Comparing storytelling in games & literature

I was asked to give a talk comparing storytelling in games and literature by Access Creative College. This article is based on that talk.

It’s easy to think that interactivity is the key difference between games and literature. Video games are interactive, which makes them unique. It’s an easy statement but misses the point that all forms of storytelling are interactive.

Scene of the Narration of the Decameron (Salvatore Postiglione, 1892)

Storytelling is conversation

There’s no such thing as a one-way story. The moment a story is told, it is immediately interpreted by the audience and becomes something new. That’s true whether the story exists on the page, as an audiobook, on film, around a campfire or in a game. The life experiences and opinions of every reader, viewer, listener or player collide with those of the creator, in the process generating a new shard of the story with each telling.

Games excite me because they’re still figuring out their form, pushing at accepted boundaries and experimenting with the art and technology. It’s an immature medium in the best way possible, like cinema in the 20th century. There are many surprising and wonderful stories still to be told by movies, but the form and language of cinema itself has now settled, just as prose fiction did in an earlier time.

In other words, we know what movies and books are. But we’re still not entirely sure where video games start and end.

Thematic genre similarities

There’s a shared thematic language between most mediums of storytelling. Games are no exception and you’ll frequently find the following genres and sub-genres:

• Fantasy
• Science fiction
• Cyberpunk
• Action thriller
• Horror
• War

These all exist in movies, books and comics, though they’re unusually prominent in gaming. It’s no coincidence that all of these genres are naturally action-focused — by which I don’t necessarily mean action sequences but more literally scenes in which you can take actions.

The quest-heavy structure of traditional fantasy lends itself to player motivation and goals. Science…