I wrote this originally in response to one of Porter Anderson's Ether For Authors columns on Publishing Perspectives, but as we occasionally discuss the confluence of stories and interactivity on this blog, it seems like it might bear repeating.
You can read the original piece ("Where is publishing's jetpack?") here. The points I want to address are, first, by Hugh Howey in The Future of Books:
"Donning an AR headset to read a picture book will be as common twenty
years from now as putting on 3D glasses to watch a film can be today.
But imagine this scenario: You put on a pair of AR glasses and grab a
copy of Gulliver’s Travels. The glasses recognize the cover of the book, and it knows you’ve purchased the AR version of Gulliver. When you open the book, the story comes to life all around you.
Not just on the pages of the book, but on the floor in front of you.
There’s Gulliver being washed up on the beach. You might pull your knees
up to keep your feet from getting wet. There are the Lilliputians
staking Gulliver to the sand. Maybe one of them asks you to place a
finger on a knot while they tie a bow."
I like and admire Howey, but that multimedia monster isn't the future of anything. You breed from the unhappy pairing of book and movie and you're only going to get a mule.
"I hate to say this, but storytelling does not come naturally to Swedes.
But we’re good at designing systems, and that’s what these games really
are…Battlefield is a system designed for entertainment rather than for
telling you a story."
Okay, let's start with that. “Storytelling does not come naturally to the Swedes..." Utter nonsense. You will find game developers in the UK
saying that storytelling does not come naturally to the British. America
likewise. The fact is, storytelling often doesn’t come naturally to the
kind of person who gets interested in videogame development. Software engineers may not as a rule read widely, and may not grasp how broad and flexible is our remit when we talk of storytelling. That,
fortunately, is changing.
What Mr Soderlund is missing is that, when we talk of
storytelling in games, that doesn’t mean a writer using the game as a
stage from which to declare a pre-defined story. A game is a world: an
environment populated by characters and objects with rules to govern the
interactions between them. The most interesting possibilities for story
in such a context are not the sequences I might write in advance for
the player to watch. That’s just using the game environment as a kind of
movie, albeit one you can walk around inside. The really interesting
evolution of storytelling in an interactive framework is when the story
emerges from what the player does. Like, if I place a limpet mine on a
wall that I couldn’t otherwise scale and use that to rocket-jump over
it, there I have a story to tell my friends. It’s a very simple story in
that example, but it’s special because I made it happen. It wasn’t a story fragment left there for me to experience “from the stalls”. It was always supposed to be - paraphrasing Patrick Soderlund now - a system designed to enable stories to happen.
So here’s how game developers ought to be thinking about interactive
stories. Once a fortnight, I run a face-to-face roleplaying game. My players are mostly writers themselves. I see myself as the moderator. I
present them with the germ of incidents, non-player characters to interact with, the constraints
such as legality and status. I don’t know in advance what the story will
be. The story only happens when the actors – that is, my players – come on
stage. Our stories are not polished the way a novel or movie ought to
be, but they’re not intended to be a spectator sport. Nobody authors them. There's no talking of ourselves in third person. None of us stands back outside the narrative and tries to engineer where it's going. To allow these stories to occur, we let go of being authors and step into the world as participants.
Experienced from
within, a genuinely emergent story is new and unique and thrilling. It
isn’t “tell me a story” any more. More videogame developers like
Soderlund should roleplay so they get to see why the rest of us are so
excited by the possibilities here.
Having said all this in praise of what videogames can deliver, I have to add that prose is still the most
powerful medium for telling stories. That’s been true since long before
Homer first banged his stick on the ground and said, “Sing, goddess!” –
and you bet you could hear a pin drop. Words are more powerful
because they create a more personal conduit into the imagination of each
reader or each listener. (And to think I say this as a writer of comic
books and a designer of videogames.) That’s why, if a discerning fellow
in the year 2034 really wants to appreciate Gulliver’s Travels, he’ll do
without the sloshing surf sound FX and all that art installation
gimcrackery and just go back to the words as Swift wrote them.
You can read the original piece ("Where is publishing's jetpack?") here. The points I want to address are, first, by Hugh Howey in The Future of Books:
I like and admire Howey, but that multimedia monster isn't the future of anything. You breed from the unhappy pairing of book and movie and you're only going to get a mule.
And secondly I'm responding here to this comment by by Patrick Soderlund in This is War (for a Game Industry's Soul):
Okay, let's start with that. “Storytelling does not come naturally to the Swedes..." Utter nonsense. You will find game developers in the UK saying that storytelling does not come naturally to the British. America likewise. The fact is, storytelling often doesn’t come naturally to the kind of person who gets interested in videogame development. Software engineers may not as a rule read widely, and may not grasp how broad and flexible is our remit when we talk of storytelling. That, fortunately, is changing.
What Mr Soderlund is missing is that, when we talk of storytelling in games, that doesn’t mean a writer using the game as a stage from which to declare a pre-defined story. A game is a world: an environment populated by characters and objects with rules to govern the interactions between them. The most interesting possibilities for story in such a context are not the sequences I might write in advance for the player to watch. That’s just using the game environment as a kind of movie, albeit one you can walk around inside. The really interesting evolution of storytelling in an interactive framework is when the story emerges from what the player does. Like, if I place a limpet mine on a wall that I couldn’t otherwise scale and use that to rocket-jump over it, there I have a story to tell my friends. It’s a very simple story in that example, but it’s special because I made it happen. It wasn’t a story fragment left there for me to experience “from the stalls”. It was always supposed to be - paraphrasing Patrick Soderlund now - a system designed to enable stories to happen.
So here’s how game developers ought to be thinking about interactive stories. Once a fortnight, I run a face-to-face roleplaying game. My players are mostly writers themselves. I see myself as the moderator. I present them with the germ of incidents, non-player characters to interact with, the constraints such as legality and status. I don’t know in advance what the story will be. The story only happens when the actors – that is, my players – come on stage. Our stories are not polished the way a novel or movie ought to be, but they’re not intended to be a spectator sport. Nobody authors them. There's no talking of ourselves in third person. None of us stands back outside the narrative and tries to engineer where it's going. To allow these stories to occur, we let go of being authors and step into the world as participants.
Experienced from within, a genuinely emergent story is new and unique and thrilling. It isn’t “tell me a story” any more. More videogame developers like Soderlund should roleplay so they get to see why the rest of us are so excited by the possibilities here.
Having said all this in praise of what videogames can deliver, I have to add that prose is still the most powerful medium for telling stories. That’s been true since long before Homer first banged his stick on the ground and said, “Sing, goddess!” – and you bet you could hear a pin drop. Words are more powerful because they create a more personal conduit into the imagination of each reader or each listener. (And to think I say this as a writer of comic books and a designer of videogames.) That’s why, if a discerning fellow in the year 2034 really wants to appreciate Gulliver’s Travels, he’ll do without the sloshing surf sound FX and all that art installation gimcrackery and just go back to the words as Swift wrote them.