prove is how writing can be transformed with our use of technology.
Film and TV are an easy example; make descriptions into people and places that the audience can see and hear. Writing can make or break what’s on the screen, but in the end it just has to make sense visually. Plot has to be carried by characters we see talking. Characters have to be memorable by what they look like, how we see them interact with others. And then it all has to fall within a realistic watch time.
Just look at HBO’s Game of Thrones – when the cast was gargantuan, most viewers only distinguished between characters with descriptions like “she’s got dragons” or “he’s really mopey”. Maybe they still do. Meanwhile, A Song of Ice and Fire has the time to establish more about the world, and the people in it.
But books and film aside, I think it’s the writing in video games that treads the space between them. Video games can maintain the visual allure of a Hollywood film, whilst still carrying the time and backstory to build a more compelling world and characters. Triple-A gaming titles boast 50+ hours of content – and a great deal of that has to be around story, even only to justify that amount of time!
So why is this relevant to the Literature section? Well, it is a form of story-telling, once primarily written word now with a bunch more enticing mechanics. The stories told in video games today are just an evolution of the “Text Adventure” games that started in the 70s.
Zork 1 (1981) is one of the most acclaimed text adventure games of its time.
The name “Text Adventure” is pretty self-explanatory. The program writes out your surroundings and waits for you to write out an action in response. Interactive narrative like this was very popular with fantasy novel communities in its time – Tolkien’s The Hobbit and Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy both have text adventure adaptations.
Back then, programming could only manage much simpler activities. You either had the likes of Zork to tell a story or Space Invaders (1978) as an activity in pixels. Video games weren’t advanced enough for narrative (without any supplementary media to explain them) until the 90s. With how well-off the industry is now, the two concepts of games have been joined to varying degrees.
This argument’s already been done to death, but there’s still plenty of debate online as to whether or not a story or writing should be necessary in a game. Because video games can be such a weird mix of different media, should story be important? How much of a priority is it over other aspects, such as graphic design or just being fun?
Video games such as The Last of Us, Uncharted, and the recently released God of War all have a massive focus on story and action. A player is limited to only following the forward path the narrative sets out, but how they go about finding out more about the world and approaching challenges is down to them.
There’s other genres of games that do away with any action, in favour of what can be done with the story. Games such as the Telltale series, Dontnod Entertainment’s Life is Strange and a whole genre called visual novels act as point-and-click adventures.
They focus on players’ choice in where the story goes, where to take the adventure and who to make allies or enemies of. Endings can be as varied as the moral choices you make over the course of the game.
The ultimate goal: a meaningful conclusion to the story, one that the player feels they impacted, and reflects a realistic consequence to what they did. But for all the choices, if the writing isn’t good there’s nothing else to hold it up.
I think that without a decent writing and a good narrative, whichever actions you take won’t feel like they have any consequence. And that’s true: it’s just make-belief on a screen. But that doesn’t mean it should take away from the escapism we still use books and movies for.
Watching a film or reading a book, we want to find some small fulfilment in that – even just as a token of time well spent. Video games need to do the same, and I think quality writing is the answer. In the world of the game, there needs to be justified reason for not just the player to do something, but for it to make sense.
Making a narrative into something a person outside of it can influence is something completely different from movies or books. To be taken as a serious form of storytelling, video games need to own it.
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