Perth festival: Narrative is becoming more important to the gaming experience, with writers arguing that they take interactivity to a whole new level

“Story in a game is like story in a porn movie: it’s expected to be there, but it’s not that important.” John Carmack, founder of ID Software and creator of Doom and Quake, said that back in 2003, and for many games designers it still rings true. The pure, unalloyed joy of shooting a man in the face is presumed compelling enough to satisfy the player – even when stripped of the reasons for the shooting and the identities of the shooter and the shot.



But for other games-makers, writing is increasingly seen as an essential component of a good game. “The idea of having [story] separate from the design is not constructive and that it holds us back,” argues Clint Hocking, writer of Far Cry 2 and Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory. “We haven’t fully understood the way the medium works, or what we’re trying to accomplish with it.”

Gameplay and story have traditionally occupied the player’s attention using a timeshare model; gameplay forms the meat of the experience as players test their physical and mental skills, and narrative is often delivered in cut-scenes that nestle between the action sequences.

As a result, the two often don’t quite match up – even when it comes to critically acclaimed works. Take the globe-hopping, characterful tales of archaeological adventure spun by the Uncharted series, for instance, and marry them with the fact that the body count racked up by chisel-jawed charismatic frontman Nathan Drake must now rank somewhere in the thousands. Or 2013’s Bioshock: Infinite’s sumptuous world, fascinating plot and metaplot – and its series of nonsensical gunfights augmented by mad-science superpowers.



So how to better integrate story and gameplay, and reduce the number of titles that contain barely related action sequences? Hocking suggests a daring approach to change: “I don’t think that incremental is necessarily best. I think we need more revolutionary and more aggressive approaches to try and tackle these problems. We need to take bigger risks in order to succeed.”

The revolutionary approach, however, might not always be popular. There was an outcry in 2012 when Bioware writer Jennifer Hepler suggested that she would like to see a “skip game” button in the manner of a “skip cutscene” button. Why, some commenters argued, would you make a game that you could bypass? What would be the point?

Hocking still believes in being bold. “We should just start making games that are about narrative ideas instead of games that are about, say, shooting or jumping or flying or driving,” he says.



That presents a challenge because the games industry has for years invested in capturing performance and voice, and then rendering it so that games characters behave as they would in a film. “It’s really hard to imagine a world where – for example – we generate what characters say in runtime based on sentences that are constructed out of giant databases of written material … because then those characters would talk like Siri,” says Hocking.

“That would be a big blow for us, because right now all of our characters talk like actors in a motion picture. But, in reality, our graphics aren’t all that much better than Siri – as a visual equivalent. We just don’t think of it that way.”



Guy Gadney’s new project, The Suspect, gets round that problem by using chat and instant messaging as storytelling devices. Players interrogate an AI suspect, accused of murder, attempting to make him give up information by typing dialogue directly into the game.



“The conversation is the game – it’s not the video in-between levels that you’ll skip because you want to keep on going,” said Gadney, executive director of Sydney-based interactive storytellers The Project Factory.

The idea of free-text isn’t revolutionary, of course – point-and-click games have been doing it for decades – but to implement it in such a focused way, combined with this in-depth narrative, seems fresh.

“It’s an experiment I’ve wanted to do for many years,” Gadney says. “It’s very complicated – it’s not like writing a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure with multiple narratives; you’re writing for algorithms. You’re writing for artificial intelligence. You’re writing in multiple layers of what the player may or may not say – there’s a lot of writing that’s going to be redundant. It’s highly experimental, but that’s what we like.”



The Suspect’s combination of story and gameplay, developed from the ground up so the two are inextricably intertwined, seems a step forward for writers. “Really good writers are able to create universes and characters and hold them in their minds,” says Gadney. “But rather than the writer finding that thread through the world and then writing it down as a formulaic linear narrative, I’m saying to them: give me your universe.”

Hocking believes that there is a market for narrative games that spontaneously generate stories according to the way they are being played. “You’ll see people who play a game that’s full of noble knights and great heroes and self-sacrifice. You’ll see people who play Game of Thrones and it’s all about weak people and cowards and horrible betrayal and disgusting murder. It’ll be the same game,” he says.

Gadney recognises the shift in the industry, too. “I hope we are entering a stage, now, where writing shifts from being a monologue to a dialogue … That’s where I think people are starting to head.”



The result will be a game that responds to the player. Hocking gives the example of Street Fighter 2 – where the game will react to the way you are playing it. “If we had that not in the form of kicks and punches, but in the form of reversals and betrayals, and confidences and trust and all of the kinds of things we think about in human relationships instead of in human fist-fighting, we would be able to amaze people.”

• Clint Hocking and Guy Gadney are appearing at Perth Writers Festival on 22 February as part of a series of discussions about games that include The Game Changers: Character and Story and The Game Changers: The Writer and the Game.