How Games Tell Stories

The Future of Storytelling

While there are still modern games that stick rigidly to the idea of having lots of cut-scenes, these days, they're in the minority - most games do still have sections where you watch action unfold, but they tend to take their cues from Half Life. While it wasn’t the first game to use scripted sequences rather than cutscenes it was immeasurably better than Die Hard Arcade, which actually bears that distinction. Half Life allowed the player to remain in control as Gordon Freeman even while a cinematic had been triggered. There were compromises such as blocking you into a room, but the sense of immersion was still preserved.

Where a cut scene would displace the player from the immersive game world during scripted sequences, with Hollywood shot sequences and letterboxing, Half Life continued to use the existing framework of the playable game to forward its story. Changes in this framework have continued throughout the decade in the form of small-scale experimental productions. Michael Mateas is a professor and video game designer who's managed to make it in to our nebulous list of favourite AI Researchers. He’s best known to gamers as the man behind the free to play Façade.


Façade garnered a lot of academic acclaim for being the first successful AI-based electronic narrative: becoming a bit of a pleasure sock for the likes of Kotaku and even being called "the most important game in the last decade" by game gurus such as Ernest Adams.

The game takes place in a flat-shaded 3D eyesore of an apartment, and you play the friend of a troubled couple on the brink of divorce, interacting with them by typing out sentences of speech. Mateas takes a position that tries to reconcile player-agency with the tendency of games have of railroading the player into doing what the designer has dictated, by allowing player-responsive stories to be created in real-time. In short, you can say whatever you want, the AI can usually understand you and respond intelligently and some details are randomised every time you start the game up.

Authorship in a game becomes entirely procedure based; rather than explicitly dictating the actions of the plot, the real role of the author here is to create the framework while the user propels the actual story.

It's just one idea though. The future of narrative in games lies in understanding the potential of games, instead of trying to evolve the One System to Rule Them All mentality. If there’s one thing that Façade has proven it’s that even though games aren’t movies they certainly have the ability to tell stories in their own way.