Stop Documenting the Truth
“The bloodiest war started in 2932. Both sides struggled through tough days. It wasn’t until Cerias Tucker betrayed President Holland by poisoning his porridge that peace could be established.”So Bad
I see narrative like the one above too much in games. There are several storytelling crimes in those two sentences. Beyond being overly short with pointless information it lacks engagement, relevance, or viewpoint.
Each time I’ve seen a writer create text like that, I assume they were attempting to set the scene for the player. To help the player understand a character, the world, or the history of the world. Unfortunately, it actually sucks.
One of the most famous narratives similar to this is the opening crawl for Star Wars. It is an iconic and memorable opening. It also does almost nothing for the story. If that screen crawl were to be removed, I believe nothing would be lost from the actual film. The film covers everything in the crawl at its own pace. The only real value of the crawl is text at an interesting angle before some great camera movement. That crawl has become about the excitement of starting a new Star Wars film and much less about actually adding to the story of the film.
It Matters More in Games
One of the big differentiators with videogames is the level of immersion and involvement a player can have with a story. The player can be a living witness to the story or can quite literally drive all the story choices. Direct reciting of events as narrative is not realistic to a world you want the player to feel they belong in.
The way we are told events in the world is always from someone’s perspective. We then get a feeling about the events from that perspective combined with what we think about them. If we tell events in games from the perspective of the in-game author we get many advantages from it:
The game feels more real
The player gets to decide if they trust the story and the source
We can introduce alternate versions to add depth or confuse the issue
A Shootout in Town
For instance, we could have the following:
“I’ll do my best to tell you what I saw. Every time I try to say this I cry. Oh, God, please help me.
The first I saw was the Red Bandits emerging from the dust storm and trying to escape with their transport pullers crawling down the back path of town.
Deputy Thompson knew he couldn’t allow them to keep spreading their lies and their ways in a new town. He went out to stop them.
Bravely standing in the middle of the path a few strong supporters stood with him. I could only imagine the hate under their bandit masks as they opened fire. Old lady Candice stepped in front of Thompson hoping to stop the aggression. They, they, cut her down without hesitation. They, they, never even stopped firing. I never got to say goodbye. It took our doctors to confirm it was her.
All of them were murdered by the time the Red Bandits got near them. It was a massacre. We can’t let this continue.”What if this was narrated by Sam Gladly, a poor local farmer? What would you think?
What if it was a report from the Ministry of Truth?
A Second Thought
Later, you could have the player get another account of the event told from the Red Bandit’s perspective:
“We tried to reason with the Deputy. We wanted to live in peace on the outskirts of the desert. He insisted we erect their idols or go to the education camps.
Murray wanted to try one last time putting up the white flag to talk. The deputy’s goons shot him four times in the gut and sent him back. They saw him wrap the white flag around his waist. As the flag became soaked with his blood they said it gave him a great red color. They mockingly called him a "Red Bandit." Apparently the name stuck and they kept referring to us as that.
We knew we had to flee. We weren’t going to have our kids be programmed to hate us. The only path to peace would be to try to escape through the back of town. It wasn’t any good. Those goons found us and opened fire.
They lined up their women in-front of them as human shields. They were firing from behind their women with the barrels literally under their arms.
I tried not to use my weapon. I saw my youngest child go limp and fell off the transport. She had been shot. It was clear she was dead. My two other kids were in shock. I was a fool to hold fire. I started shooting back. Then I lost my other children.
Only a few of us escaped with our lives. I keep trying to find a way to live with the horror of that day. Why am I even trying to make the world better now that my kids have been killed? Who am I trying to make it better for?”If you set up your story events as unswerving truth you’re just documenting facts. If you want to document facts, make a quiz game. If you’re going to make a story, help the player live and breathe that world.
Feel free to write a hard truth of what happened to characters and your world. Just keep it to yourself and only tell it through the lenses of those that claim to have been there.