Image: Post Malone’s Murder Circus, one of the many projects Richard Dansky worked on in 2024.
Author: Richard Dansky
Every video game ultimately becomes a story.
The elements of the game, even and perhaps especially the narrative ones, are inert until they are suddenly interacted with by the player. That moment of interaction, whether it be a button press or a joystick move or whatever, taps the potential of the dev team’s hard work and lets it spring to life. Then and only then is the game realized, as it becomes something active and vibrant as the player journeys through the content, each in their unique, own way.
Every player’s experience is in fact different. Even the most tightly controlled rail shooter, the most finicky puzzle game allows for the player to make choices moment to moment, and no two players are going to make the exact same choices in the exact same sequence with the exact same timing. The playthrough is one of a kind – it may be very similar to the ones others do, but there will always be places where the congruence breaks down. As such, every player can say that it was their game, that the precise choices they made along the way set their playthrough apart.
Linear sequence
Along the way, a funny thing happens. The player, by playing, creates a linear sequence of events. Even if the game itself is non-linear, unless the player has a TARDIS on standby, they experience it in a linear fashion defined by their choices. That series of encounters with things animate and inanimate gets strung together into what can only be defined as a story.
This is true of every gameplay session. Even games with little to no narrative content – and please spare me the tired example of Tetris; we can argue this one until the heat death of the universe – in their presentation produce stories when played. What the player did first, second, third and on til last is a story they created, combining their direction and choices with the elements the game offered to them to interact with.
Concise tale
Then, something even cooler happens. The player, having scribed the story through play, then assumes the role of editor and refines it for transmission to others. This, which I call “War Story”, is the distillation of the entire story of the gameplay, with its bumps, hiccups, delays, wrong turns, pauses, mistakes, and failures, and refines it into a clean, concise tale for the telling. This, they then relay to friends, fellow players, YouTube audiences, streaming audiences, and whoever else is in earshot.
The game, in all its complexity and grandeur and expense and expended sweat, comes down to a story.
Infinite stories
This is not to say that there is no point to this besides a story. It is the synergy of all the elements – gameplay, art, animation, audio, narrative, and more – that creates the narrative elements that the player wants to play and thus create their personal story with. No game’s story gets finished without there being something worthy to create and tell. Furthermore, there are infinite stories to be told in each game. Replays and rematches and new rounds and new loadouts, all this and more creates new stories to tell as the new experience of the game is created.
In the end, when the game is exited and the console is shut down, the story remains with the player wherever they might go. And that, my friends, is all we as game devs can hope for.
Author Richard Dansky has contributed to over 60 titles in iconic game franchises like Ghost Recon, Might & Magic, Splinter Cell, Far Cry, and Rainbow Six, His most recent credit was on Hunt: Showdown 1896. He has published eight novels and two short story collections and serves on the advisory board on the Game Narrative Summit at GDC. Follow him here and here. 