Videogames & Storytelling (Essay)

“Videogames are an under-explored area in academics” (Evans, 2014, p. 1). However, the proliferation of the industry throughout the past two decades and, more specifically, “the vision of the videogame as a storytelling platform” have garnered the attention of various scholars who have recurrently investigated and categorised videogame narrative structures (Picucci, 2014). As videogames have become increasingly challenging and their narratives have evolved to better appeal to the standards of players (Evans, 2004, p.1), they have thus evolved into “multimodal genre experience[s]” (Cășvean, 2018, p. 58) that transcend the limits of other preexisting mediums. Indeed, “literary and film studies now seem at the mercy of videogame developers who are able to achieve creative goals of which authors and filmmakers have only dreamt” (Jones, 2008, p. 20).

To better understand what makes videogames excel at storytelling, one must look no further than the very nature of the medium in itself. “A videogame is a game which we play thanks to an audiovisual apparatus and which can be based on a story” (Esposito, 2005, p. 2). The first two concepts amalgamate into the gameplay, “which is the human element of games as it involves player interaction and game rules” and a major catalyst for the narrative (Evans, 2004, p. 1). Zimmerman describes a game as “a voluntary interactive activity” which follows a set of rules that inevitably enact “an artificial conflict that ends in a quantifiable outcome” (2004; cited in Esposito, 2005, p. 2). Furthermore, videogames evaporate the distance between the player, or gamer, and the media text’s protagonist as it exists in (for instance) books or films (Veale, 2011) thus entrusting the gamer with agency through “the gameplay logic” (Jones, 2008, p. 21) and a subjective, affective-immersive experience (Veale, 2011).

While both these components are at the core of a videogame, this essay is more concerned with the other two components outlined by Esposito. The “audiovisual apparatus” refers to the physical electronic system used by the gamer to interact with the game (Esposito. 2008, p. 3). Impulsed by “the conflict between the quest for cool graphics [versus] the lust for [profit]”, the game industry has progressively developed its various platforms (consoles, computers, mobiles...) alongside the games’ mechanics and design (Veeder et al., 1995, p. 486). However, it is the story, or the videogame’s capability for storytelling, that constitutes the central pillar of this entire industry, and this essay’s object of interest. Therefore, this essay will subsequently explore this concept below, in an effort to ascertain how relevant the potential for storytelling is to videogames altogether. In doing so, this essay must thus consider what storytelling provides to modern videogames and its many forms, whilst addressing some key debates in the field, such as the dichotomy between narratological and ludological approaches.

Diane Carr (et al.) defined a videogame’s story as “the general plot, setting, and action of the game”, which utilises the game’s discourse, or any factor used by the player to advance the storyline, as the foundation for the game’s architecture (2006; cited in Evans, 2014, p. 3). This foundation is not only inherent to videogames, much like the existence of thematic genres that employ the narrative to categorise the many texts produced for a medium. Hence, “videogames use resources from the fertile field of popular culture, exploiting models, pre-worked materials, well-known heroes, stereotypes, and myths” (Cășvean, 2008, p. 57). Cășvean further argues that a videogame’s category thus becomes an identifier, a “playing contract” passed from producers to players that ensures the latter recognise the game’s genre, thus shaping their expectations of what the game will be like and acting as a sort of marketing tactic (2008, p. 58).

These typologies can often be lacking in clear defining criteria, but the industry’s fast-paced developments have “led to an expansion of the genres of videogames and their overlapping '' (Cășvean, 2008, p. 58). The criteria used to classify videogames often refer to qualities such as the number of players, the type of reception or the platform the game uses (Bezchotnikova, 2018), although descriptors relating to the gamer’s experience with the gameplay and narrative are also useful for fully understanding a game. However, as mentioned beforehand, modern videogames have become “multimodal genre experience[s]” and thus games with multiple descriptors and genres complicate the categorising process (Cășvean, 2018, p. 58). Bezchotnikova argues that to solve this, game criticism must focus on the dominant genre, or the game’s constitutional figure (2018). For instance, ‘Halo’ (Bungie, 2001) is simultaneously “an action game” and a first-person shooter (“FPS”) with occasional "third-person” driving and components of “puzzle and strategy” (Aarseth, 2004, p. 363).

As Todorov surmises, "it is not the ‘genres’ that have disappeared, but the genres of the past have been replaced by others" (1976, p. 160; cited in Cășvean, 2008, p. 58).

Nonetheless, a videogame’s narrative themes and genres do not embody the entirety of its storytelling capability alone. In reality, “storytelling has become the art of world building, as artists create compelling environments (...) bigger than the film, bigger even than the franchise” (Boni, 2017, p. 11). Worldbuilding is generally regarded as very relevant to storytelling practices (Ryan, 2013; Lavocat 2010; Besson 2015; Alexander, 2013; cited in Boni, 2017, p. 12) since building and visiting imaginary worlds have always had its place in human history, to the point of serving “an evolutionary purpose” (Wolf, 2012, p. 3). Storytelling in videogames thus combines the world built specifically for them in which a particular story is being told with its narrative, from the perspective of the protagonist who is controlled by the gamer. Subsequently, they are considered to be the ultimate “storytelling platform” (Picucci, 2014).

Puccaci further argues that a game’s architecture is established by intertwining the game’s storytelling and its narrative structures, meaning “the methods and techniques used by game designers and allowed by the medium to deliver the story content throughout the gameplay in collaboration with the players'' (Picucci, 2014). Thus, Picucci (2014) establishes four main frameworks towards understanding how game developers and AI employ narrative structures that shape the game and the player’s experience of it, according to “pre-established narrative structures” (completing checkpoints throughout the game to reveal more story sequences), “discovery narratives” (relying on players to explore the game for more information), “sandbox narratives” (a highly interactive, loosely story-based narrative) and “computer-based narratives” (maximising simulated randomness in the absence of a story). Conclusively, games reconstruct narratives to tell their stories according to these main frameworks which are generally shaped by the producers’ awareness of the medium’s limitations. Said limitations have changed drastically throughout videogames’ existence, expanding the creative possibilities of storytelling in videogames.

The broadening of these creative possibilities has resulted in the emergence of many different modes of storytelling, which differ in the type of space employed by the game, the relationship it forms with the gamer and its outreach or “transmediality”, etc (Thon, 2009, p. 1); thus these modes have become the object of increasing levels of academic attention. On the basis of “spatial storytelling” (Hameed et al., 2018), Fernández-Vara proposes a mode of indexical storytelling inspired by Carson’s concept of environmental storytelling (2000; cited in Fernández-Vara, 2011, p. 3). Whilst environmental storytelling “is infused into the physical space” and requires the player to find and decipher the information throughout the game’s space (Carson, 2000; cited in Fernández-Vara, 2011, p. 3), indexical storytelling creates involuntary stories from the traces left in a game’s environment by either producers or players (Fernández-Vara, 2011). However, modes of storytelling can also be established depending on the player and their experience throughout the game. The increasingly high expectations of players on the freedom allowed by games have fostered interactive storytelling (Delmas et al., 2009), which in turn has evolved “the direct relationship [of players] to the consequences of their actions [in-game]” (Veale, 2011, p. 41). This interactive relationship provides the necessary bases for the player to become fully immersed within the game, enabling them to be subjected to an interaffective mode of storytelling that bestows the player with a responsibility unique to this medium (Veale, 2011). Lastly, there has been much academic meditation on the evolution of digital storytelling as defined by the employed platform, which is integral to the videogame industry (Padilla-Zea et al., 2012). Although, in recent years, “transmedia storytelling” has emerged as a collation of “communicative practices [and] business opportunities for the entertainment and cultural industries” that continuously span multiple platforms and genres (Jenkins, 2003; cited in Sánchez-Mesa et al., 2016, p. 10).

“Transmediality'' signifies one of the most relevant trends in modern media production (Eder, 2015, p. 2). It refers to both the maximisation of content by “giant media conglomerates, [who] ‘stream’ their ‘content’ across as many ‘platforms’ or ‘media’ as possible” and by the participation of fans in the creation of media texts related to a given fictional universe (Eder, 2015, p. 2). Consequently, many modern franchises group media texts that all contribute to the same story but span multiple mediums and texts. For instance, massively popular franchises such as ‘The Matrix’ and ‘Star Wars’, which similarly originated from prominent cinematic texts, grew to encompass “commercially successful computer games'' as well (Thon, 2009, p. 2) thus the full story conveyed in a specific game is often broader than the game’s own horizons. The player must choose whether to engage with the game’s fictional world or to “refuse the invitation and still play the game” (Juul, 2005; cited in Thon, 2009, p. 2). In the case of hugely popular online videogames, for instance ‘Apex Legends’ (Respawn Entertainment, 2019), this transmediality somewhat extends to the “affinity space” surrounding a game, wherein a gamer can “improve their skills within the game [looking up] tutorials online [on Reddit and Youtube and watching livestreams] on Twitch [or] make friends and connections [with other fans on Discord]” (Darras, 2021, p. 17). It can be thus argued that the advancements of the gaming industry have massively evolved the way storytelling takes place, since now stories transcend individual media texts and platforms, even seeping into and being deployed through real-life platforms like social media or the Internet, which are the main sites of fan participation and interaction.

Nevertheless, storytelling cannot be relegated, much like the recent trends in game production and distribution, to just a maximisation of content streamed across a vast diversity of platforms in order to boost media conglomerates’ revenue. The (game’s) story is still unequivocally at the centre of any storytelling purpose or process. Hence, many a scholar has turned to the dichotomy between narratology and ludology, that is a building block of critical gamestudies, in an effort to understand how the now-transmedial constituents of videogames have evolved to better fulfil their social purpose. Firstly, narratology is a scholarship troubled with the study of narrative elements (Mateas et al., 2005) independent of “the medium of representation” (Frasca, 2003, p. 2). Secondly, ludology establishes gameplay, structure, mechanics and game design to be the more relevant aspects to gamestudies (Frasca, 2003). In some games both the narrative and gameplay are intertwined. However, some games “have characters and a story that feel out of step with the actual gameplay” (Nottingham, 2021). For example, ‘Valorant’ (Riot Games, 2020) employs gameplay that involves a tactical 5v5 conflict between attackers and defenders who are mirrored versions of the same playable agents, but this only hints at the two Universes’ worth of significant events and stories held within the game’s lore and overall, transmedia storytelling process. This rift between the narrative and gameplay is what videogame developers call “Narrative Dissonance” (Riot Games Devs, 2021) and it suggests that the average gamer possesses enough media literacy to choose how much of the storytelling process they want to engage with (Juul, 2005; cited in Thon, 2009).

Nevertheless, neither of these scholarships carries more weight than the other in terms of their relevance to gamestudies. Therefore, both a game’s narrative and its gameplay structure are fundamental to build its storytelling capabilities, and narratology and ludology have a symbiotic importance to gamestudies, which is the general consensus to which ludologists seem to have come to in regards to this relevant, yet stale debate (Mateas et al., 2005, p. 2) which “never took place” (Frasca, 2003, p. 1). Indeed, both of these frameworks are also essential towards understanding what videogame storytelling can fully accomplish.

This essay has hence illustrated how storytelling is deployed through videogames and the evolutions, genres and modes of storytelling that span the entirety of the videogaming industry. This can be especially illuminating when attempting to delineate the full capabilities of what videogames can accomplish. Videogames, through forcing a player into a first person perspective of a story, can develop “knowledge acquisition” and further “identity and performance [through] representation” (Shaw, 2010, p. 404), whilst serving as an interaffective immersive medium that greatly fulfils the social need to build worlds that can convey complex stories (Wolf, 2012). Videogames are also a medium that is incredibly adept at depicting or situating stories that span worlds too large for a single media text, in comparison to other mediums like film or literature, lending to a surge of transmediality (Thon, 2009) in recent times and proving again that gamers’ ever-increasing expectations of agency and stories to consume can indeed be met through games with a firmly established architecture. It would seem that videogames are a medium with infinite storytelling capabilities, but this is far from the truth.

Game developers are highly aware of the limitations of their medium (Picucci, 2014), which are determined both by the scope of their project and by the restraints imposed by the technological resources needed to properly develop the vision for their game. Thus, games are developed with specific narrative frameworks and game (spatial) design in mind by the developers (Picucci, 2014), who must create the world the player will inhabit and the way they will interact with it. Therefore, the storytelling capabilities of videogames are not infinite and game design must be detailed and methodical to produce games that are complex, aesthetically pleasing and playable to appeal to the demands of gamers. This is why some games employ “Narrative Dissonance” (Nottingham, 2021) to bridge the gap between the fictional world as the gamer understands it and the reality of what the game developers can produce with the resources at hand. In conclusion, the storytelling capabilities of videogames are not only incredibly relevant to videogames as a medium, since the entire process of game development is both driven by and determined by the characteristics of the story the game will tell; but also to explain why videogames are such a popular, ever-evolving medium at the present time, due to the agency and responsibility they bestow on the player who will form interaffective relationships with gaming texts on account of their immersivity whilst further engaging with the story in gamer affinity spaces (Darras, 2021, p. 17). It is this relationship between the gamer and the game’s story that is unique to the medium, and that ensures that gamers keep consuming gaming texts, thus cementing the validity of gaming as the “storytelling platform” (Picucci, 2014).