Narrative Engine

Write it like you stole it

Today I played a game – a mainstream, top-drawer narrative affair. In it, a mysterious figure whose name I can’t remember told me to go somewhere and kill someone, and while they explained why it was important, I wasn’t paying attention and I still don’t know. I went and did it anyway. I wasn’t paying attention but, thankfully for the oversight committee, my protagonist was.

The weird thing is that this game doesn’t seem to mind that I don’t know why I’m doing what I’m doing. Every other aspect of this game cares about me and my progress: if I don’t understand the combat system, it pops up little reminders. If I don’t traverse correctly, I fall. If I need to do a thing in the world to reduce a Bad Stat, then any time I’m near that thing, the UI wiggles like a dog that needs to go outside. Every mechanic is introduced, highlighted, taught, reminded and reinforced.

But not so the story. It’s given up on me. Dialogue slides hopelessly by, driftwood from the wreckage of a narrative arc that foundered far from shore, leaving only cutscenes that stand unsupported like Ozymandias’ legs in the desert.

In film, this sort of thing isn’t allowed: the rule ‘show don’t tell’ exists because if a passive viewer doesn’t have to figure out what’s going on then they never will. But in games it’s not so easy: players will walk past what they’re shown and forget what they’re told. There’s just too much to be known: how to play, where to go, who to target, why. We can’t be expected to take it all in, and the designers know this. Games keep it simple. We players aren’t paid to think, goddammit.

(But for some reason I’m still allowed to drive? The protagonist demonstrates heroic restraint as I run off in completely the wrong direction. He knows this city and I don’t, but he doesn’t overrule me. Our destination turns out to be a massive building visible from most points of our winding journey. He might have said something, but I guess he doesn’t like to mansplain.)

When I was a child, my dad took me and my brothers to a barber shop in Burnage, Manchester: a gloomy, seedy place opposite a record shop from an Oasis song with magazines we weren’t allowed to look at and an arcade cabinet we were absolutely not allowed to use (but which my brother Chris insisted he had “beaten”: here’s me getting the last word 30 years later; no, you bloody didn’t). In the mirrors, while we had our hair cut, we’d watch the other customers play. Each level started out with a single screen of text instruction – ‘SHOOT THE TERRORISTS NOT THE HOSTAGES’ – and ended either in a prerecorded cackle and a text screen saying ‘YOU LOSE’ or the words ‘GOOD JOB SOLDIER’. Like the mission briefings in Paramount’s Halo TV show, it was understood that detail was superfluous: the operational detail would probably work out just fine.

(More recently, Outer Wilds embraced this speechless restraint more elegantly, but mainly so that the protagonist didn’t have to continually say, like the bowl of petunias, “Oh, no, not again”.)

But a narrative adventure shouldn’t need

to be so cautious. It should wear its specificity, research and characterisation on its sleeve! So I think we need to be dropping the respectful decorum of ‘show don’t tell’ in favour of the darker side of the expositional spectrum. Palpatine-like Hollywood script guru Robert McKee advises “exposition as ammunition”: don’t have a character tell me something; have them yell it at me while we argue about something else. (“You can’t have beaten that damn game, Chris, because your fancy haircut takes so long!”)

After all, if I was being told by a real-life shadowy figure who to go kill, I’d want to make pretty damn sure I’d gotten the details correct. If I was Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt, I’d want to back the tape up once or twice before it self-destructed, like I do when someone is manic enough to leave their number in a voicemail. Maybe I’d like to haggle down the number of victims, or even propose that violence never once improved a structural problem.

Maybe if, as players, we were allowed to engage with the story content instead of simply being subjected to it – if we battled with it, turned it over, and threw it back in our shadowy overlord’s faces – then we’d remember it at least a tiny bit more? Because lectures don’t stick, but no one forgets a good argument, no matter how petty.

Not even after 30 goddamn years.

Author and narrative designer Jon Ingold is the co-founder of Inkle Studios, whose A Highland Song is available now.

Maybe if we were allowed to engage with the story instead of simply being subjected to it, we’d remember it more?