Six Questions with Jason Bergman
Narrative in Videogames Survey Response
Jason Bergman
News Editor: Blue's News
Editor-in-Chief/Creator: loonygames
In your opinion, which games have the most impressive narrative content
(which are the best stories)?
Generally speaking the games with the best storylines have traditionally
been role-playing games, and this is a side-effect of the emphasis on
storytelling in that genre. But that's not always the case: Clive Barker's
Undying is a recent example of a non-RPG that manages to tell an
interesting story, and the first two Panzer Dragoon titles (particularly
Zwei) told original and captivating stories despite their emphasis on pure
action. The third game in the series was a full-fledged RPG and naturally
it told a more cohesive storyline. Other non-RPGs with compelling stories
are the Myth series of strategy games from Bungie, and of course Half-Life,
which broke new ground in many, many ways.
Which games do you see as creating a new narrative form - innovating a new
structure or style with which to tell stories?
I think any truly successful title does this, but the ones that I think are
really trailblazing are the ones that mix and match genres as necessary for
their game and the type of story the designers want to tell. Deus Ex was
brilliant because it had no real genre...it had action elements, strategy
elements and RPG elements, but at any given time you had the choice of
choosing one of those three to solve a particular problem.
I think Half-Life really created a new narrative form by emphasizing the
first-person perspective. Everyone in the game world calls the player "Gordon
Freeman" but aside from the loading screen (and the box) you never actually see what
Gordon looks like. This helps to convince players that they *are* Gordon Freeman.
How important is narrative content in games?
It depends on the game. Most games benefit from them, but not all...did the
lack of any real story make Soul Calibur any less brilliant? There have
been strange attempts to add a plot to Tetris, but there's a perfect
example of a game that really doesn't need any sort of story to make sense.
Do people like Chess any less because it has no story or believable characters?
What are your views on narrative techniques such as branching storylines
and alternate endings, which we see commonly in games, but rarely in other
mediums?
I think as gaming evolves as an artistic medium this will become more and
more prominent. Because by definition games are "interactive" it seems only
natural that they should take advantage of this whenever possible. I think the next step
for the industry will be to create a truly open-ended game that manages to create a
dynamic story based on what the player does, not what the designers set out to tell.
Black & White has a lot of this in it, but it still has a clearly defined storyline,
with a beginning and an end. With the level of AI designers are able to create these days,
I think a fascinating experiment would be to create an AI-driven world where the story is
created by what the player does and how the people around him react.
In a different way this is already happening with massively multiplayer RPGs, as each of
the characters is an actual person, and there's no way to really control their actions.
Some of the upcoming MMORPGs are going to try and tell a cohesive story, and I think it
will be quite interesting to watch how this turns out.
How do you see the potential or execution of narrative in videogames
differing from the potential and execution of narrative in other mediums (films, books,
etc.)?
Well, I think this is pretty obvious: no other medium offers the same level
of interactivity as video games. A book, song or movie is a static creation. It looks and
performs exactly how the author intended it to, but a game doesn't have to be that way at
all, and many aren't.
What trends in gaming do you see as counter-narrative, not encouraging
and/or including narrative content?
I don't think there are any counter-narrative trends. The medium is still
comparatively in its infancy, so the industry is still trying new things
and attempting to figure out what works. After all, let's not forget that
the technological innovations in a game as lacking in story as Doom or
Quake helped to create Deus Ex.
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