The Power of Emergent Stories in Video Games
Storytelling is one of humankind's greatest superpowers. So, let's dive into the techniques used to generate character arcs and player-driven narratives.
Games are one of the most powerful methods of storytelling. Not because of complex characters or cinematic set pieces. But because, games — unlike any other medium — allow the player to drive the story.
The interaction of players and game mechanics creates unique sequences of events. These can form emergent stories. No designer has scripted them and each player’s experience is their own. For example, any fan of the battle royale genre will remember their first “victory royale”. They’ll remember the fear of their final fight, heart racing, mind-focused on their final opponent. Then… triumph. These emotions can’t be replicated by authored content. Most importantly, emergent stories are able to break the barriers of fiction. Your character hasn’t been crowned champion, you have.
Of course, many games tell powerful authored stories. Cutscenes, dialogue and level design are all commonly used by designers. Yet many of these narrative tools fail to leverage gaming’s most important trait — interactivity. As a result, emergent stories can create unmatched experiences, impossible in any other medium.
How do games create stories that last a lifetime?
Creating stories solely through a game’s mechanics is incredibly challenging. For some games, it can be baked into their genre’s design for others not so much. Simulation games often encourage emergent storytelling. Their interconnected and layered systems allow for the constant production of unique experiences.
Minecraft is a wonderful example of this with the game’s notorious “first night”. In a world, where anything and everything can be interacted with, it takes knowledge and creativity to survive. The journey of mining your first tree, crafting your first pickaxe and building your first (and hopefully last) dirt hut is heightened by the fear of nightfall. Crucially, the player is never told about the dangers of the night. Leading to a cathartic experience as you frantically flee an army of monsters before building shelter. An experience hard to forget.
The commitment of games such as Minecraft, Dwarf Fortress, Rimworld and Subnautica to mechanic and player-driven, emotion-based stories leads to the creation of unforgettable experiences.
The aforementioned battle royale genre is proof that emergent stories work just as well in AAA games. The genre, which has skyrocketed in popularity, over the last decade, is a master of manipulating emotions.
Crucially, emotions, and how they change characters, are the foundation of storytelling.
When you first hit the ground in Apex Legends, you might feel a sense of optimism. Immediately, you spot one of your favourite weapons. It’s rare, in battle royales the location of loot is randomised every match. However, this early victory is threatened as you hear another player land nearby. Your adrenaline spikes. A minute passes and you’ve found more crucial resources. There haven’t been footsteps for a while, but you're still tense. The fear of being shot in the back looms over you. Gunfire. You turn and there stands another player, gun pointed at your head. You duck. Bang. Your hands are shaking. Fumbling with the controller you press on the analogue stick, and your character runs forward and crouches behind a crate. Bullets flicker past. Each one smacks into the wall behind you. Pulling out your gun, you rise and shoot.
Muscle memory gets the job done, and loot spills onto the floor.
Emergent stories, like this, are constantly being crafted by games. How emergent stories are crafted, however, is far easier to see in multiplayer games where real players heighten the states and add emotional weight to each decision. As a result, let’s turn our attention towards single-player games and dive into the simulation of in-world characters.
How characters & emotions drive narratives
As said before stories are built with characters, their emotions and how they change. This presents an interesting challenge since we can’t possibly hope to generate realistic, unique, complex, layered characters through code. As a result, games such as Dwarf Fortress and Rim World employ a slew of techniques to generate incredible stories through the human mind.
It’s important to note that each of these games relies on stories based on fictional characters and their emotions compared to battle royales which base their emergent stories on the player’s own emotional journey.
Let’s start by looking at Apophenia. This refers to our ability, as humans, to see patterns in complexity, even when none truly exists. This is why we have no issue understanding a cartoon in which a faceless desk lamp is afraid of a rubber ball. Or how we quickly recognise faces on inanimate objects.
Crucially for us, apophenia works strongest with particular kinds of patterns. One of which is personality. We constantly aim to understand the motives and intentions of others. This desire is so strong that when left to our imagination the human mind is by itself a fantastic story generator.
Game developers can exploit this wonderful behaviour quirk to develop powerful emotions. This also means developers don’t need to worry about implementing complex systems. Instead, we can allow the player’s imagination to do the calculating. By simulating how a character’s emotions change, we’re able to create sequences of events that fuel our drive to understand personality
For example, in Rimworld, our colony’s doctor was mistakenly shot during a pirate raid. Just a roll of the dice under the hood, nothing out of the ordinary. But to the player, the killer was silently avenging the death of his friend who they had watched go through a botched surgery and die only a few minutes prior.
Random chance combined with interesting systems is enough to trigger our apophenia, but there are two more ideas we need to understand in order to properly frame emerging stories.
The first is abstraction. There’s a reason books are able to create a more powerful image in the mind than most photographs. By allowing our minds to “fill in the gaps”, we encourage imagination and as a result, allow for apophenia. This is why realism in games can demand a more authored narrative structure. Compare the charming yet scripted battles of Hades, with its detailed characters and emotion-filled dialogue to the chaotic cartoonish levels of Spelunky. Both are fantastic experiences and each technique comes with its own ups and downs. Where Hades tells a passionate handcrafted tale, Spelunky creates impromptu moments we’ll feel driven to share online.
The second is labelling. This is the choice to frame existing mechanics within fiction. For example, Rimworld generates stats for your colonist’s skills and health. These are then reinforced by fictional descriptors such as previous jobs, relationships with other colonists or medical conditions that explain the statistical data. This can act as a starting point for our imagination and encourage apophenia later on.
All of these techniques together play into our imagination and allow our minds to devise intricate stories and engaging character arcs. These stories and the emotions they evoke last long after we put the controller down or step away from the computer.