The path to prominence for video games has been an unusual one compared to film, photography, and classical forms of art. Unlike everything else, video games were born in the 60s and 70s as a novelty in a niche business-technology by a homogeneous community of left-brained, mathematically-minded, 20th-century men. This incredibly high technical barrier to entry has been a guard against all kinds of diversity for many decades.

Man in arcade, Japan, 1986, Photo taken by Elisa Leonelli

A geeky subset of programmers has been the stewards of games for a young male audience practically forever. This led to what feels like a masculine, sometimes juvenile set of narrative tropes and cathartic, mechanical games which typically involve shooting someone or saving a girl.

Screenshots from Metroid, Nintendo Entertainment System

But in the last 20 years, this began to change, owing to a trio of happy circumstances:

PCs and laptops became more common, allowing people to make and modify games at home.
Development technology matured to the point where some disciplines, like writing, required little to no programming experience.
Finally, money. Video games became big business, companies swelled, new specialized creative positions opened, and creatives from all around started to take a good look at this industry.

As creative diversity bloomed, it wasn’t just stories and visuals that improved. The most fascinating growth has been in gameplay. The actual playing of the game. The art of the game is what I want to explore here, and hopefully, open your eyes to this incredibly exciting medium of storytelling.

The thrill of control

Most of us as kids have that special moment where we push a button on a controller and some character on the TV lurches in response. Gasp. It’s a big shock. We try again. We mash the buttons and watch our man become possessed by our input. Then we tame the controller and begin to explore. There’s a person? We approach them. It says press X, so we do. He’s talking to me! What’s he saying? He says there’s a special pond somewhere. And off we go.

In the right time and the right place, this experience can be magical. The TV turns into a portal. We’re no longer hostage to TV scheduling, scripts, page order, we’re unbounded. Presented with possibilities, never a guarantee.

A boy and a woman playing Pong, 1975, Interfoto/Alamy Stock Photo

The handshake between player and game is very special. It’s an agreement that the player will give to the game, and the game will give back. But what a game asks and what it gives is different every time. Sometimes, it asks little more than a book does: just turn the pages and read. But most of the time games ask much more from you. And sometimes a game asks everything of you.

The give and take narrative is what is so unique and challenging about making games. Ideas and themes have to be encoded into more than just sound and video, but also action, and then we must encourage the player to undertake the action and ponder on it.

Focus. Don’t blink.

When Papers, Please brought you into the administrative hell of a Soviet-state immigration, it did so by putting you into the shoes of an immigration officer. By hearing the plights of these sorry souls under your interrogation lamp, you had to examine their many, many papers, then crosscheck for inaccuracies and errors. In the end, it was still up to you whether you let them through or not.

Through the simple gameplay of checking papers and stamping documents, you were brought into a very unique setting and made to feel the pressures of your character and contemplate the wretched state of the world it represents. Powerful stuff.

In Before Your Eyes, you are asked to connect a camera, turn it on yourself, and sit back away from the controls. You’re in a narrow boat on still waters, sailing towards the afterlife. The captain asks you to recount your life story. To underscore the swiftness with which life moves, these touching, relatable vignettes of life skip when we, in real life, blink. A heavy-handed metaphor, but effective.

In Journey, you take control of a mysterious, shrouded biped in the sand looking at a vibrant, beautiful mountain far away. With no words, the game releases you. Throughout your journey to the mountain, you’ll find another real, human player along the way. Stripped of language, determined to push on, the players you encounter are almost universally kind and cooperative. Journey ends with your near-death, revival by some heavenly force, and a transcendent musical moment where you soar to the top of the mountain.

It’s a powerful, aesthetic experience which demonstrates the power of faith through gameplay by pairing you randomly with strangers and having you willingly cooperate to reach a common goal. This point is driven home at the end when your character shows faith too and is rewarded with a burst of power and energy that carries them over the finish line.

These are just a few ways in which meaning is put directly into the gameplay. There are many other examples. What ties them together is a tight focus on a single theme or idea over traditional didactic narrative.

Understanding this type of vibes-based narrative is crucial to understanding the expressive capacity of games. In Journey, we’re neither shown faith nor told it, we’re made to feel it, practice it, and explore it on our own in a guided environment. In Papers, Please, we’re neither shown nor told about the political and cultural movements keeping people oppressed in Soviet states, we experience it in an environment where showing human empathy is punished.

This is just not possible in other mediums.

Making it up as we go along

Sometimes, when a game decides to not tightly focus but expand its scope and possibly tell a more traditional narrative at the same time, the ideas of emergent gameplay and branching narrative become important factors.

In branching narrative, the player is deciding the state and condition of things implicitly or explicitly through action. The player might ally with the blue King over the red King, or decide that the zombie-infested town ought to be destroyed along with the survivors. Through a traditionally written storyline, the player could be given any number of pick-an-outcome options that customize the story as it goes along. This is very common and is utilized everywhere to increase player engagement.

It’s the central gameplay of some award-winning games like Detroit: Become Human, The Wolf Among Us, and Life is Strange. They specialize in having branching choose-your-own-adventure stories. They’re fun, but that’s all there is to them.

Emergent gameplay is more interesting from an artistic point of view. Emergence can coexist with other types of narrative and in any setting, all that is required is that the player is at some point given a set of tools and the freedom to use them within a world. If handled well, it can turn what would be a boring walk from point A to point B into a thrilling and unique adventure.

Emergence is about crafting your own story, breaking from strict narrative, doing away with the choose-your-own-adventure stories granted to you by the writers. To get a clear idea of what kinds of stories might emerge, let’s imagine an example:

You decided to go treading in the deep shadow of a desert valley when an ambush sprung from above. Your weapon clicks, empty. You remember shooting the last of your reserves 20 minutes ago at a pursuing animal. You duck behind cars amidst the thunderous clap of gunfire. Your head ducked, you look for a means of survival. A little motion mine laid by the ambushers is near. You toss it in the path of them as they descend down the rocks. Time-limited, you remember a bottle of drink you relieved from an abandoned van the day before. You toss it on them as they near, intending to set it alight. A loud crack of gunfire. Your blood sprays over the door of a car. You need a doctor soon...

See what I mean? The moment of action was completely unscripted, dictated by your past decisions. When you come out from that valley alive, whatever state you’re in you’ll carry into the next moment, rolling the ball of consequences on your own.

In games like these, sandbox games as they’re called, the emergence is usually complemented by a larger open-ended story or stories. Find out who did this or find the cure, that kind of thing. Emergence is a fantastic way of giving meaning, purpose, and story to otherwise monotonous moments of mindless action.

The Art of Action

Guccified

Charting Changes