Storytelling in Gaming

For Tuesday’s class I attended Seamus Sullivan’s “Dramatic Storytelling” session. Over the course of the session, Sullivan briefed over different tips in building a successful story as relates to video games. He started the session by saying “Every game is a drama – whether simple or complicated.” In order to bring this point home he illustrated with Tetris as a remarkably simple drama, with the player as the main protagonist, and Assassin’s Creed II as a complicated web of narratives inside a larger story with Desmond/Ezio being the protagonist. While I quite enjoyed Sullivan’s expansive description of characters and dialogue, I would challenge him on this introductory point. To make this sweeping generalization about all video games seems to provide a narrow view of gaming. As we’ve read from Ian Bogost, video games can do much more than simply tell a story. If every game is a drama, where would that leave throwaway games, for example? What about casual games? Does solving a game of Scrabble against someone else really tell much of a story? It might, but it almost seems to broken down even to be considered, and it certainly wasn’t the goal of the game developers. Thus while Sullivan provided a very well laid-out format for how to approach games, using great examples such as Half-Life and Portal, I believe this doesn’t cover a wide enough platform that he claimed it did, but rather only certain types of games, namely the ones that focus on storytelling in particular. Part of this class’s goal is to figure out how to expand the world of video gaming to multiple different lenses. In this way, storytelling is merely one aspect.

One thought on “Storytelling in Gaming

  1. Professor Sample

    I agree with you that storytelling is only one aspect of gaming—and I guess it was the nature of the conference that it was the aspect that was privileged during the talks. Like Sullivan, many of the other speakers focused on massive, immersive RPGs, where there is a significant amount of narrative design. But I wonder, thinking of your Tetris example, how important narrative design can be for smaller games. Are there casual games in which “story” (in its loosest sense) is a significant aspect of gameplay?

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