Games and Narrative

For the week of April 15th, we were asked to think about how storytelling is presented in games, and how its presentation in games differs from other media.  To me, the primary difference between games and other mediums is that games enable the audience to participate in the creation and development of the narrative to a far higher degree than any other medium.  While a game can contain units of linear narrative in it such as text and cinematics, it's the player narrative of the exploration of these units that distinguishes games from other forms of media.

A game that's a strong bare-bones example of this is Triptych, by Stephen Lavelle.  The game is presented as an interactive fiction game, where there's textual descriptions of the scene and you can choose from a limited set of actions.  The plot of the game is extremely simple: you just walk around your room and sit down to write a letter.  However, as you progress through your options, more and more of the words in the banal descriptions begin to be replaced with words such as 'lies', 'shame', and 'anger' until the descriptions become entirely incomprehensible, such as 'lies lies shame lies, anger deceit lies wretch'.  The words of choice differ based on which options you choose.  This way of presenting someone dealing overwhelming guilt, pressure, or anxiety would have been interesting enough as a short story, but I think that the choice to make it interactive added additional meaning and impact.  As you're making decisions on behalf of the protagonist, you get an odd sense of empathy for the character that I feel can't be reproduced in other mediums.  Additionally, the way that the narrative unfolds differently through each playthrough manages to shed light on the overall structure of the system, giving insights that would be absent from a more static narrative experience.