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.
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.
