Storytelling in games & books

It's a matter of perspective

I used to write about games more than I do now. Most of my time is taken up with my own fiction and writing about writing, but I think I’ve always been a frustrated game designer at heart.

Several years back I gave a talk at Access Creative College about storytelling in games. This article is based on that talk, though I’ve significantly updated it because games design never stands still.

A couple of caveats: I’m not a game designer, much to my chagrin, so this is all coming from a player observation perspective. I’d love to hear from game devs about whether I’m talking nonsense.

Games are interactive!

It’s easy to think that interactivity is the key difference between games and literature. Video games are evidently ‘interactive’, in that the player can affect what happens to a greater or lesser degree. This is what makes them unique as a form. It’s an easy statement but in the context of stories misses the point that all forms of storytelling are interactive.

Scene of the Narration of the Decameron (Salvatore Postiglione, 1892)

Storytelling is conversation

There’s no such thing as a one-way story. The moment a story is told, it is immediately interpreted by the audience and becomes something new. That’s true whether the story exists on the page, as an audiobook, on film, around a campfire or in a game. The life experiences and opinions of every reader, viewer, listener or player collide with those of the creator, in the process generating a new shard of the story with each telling.