A version of this article first appeared in the January 2011 issue of Game Developer magazine.

Unlike what video game detractors might tell you, story and narrative are a huge part of the art and science of building interactive entertainment.  Nearly all games have some level of storytelling in them.  What is more fascinating to me as a designer is how wildly different the usage of it from genre to genre, and even within that genre from game to game.

This is, of course, quite different from most other media – most fiction, be it murder mysteries, cop shows, blockbuster movies or even Saturday morning cartoons, are deeply and intuitively narrative driven (although, of course, the quality of it can vary wildly).  Not so with video games.  Nearly every game leverages narrative in a way, to a different degree, to different results.

Some games (such as those of Bioware, my studio) make story central, whereas others use it as a mere backdrop.  Most triple-AAA titles opt for a middle path – having a simple (but sometimes powerful) story that creates a sense of place and purpose.  These designs never forget that gameplay is king, and story should only be pushed so far as to support those ends.

Story is perhaps the most flexible tool in the designer’s toolbox, and as such, use of story in games can take wildly divergent approaches.  This is one of the reasons that making rules about narrative in games can be so difficult – the approach and focus given to story is going to wildly adjust how the designer needs to approach it.  Is the story merely a backdrop to the action, or is it core to the player’s activity?  Can the player adjust the flow of the story, or is he merely along for the ride?  Does your design require the player to pay attention to the story, or is it merely there for color?  All of these things are central to how the story, and the player’s interactions with the story, must be constructed.

This is all complicated by the fact that telling stories in games is hard for a lot of reasons.  Designers don’t have control over the flow or cadence of the experience.  Games are long, so long it can be hard for players to keep track of the narrative, especially if they walk away from the experience for a while.  And despite the fact that players always claim to want more and better stories, inartfully trying to cram it down their throat is more likely to bore or confuse them – care needs to be taken to present the story to them in a manner and pace conducive to the rest of their game environment.  What that manner is will vary wildly based on the game you’re trying to make.

Narrative as Backdrop

Most games have at least the minimum level of story, which is the narrative backdrop.  For some games, especially multiplayer games, this might be all of the story that a player encounters games.  The depth of these backdrops varies wildly from game to game, and often only serve to give the game some grounding – board games like Dominion and Settlers of Catan both have backstories in the rules that are only a couple of paragraphs long meant to ground the player experience, and the players will rarely give them a second thought.

Backdrops can be much deeper and more involved, though: the MMO Shadowbane had backstory of astonishing depth. Reams and reams of lore of every available aspect of the fantasy world was on the web site for players to discover.  Little of it was to be found in-game, other than the handful of players who used this lore to roleplay – most players appreciated the depth, but were more interested in the game’s siege mechanics.  Using a backstory-centric approach to narrative is common in MMOs, as most MMOs are not well suited to presenting a sense of change and history, especially in a world with a few thousand protagonists all trying to change it.

The deepest backstories in games come from licensed ones.   Arkham Asylum and Force: Unleashed have decades of material to draw from and, in both cases, designers worked hard to ensure that they drew on commonly recognized elements recognized by casual fans as well as Easter eggs to cater to the hardcore.  In a licensed project, perhaps no application of story is more important, and when reviewers state Arkham Asylum really brings Batman’s world to life, or that Force Unleashed captures the far reaches of the Star Wars universe, you have a good understanding why these games succeeded.

Narrative as Plot Propellant

Most games described as having great stories (such as Starcraft, Half-Life and Uncharted 2) go beyond a backdrop and instead, provide a narrative for which the player is expected to play the role of the protagonist.  These stories provide a framework for the missions of the game, and an explanation for why the player is doing what he’s doing, why he’s visiting the locales he’s visiting, and an explanation for why things are getting progressively harder and more urgent.

In this regard, stories also provide continual rewards for the player.  Completing a map in Psychonauts or Uncharted 2 gives the player a cutscene that progresses the narrative, but with charming characters and witty dialogue that makes the player want to progress to the next cutscene and get the next narrative Scooby Snack. Stories done in this manner with this goal can have well fleshed out characters who experience growth, witty banter, as well as a sense of mystery and the occasional twist.  Or the narrative can be whittled down to nothing but the reward, as it is in Rock Band:  you’ve been rocking the Casbah, so now you get a private jet.

The narrative as propellant concept is not just for the triple-AAA games.  Diner Dash similarly does this, and Puzzle Quest’s narrative and RPG is a core reason why that game differentiated itself from other match-3 puzzlers.  Story is also a key design focus of the Facebook game Frontierville, and one of the reasons the game separated itself from the pack.  Expect story to hit Facebook game design in a big way over the next year.

Narrative to Build Emotional Connection

Baldur’s Gate was released more than a decade ago, so you can forgive most players if they forget the finer details of the story.  However, few players who played Baldur’s Gate would soon forget Minsc and his space hamster, Boo.  In not just games but TV and movies as well, the characters navigating the narrative are at least as, if not more, important than the twists and turns of the story itself.

In most video games, the main character is designed to be somewhat of a blank slate, so that the player can more readily see himself in that role, taking part in the narrative.  This raises the importance of the auxiliary characters: Minsc and Boo, or Chloe in Uncharted 2, or even the squadmates in Bad Company or the little sisters in Bioshock.  These characters and companions add personality and warmth to the game experience, give emotional cues on how the player should feel and, perhaps most significantly once you like them, give the designer something in the narrative that the player has an emotional investment in.

Most screenwriters accept as dogma that audiences are more biased towards saving a loved one than a world – in their hearts, they would choose saving Lois Lane over a nameless, faceless Metropolis everytime.  This is probably merely a triumph of heart over head audiences want in our escapist fantasy, but it is something that can be manipulated by the designer in order to increase personal investment into the game.  Rescuing the princess is one thing – rescuing your love interest is quite another.  And spoilers alert, but would anyone be talking about the story of Final Fantasy VII if it wasn’t for the death of Aeris?  Or talking about the  story in Starcraft if not for the capture of Kerrigan?

Narrative as Explanation

It turns out that the world of Might and Magic is not a fantasy world.  Not to spoil the story for those who were really hoping to back and play Dark Side of Xeen someday, but according to the first Might and Magic. these worlds were all giant terrariums  hurtling through the void for some cosmic purpose.

A nifty upside of this science-fiction backstory allowed for robot bosses and laser rifles at the endgame, but the real reason for was much simpler: the tech for the first Might and Magic was grid-based at the core, and designer Jon Van Canegham wanted an explanation as to why the world was perfectly square and had an impassable barrier on all sides.  In this instance, he saw story as design spackle, suited for covering up game elements that were nonsensical and inconvenient.

Story used in this fashion is an incredibly useful design tool, but the designer should be wary about going too far and instead drawing attention to what you had hoped to hide.  When Knights of the Old Republic was in the early design stages, they recognized early on that the walk back to your ship was killing their game flow.  Their first pass design to solve the problem called for a ‘call speeder’ button that summoned a speeder bike to where the player was, animated the player getting on it, and then teleported the player to his starship after a fade-to-black.  The feature raised more questions than it answered – why isn’t a player riding a speeder all the time?  Where did it come from?  Why can it be summoned anywhere?  The designers killed the long, convoluted idea and changed the button to a simpler ‘return to ship’.  By handwaving away the explanation, the designers drew less attention to what was an important but incongruent feature.

Narrative as Player Agency

Last, but not least, we have the game’s narrative acting as the primary means of a player’s agency – the player makes choices within the game that dramatically affect the outcome of the game’s narrative.  This is, of course, the bread and butter of the game design behind Bioware games like Dragon Age and Mass Effect.  The intricacies of designing these are fascinating, and well worthy of their own discussion – so we’ll talk about them next month.