Tuesday, April 9, 2013

Narrative Without Story


I was recently caught by a youtube comment that sent me on an angry rant to myself regarding the commentor's ignorance and inability to see reason. After calming down I decided some of the conclusions I came to reinformed my understanding of Story and Narrative in Video Games. I shall dispense my insights now.

"No, video games without stories do not deserve to exist anymore in this modern age of video games. A video game without a story being made now is like making a silent film from 1920 in the year 2010. It is just fucking outdated and shows insane laziness and overall not caring about the quality of their own products.
Nowadays, either make a story based game, or fucking leave the medium. Gameplay only games are doing nothng else but being damaging to the medium. Such as COD!"

It's funny he should mention silent films and a 1920s aesthetic  Because the most powerful exemplification of how wrong he is comes from a game that brings that style to a modern audience, and laziness is not the game maker's reason for that style -- quite the opposite.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. The reason why he is incorrect is because he is confusing Narrative and Story. Story is essentially the explanation we get of what's going on. Narrative is how the audience interprets the flow of actions and reactions that make up the game world and progress what's happening. Narrative uses story, though does not require it.

So, a game like Braid has lots of story -- dozens of books and things to read about why your character is there, and what his life means -- this is what you are given. The narrative is a mix of this and the input of the puzzles and challenges that present themselves, the *meaning* of trying to go back in time to do over past mistakes and so on.

However, games without this kind of exposition about their main character and the plot and reasoning for things do not exempt the game from having narrative. If we take another indie game of the same period with similar amounts of accolades we can see this, the game LIMBO.

LIMBO is the game I referred to at the start, it's minimalist in its design, with no information whatsoever about what we're doing or why we're there. It is a "gameplay only" game as our commentor would define them. There is no story at all, just gameplay. However, this is different from lacking narrative. LIMBO has one of the starkest and most emotionally impactful narratives in all of video game history, without using any story.

The game's creator takes the puzzle platforming style and sucks all the colour and life out of it, leaving you with a dark shadow world, everything you see is a silhouette and you experience real suspense and fear, something completely absent from most games of this genre like Mario or Braid. This game draws on your emotions and makes you think about what the actions mean and how they mean.

This game is akin to a Franz Kafka novel, in that it strings together actions and events with a nameless, faceless character that must survive and continue towards his vague goal, like getting to "The Castle" in the book of the same name.

The fact is, media like LIMBO gives you reams of narrative and impacts the audiences's intellect and emotions in as deeply a way as any movie, book, piece of music, or video game with a story does.

As short a game as LIMBO is, it kept me enthralled and forced to finish it despite hardships and difficulty with certain puzzles, and to date I have 4 times more played time on LIMBO than I do on Braid, despite it being shorter and completely lacking story, explanation, or dialogue of any kind.

If games like this, as the commentor purports, should be shunned from the industry and no longer allowed to exist? Then this industry would be much much poorer for it.

Games without story can still have narrative.

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