Over at the Terrible Minds blog, Chuck Wendig’s discussing the concept of emergent narrative, as he says:
…storytelling in games is about empowering the player to experience and tell her own narrative.
It raises a number of interesting points about the potential for storytelling in games. While I don’t believe that all games should be attempting to generate an emergent experience for the player – I suspect there will always be a place for the author-crafted narrative – this is something which gaming is more suited to than any other form of media. Minecraft, as Chuck points out, is an excellent example. The world I’ve created in Minecraft is not only unique, but full of my own personal stories; they may not have the depth or development of author-crafted narrative, but they have an immediacy and deep-rooted sense of connection to my individual experience of the game.
Chuck also refers to Deus Ex as a game in which emergent narrative has been put to good use; at this point, I think we need to define terms before we can discuss in more detail. I’d agree that Deus Ex is a prime example of short term emergent narrative – ask three people how they tackled the Statue of Liberty, and you’ll most likely get three different answers, accompanied by excited stories of exactly what happened in the process – yet this form of short-term narrative attachment seems fairly prevalent in gaming. We all have our war-stories to tell.
In the longer term, things become a little more murky. Despite the number of options open to the player, Deus Ex is still a form of author-created narrative, or more accurately, a branching tree of alternate-universe author-created narratives. Heavy Rain is another fine example, although lacking the sheer breadth of Deus Ex’s possibilities. While these branching narratives are undoubtedly effective, I would argue that they only give the illusion of being emergent, allowing the player to shape the story within given parameters, a limitation which can often prove as restrictive as a truly linear experience.
Moreover, the higher production values rise in gaming, the more difficult it is to create compelling branching experiences, as multiple branches risk increasing the cost of creating assets exponentially. Minecraft, of course, has successfully achieved emergent narrative by going low-tech, but even so I would argue that Minecraft provides less a long-term emergent narrative and more a collection of short-term narratives.
True long-term emergent narrative is certainly something the games industry should be aiming for. Perhaps Jason Rohrer’s Sleep Is Death is a basic template for such a system, but with a sufficiently developed artificial intelligence on the creative end rather than a human. And if we can produce artificial intelligences with as much storytelling talent as a flesh-and-blood human, perhaps that will indeed spell the end for the author-created linear experience. But it won’t be any time soon.
