notes: approach to narrative
In Sword & Sworcery our approach to narrative was fairly specific, focused on the path of particular protagonist, The Scythian, whose identity and motivation was hinted at but kept at a distance. While this wasn't part of the initial concept, the audience's enjoyment was often interrupted by hopefully-intuitive but often oblique progress-stopping puzzles.
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Our intention with narrative this time around is to keep it broad, our focus will be on a group of characters, pilots and pilgrims exploring an unfamiliar world, and while the non-player characters may have specific roles and backgrounds, the player character will be mostly blank. Our goal is to create an interesting, dense world rich in expressive systems and give the audience enough room to shape their experience. While some gatingwill no doubt occur, we'll aim to keep the playspaces wide open. We intend to focus on enjoyable, repeatable activities that will require and reward precision, skill, focus, practice and thoughtful decision-making. There'll be no shortage of puzzling elements to ponder while going about these activities - there'll be mysteries to investigate, hints and clues to uncover... however these puzzling elements will not be placed as obstacles in the audience's path, they'll be woven into the world sparking a player's curiosity and creating intrinsic incentives to look around, discoverable by anyone who has the time and interest.
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On the topic of narrative, we recently had the privilege of creating an illustration for the cover of Austin Grossman's book YOU: A Novel. Austin is a veteran videogame designer and now a published author who got his start at a now legendary videogame company in the early 90s. His credits include well-regarded classics like System Shock, Deus Ex and the more recent and well-received Dishonored. It turns out Austin is a fan of Sword & Sworcery, and his twin brother Lev Grossman, an author and book critic, put it on Time Magazine's 'Top 10 Videogames of 2011' list. It's a bit of a long-shot, but we're hoping to loop Austin in to this project at some point as an advisor and maybe even contributor. YOU is a great book btw, recommended.
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In any case, Austin Grossman's thoughts on how writing and narrative fit into videogames are well worth considering, as they align with our perspective. These are from "Opinion: Videogames Taught Me To Write" an essay by Austin Grossman published at Polygon, we'd recommend reading the whole thing. link
You learn to be inventive. After all, players are using everything on the screen to form an idea of what they're doing and why. You learn to sneak story in at the margins. Leave it lying in dusty corners and layered into other parts of the world, embedded into combat mechanics and level geometry and audio cues, or leave half-cues for players to fill in.
In a video game, words are often the worst way to convey anything. Why say "take the third door on the left" when you can illuminate the correct door, or make the controller shake when you walk near it? Reading is cumbersome, it's abstract and it's slow, and in a medium that uses light, sound and even touch, you have to be conscious of what jobs language does well, and what it doesn't, and video games expose those strengths and weaknesses really well.
You can coax or seduce them along a narrative path, you can create all the affordances and connect all the dots, but ultimately what they're thinking is not up to you.
They come to a piece of art with their own investments, intentions, prejudices and plans. Their story might be wanting to collect every missing coin in the kingdom, or smash everything breakable, or just reach the highest vertical elevation in the game's universe. It may well be something cooler than anything you'll ever come up with. You don't know, but you make a world in which story can appear and take effect, and hope for the best.
From "In Dishonored, Sometimes The Story Is What You Don't See" a post on Kotaku about Austin Grossman's role as a writer on Dishonored, worth reading. link
The beautiful thing about games and novels and films is that you don't tell a story one way. You have a huge tool kit for telling stories. Montage is a tool. Flashback is a tool. First-person is a tool. Third-person is a tool. Environmental storytelling is a tool.
Finally, here's a spot-on tweet from videogame director Hidetaka Miyazaki, known for Dark Souls.
The greatest tool for narrative is the world you create for it to exist in.