Narrative designer Cara Ellison looks at Brothers, Full Throttle, Journey and Half-Life and asks, how exactly do they do this games writing thing so well?

Video game writing is still something of a misunderstood art form. Can’t you just pluck someone out of whatever breeding pool Michael Bay incubates his screen writers in? Surely telling a story is the same in any medium – you just call up some scruffy, caffeine-crazed underfed, and watch them work their dark art on your sprawling epic, right?

Hold your dismissive rhetorical tone, I’d say to me. It’s not quite that simple.



Not all writers have the flexibility to move from one medium to another. The switch from novels to comic books, for example, is one of the most brutal transitions. The Wicked and the Divine writer Kieron Gillen describes a comics script as a “love letter” to the artist, a document designed to woo your illustrator into a trancelike state that makes them want to draw your demented witterings. But it is a love letter that is often split into issues and pages and panels, ruthlessly cut up and structured, which to the long-form fan feels like pinning down your childhood pet and slicing it into neat compartments.

Writing for games is similar, but stranger still. You sometimes write a script for hundreds of people who are trying to help you out. You plot the beginning, middle and end, yet often the story is shaped by a structure that is defined by levels, maps and technological innovation. The “innovation” is not always a new platform, it can be a new design idea that the creator(s) want to show off. Often it’s not even a set of verbs that the game creators have finished experimenting with. The writing job becomes like wrestling some writhing chimera that keeps growing new heads.

With this in mind, here are four games that handle story really well – and how they do it.

Brothers: A Tale Of Two Sons

In this beautiful game by Starbreeze Studios, the design innovation is that you control two young brothers at the same time. A narrative designer’s job is to find ways to demonstrate what that means. When you make those two boys solve problems, cope with hardships, and attempt to address the loss at the centre of their story, what does it mean to the player to have simultaneous control over both? And how can you sculpt their relationship so that your player understands the two characters? How do you say to the player that each brother addresses life differently?

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Brothers: A Tale Of Two Sons Photograph: Starbreeze Studios

Ultimately, one of the best ways that Brothers shows its skill in narrative design is by hardly using words at all. It uses actions – or “verbs”: when the older brother chooses to interact with a person he might help them, when the younger brother interacts with him he might play a trick on them. Both interactions are initiated by the player but defined by character. In the first instance, a player may also feel more warmth toward the older brother, and in the second feel guilt that they allowed the young whippersnapper to trick an old man. You learn to read how your characters will react, and learn to feel attached to them as much as you are responsible for them, because you are employing their verbs.

Journey

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Journey Photograph: Thatgamecompany

In the award-winning adventure from ThatGameCompany, the verbs of the game are always the same: press a button to jump and fly, press a button to sing, get cloth, or light a stone. This makes the story more about what the environment and score tell you: the bright, fizzy sands of the desert fluff up in front of you in the sun, the dark corridors where snake monsters lurk, the freezing, treacle-slow trek up a snow-dredged mountain … these are all emotions. The player feels them just by walking or jumping through the virtual landscape.

In Journey there’s an optional, equally mute co-operative player who may join your experience via internet: sometimes it is a story of tragedy, as the other player leaves you to your lonely doom to go off alone. Or, they might jump and chime to you at every collectible, show you how to hide from every monstrous serpent, join you in the difficult press through the hopeless snow.

Journey’s world is your conductor, the player is an orchestra of one - you slip and staccato through the notes. Journey is more than a beautiful landscape on which you can stick your androgynous fuzzy felt character, and somehow it is simply that too. The story is the world.

Half-Life

Returning to comics, the author Warren Ellis is an exceptional talent at contextualising plot within the opening two or three pages, often merely visually, without signposting it, which is a considerable challenge in video-game world building.

One of the most famous openings to a game is Half-Life, and it’s for a good reason: the team thought about how to introduce the player to a world, and how to make that world both intimidate and dangerous to the player, without having to spend a lot of money on cutscenes. So they put you on a rollercoaster carriage into the dark to show you how messed up commutes get in the near future.

It’s also quite Spielberg-esque in the tension stakes: the player has control over the character’s movement, but the rhetorical effect of being stuck in a moving carriage going into a bunker-like lab full of radioactive slime and automated robots is that you become terrified of the prospect of your own role at the end. You know something is going to go wrong, and the more things you see and hear, the more you just want to know what the heck your verbs are going to be once you get out of the train car. That’s good intro.

Full Throttle

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Full Throttle Photograph: LucasArts

Dialogue can be one of the strongest elements in a game, something that will often save the whole thing from one or two key mistakes in other areas.

The classic LucasArts adventure Full Throttle has one of the best opening lines of any video game ever made:

“Whenever I smell asphalt, I think of Maureen.”

This concise phrase, written by veteran game designer Tim Schafer, does many different things at once. At the mention of asphalt, the player knows they are dealing with characters whose lives are centred around roads. A lesser talent might well have gone for, “I’ve been around roads all my life,” for example, but that’s very boring and obvious. And not funny.

From this line, the player also understands that Maureen is a significant character in the story, perhaps a main character, or a character you must find. And they also understand that Maureen herself is connected to asphalt – a mechanic, a biker, a woman who is the journey itself?

Lastly, it is evocative of road images and sensations: it has a smell, this line, you smell asphalt, you smell what the game wants you to smell, you understand the speaker, whose entire life is asphalt, riding on it, being scraped by it, lying on it, looking at it.

So later, when you hit that literal brick wall-kicking puzzle (you know the one I mean if you’ve played the game) the player forgives it – because the writing is so good, the characters are so strong, the plot is so nicely put together. The writing sells Full Throttle. It’s still one of the only games I remember the ending of. It makes you want to open that next door, brick walls be damned.

In conclusion: understanding the verbs of narrative conflict

So often, the emphasis in video games marketing is on violence system at the core of the product; narrative designers, then, are viewed as the people who sew an emotional stitch through the levels to hold the thing together. But time and time again, players really turn up for the moment in which a story about a character or a world comes to the fore. In the recent smash hit indie game Undertale, for example, the innovation is the twist on the old JRPG battle system: what if, for one moment, you could talk to the monsters? It’s a clever, stylish narrative innovation that masquerades as a nod and a wink.

Shooting is the easiest way to put conflict into a virtual world, but the violence of our everyday lives is (hopefully) not always physical. Sometimes it is the violence of being let down, snuffing out the story we are making for ourselves. Sometimes a bully might hit us with verbal abuse, a good friend might get sick, you might be fired from your job. In life, these are problems that can be solved by a different kind of narrative interaction than merely punching someone in the face – there is room for games to explore that.

Much more can be done in games to give characters the ability to have you fight back - not just with shooting, but with other verbs - talking, solving, finding, making, building, creating, supporting, things that games like Minecraft are centred around. These too can be innovations in the game sphere, and many recent successes, particularly in the indie field, such as Firewatch, use those other verbs. Kindness, resilience, confidence, empathy, social acumen, tact: these can be interesting and fun to learn too.

The Ubisoft developer Liz England once wrote that in a team of game creators your role can be explained by what you do with a virtual door. The narrative designer makes the player want to open the door. In general, life too is about what is going to happen tomorrow, and making sure you want to get there. The door question is much more complex than anyone thinks. It’s a mirror, but you have to make people think it’s a door.