TECHNIQUE 1: Cutscenes

The easiest and mostly widely-used method involves jumping back and forth between gameplay and narrative. The characters are introduced in an opening cutscene, then you the player take control to complete a series of challenges, and then you pop back into another cutscene to get the next chunk of the story. It looks something like this:


The cutscenes can be as simple or as complex as the developers have the resources for. In the old days, cutscenes were static two-dimensional cutouts of characters who'd speak some dialogue for you before disappearing and getting you back into the action. Nowadays they're fully-rendered 3D movies.

Which is the advantage of this system -- it's linear and the games industry can pull in the talent from other industries to help make it happen. A cutscene can even be outsourced to a separate production company. You can really get a deep story this way, too: although the screen-time is short, games can try to set up complex characters, pace the action so that there's a killer climax, and generally build a linear story that just happens to have chunks of gameplay in-between.

The disadvantages are obvious to everyone who's ever slammed the X-button, frantically skipping a scene in order to get back to the game. Games are supposed to be interactive, and constantly breaking the action wrecks the game experience. Linear cutscenes don't allow for a lot of replayability, since the story is always the same. Finally, (and here Metal Gear Solid 2 leaps to mind) if the game is too heavy on the cut-scene-age, the experience bogs down.

Some games have done a great job with this, but in many ways it's the worst of both worlds. Those tiny cut scenes don't allow real writers to practice their craft in a meaningful way. Meanwhile, they interrupt and feel separate from the gameplay. Why do many games feature character stereotypes or cliché plot points? Because these devices allow you to set up a situation or a character with as little screen time as possible so you can get back to the game. Is that bad writing or just a limitation of the cutscene approach? Or both? You can judge yourself.


There are a few ways to play with this, by the way. One thing developers can do is fork off the plot based on decisions the player makes during gameplay. I charted that out above. This represents a real problem in today's game development world, where every cutscene and every minute of gameplay is really expensive to create -- what if you design a whole branch that the player never sees? For this reason, a lot of games feature multiple 'endings' while the vast majority of the game is fixed and linear.

Some particularly effective games blur this technique so that story and gameplay aren't so separate. Realtime Strategy games are a great example -- think back to StarCraft, which had some of the best cutscenes in recent memory. Bits and pieces of the story would come out in the middle of missions, shifting the plot, before you completed a level and another cutscene came along. Which brings us to...

TECHNIQUE 2: In-Game Linear Storytelling

Here's Half-Life's gift to the game world. Rather than cutscenes, Half-Life built every minute of the story into the gameplay. I'd graph it out something like this:


The game action doesn't stop for the vignettes that tell the story or backstory, and often the player can run right by and ignore them. But at all times the story is happening around the player, and the player is never pulled from the action.

It's a great device, and it's been used well in many games since then (the Call of Duty games leap to mind as great examples.) But it is limiting. Developers can't really define the hero, nor can the hero go through a big emotional change -- the hero is pretty much the player, and the action is driven not by character interaction but merely by the player getting from point A to point B. That's not very deep -- it looks pretty weak compared to the heroes that books or movies can create -- but it works well in a game environment and at least allows developers to create a really elaborate and atmospheric backstory.

NEXT PAGE: More Unorthodox Storytelling Techniques...