Tag Archives: Storytelling

Ideally, a video game’s story should react to your actions as a player. How you play the game should affect the story. And yet, that fascination with interactive storytelling lends itself to problems about how we approach a given game – or maybe even games in general. To what extent might your own approach continually funnel you toward a specific ending? In this essay I explore the conundrum of trying to mesh interaction and storytelling and the strange dilemma that faces developers.

Mysteries can be fun and engaging, and hold a lot of promise when a player can be the main character. Yet, so many games that offer mysteries end up falling short. Where do they go wrong? In this essay I will be looking at some ways in which games that hold the promise of a mystery end up not making good on that promise.

Video game stories can often be so big that they can’t be contained in a single game. We need a whole series of games. Or maybe even games and books and movies. But how does trying to tell a single cohesive story in this way affect the actual narrative(s) that we get?

What makes a story that is unique to video games? We usually focus on the player’s ability to shape the narrative. But this essay will explore how a different form of interaction – the player’s understanding of systems – can lead to a unique storytelling experience.

Cutscenes in video games often get a lot of complaints. And sometimes games use cutscenes when they shouldn’t. But how should we think about the rule for when a cutscene is valuable versus not valuable for storytelling?

When we experience narratives in games, we tend to experience them alone. We can share that solitary experience with others, but the original process of engaging with the story is something we do on our own. But what happens to the narrative as a concept when a game requires us to collaborate with others to construct the story?

Stories have a wonderful ability to allow us to explore complex moral topics without needing to engage in the direct harms that happen in those stories. Using the game Blasphemous, I wanted to explore the concept of guilt and how guilt figures into being a moral person according to the game’s themes.

Video games demand that we keep going and continually work to overcome the hurdles that confront us…but is that always a good thing? Using the game Undertale, I look at the theme of determination, and how the game portrays determination as a way of exploring the value of sticking to your goals and seeing them through.

What does it mean to look at someone else as an enemy, and to kill them in a game? It’s an action that we undertake all the time, and yet to what extent is our character “in the right”? In looking at the themes of the video game NieR, we can see how a problem of perspective in everyday life gets explored through video games.

What does it mean for a theme to be “played out”? When is a game’s story boring because it’s just rehashing a theme we’re all familiar with? In this essay I explore two radically different stories – Aeschylus’s Oresteia and The Last of Us Part II – to talk about the theme of revenge, and some problems of media criticism.