At the seminar we hosted with Channel 4 we asked Do games tell a story? And if they do tell a story then what does this mean in terms of where we find our stories and what we want from them? Do you agree that games tell stories? We want to capture your thoughts. We then plan to publish a piece of new research-based thinking that reflects the discussions of the seminar and views expressed through this forum.
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I am a student at Royal Holloway, University of London, in my final year of an English and Creative Writing degree. I have been an avid reader of books since I was first given free choice of what books to read, and for the last few years I would also consider myself a gamer and have become heavily involved with the college's games society, so this subject is one that interests me considerably.
Games are a fascinating and, importantly, very widespread medium today, and there is no denying that they do, or at least can, tell stories. Not only that, they can help to develop basic reading skills, and even encourage players to tell stories for themselves. The word "games" covers a massive collection of different things, though, and the impact that any one game can have is dictated quite significantly by its type.
The speakers of the Nintendo DS and its predecessor, the Gameboy series of handheld consoles, for example, cannot play complex sounds like speech, and so the story of games for these consoles is revealed through text on the screen. Games like the Pokémon or Zelda franchises can contain many thousands of lines of text which must be read in order to understand what is going on and progress through the game, and the players of these games are more than happy to read through all of it. Back in 2000, the original Pokémon game was the longest single work of fiction my five year old brother had ever read, or would read for quite some time afterwards, and it wasn't a simple read: if nothing else, the names of the pokémon themselves were often long and quite complex, but my brother cheerfully attempted to sound each one out so that he could talk about the game to me and his friends.
While some modern games for the PC, as well as consoles like the Wii, XBox and Playstation that plug into a television, also require the player to read text off the screen in order to follow the story, advances in both the consoles themselves and the technology that is used to produce the games mean that it is becoming increasingly common for the story to be told in fully animated and voiced cutscenes. Though there is usually still some reading required in the game, this reduces the amount considerably, but replaces it with the potential for cinematic story telling on a par with any animated film. Final Fantasy X, released in the UK in 2002, used fully voiced cinematics for the whole of the game's storytelling, amounting to "four or five movies worth of dialogue", that creates an extremely immersive and powerful story.
A lot of the power behind Final Fantasy comes from the fact that it is a roleplaying game where the player follows the story of the main character, Tidus, through a traditional 'hero's journey' storyline: at the beginning, the player shares Tidus' lack of knowledge about the world he finds himself in and they control him as he makes his way through the world, learning more and becoming more powerful. This sense of sharing a character's experience is something that can't be achieved to quite the same extent through even the best of books.
Roleplaying games exist outside of digital media as well, in the form of pencil and paper games like Dungeons and Dragons. In these games, one person called the game master or GM provides a made up world which the other players populate with characters that they have created. Usually, a GM will have four to six players, each of whom has control of a single character, and the GM will set some events in motion that the players have their characters participate in. The GM has to create a story for the game including interesting settings, characters for the players' characters to interact with, and enough pace and plot twists to keep the players invested in the game, and the players create interesting characters that develop in the course of the game through the things that happen to them and their interactions with others.
Pencil and paper roleplaying games are unique amongst the games I've talked about because they allow the people involved free reign to come up with absolutely any setting, character or series of events that they can imagine, while at the same time allowing them to choose to play in familiar settings and as familiar characters: game systems exist to let people play as characters from Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Discworld and many other settings.
In all formats and genres of game, there are many that fall short of the mark of excellence that some achieve, but despite that I think that games are an incredibly important storytelling medium today because, as I said earlier, they reach a very wide audience, and one that famously distances itself from traditional forms of storytelling: young boys. My brother, who is now thirteen, has willingly read a total of three series of books in his life, but spends almost every hour he is allowed playing a game of some sort. Even amongst the males I know at university now (which, while admittedly a skewed sample, includes several people who have read quite extensively) most of them have spent significantly more time playing games than they have with a book. For this reason if nothing else, I believe that games simply cannot be ignored as a method of storytelling today.