Unreliable Narrator

Exploring stories in games and the art of telling tales

Sam Barlow has an enlightening chat with his new devkits

Here I sit, on the floor of my apartment surrounded by cardboard boxes and bubble wrap. The Ghost Of Game Development Future has delivered me some next-gen devkits. By the time you read this, they will be current-gen devkits. It is impossible to overplay the ‘worst birthday present ever’ vibes of receiving a devkit. That time you got a remote control car, but no batteries? When your uncle bought you the Commodore 64 version of Rainbow Islands but you had a Sinclair Spectrum? A devkit is worse than that. They promise so much – the future of game development! But they can’t play retail games. So you unwrap, you assemble, you plug in. There are hums and bleeps! And then… you can look at some menus, perhaps check MAC addresses? That’s it. If you want to see anything more, you need to actually go and code a game. So right now I am sat with my new toys and a lot of empty silence. To fill it, I start talking to my kits:

Hey, kits. So how is this generation is going to be different? Is this going to be the one where games become legitimate mass entertainment? Did we beat TV yet?

Hello, Sam. Yes, this is the one! We did it. We are the Citizen Kanes Of Gaming Hardware. You’re talking to the future of interactive entertainment. We contain so many emotion engines, we can reach into your heart and brain and make you feel more human.

Great! What can I do that I couldn’t before? We have great haptics. Ray tracing! SSDs. That means faster loading! If we were online before, now we’re even more online. 4K. You can Alt Tab between games.

But what does it mean for me? How can I tell better stories? My last game used 360p video footage of real humans. We used God’s ray tracing.

God’s ray tracing? Good joke! (whispers) Really, the big difference this time isn’t the hardware, it’s the business model. The three words men can’t resist? ‘Netflix for games.’ We’re not in the hardware and game business any more. We’re in the subscription business.

This is good for me, right? The subscription business needs stories to pull people in! Discoverability is easier if you don’t have to convince people to pay up. Exactly. The primary problem that narrative videogames have faced over the last few generations hasn’t been in their creation, but in selling them. We conflated characters with genres, and because we could only package a very narrow range of genres, we really focused on a narrow set of characters and stories. When we moved from physical production to digital, there was a leap in the variety of games because you no longer had to sell them to customers through the intermediary of a game store chain’s sales personnel. Now we take a further leap.

So the big challenge is you need to keep content coming, and to not bore people, right? You’re fighting to keep them.

Yes, we need to keep it coming. And we need variety and specificity. A subscription service knows much more about its customers. We can target their niche tastes.

So we can tell stories about a broader range of characters? We can deliver more specific and unique mechanics?

Yes! Just yesterday my numbers people asked me to find more (checks notes) historical walking simulators with strong female protagonists and card collecting mechanics.

Hmm. So rather than being at the mercy of Gamestop Regional Buyers, we’re going to be at the mercy of Analytics?

Analytics are your friend! We asked a hundred storytellers what they found most useful and they all told us: analytics!

The three words men can’t resist? ‘Netflix for games’. We’re not in the hardware and game business anymore

Are you sure about that?

Yes. Did you know there is a very specific frequency of haptic feedback that can induce cardiac arrest in humans?

Are you threatening me?

Do you really want to ask that question?

I yank the powerstrip out of the socket and unwind the USB-C cord that was snaking around my neck. I pull out the notebook I use to write down new game ideas, turn to a fresh page and write, “Historical walking simulator. Strong female protagonists. Card collecting.”