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Interactive Storytelling -
Narrative Techniques and
Environmental Storytelling
Methods in Video Games
Portal, Dead Space, Fallout 3, Bioshock, Metroid Prime
Main menu
If video games shared their entire narrative in dialogue and cutscenes, the medium would be little more
1. Project Description than a film with interactive portions.  Games can do a lot of storytelling in their interactive portions,
especially through the environment.  “Environmental storytelling creates the preconditions for an
2. In the Beginning
and Throughout immersive narrative experience in at least one of four ways: spatial stories can evoke pre-existing
3. Telling the Story narrative associations; they can provide a staging ground where narrative events are enacted; they may
and Immersing the embed narrative information within their mise-en-scene, or they provide resources for emergent
Player
narratives.” (Jenkins, 2004) Many games rely heavily on the embedding of narrative information within
4. The Impact and the
Aftermath
mise-en-scene, a term used to describe design aspects in production.  It examines set design, lighting,
costuming, and so on in how they contribute to the narrative.
5. Conclusion

For example, look to Portal (2007).  For a some time, players explore the Aperature Science facility: it’s
white, pristine, clean, and very deliberately organized, with GLaDOS watching every move.  But a number
Search
of test rooms into the facility, players can stumble across and enter a busted hole in one of the otherwise
View Recent perfect walls, prompting GLaDOS to wonder where you went.  Inside, amid the boilerwork of Aperture’s
inner-workings, players can discover the  maddening scrawls of someone called ‘the Ratman’ who
writes on about cakes and lies and how she is watching.  Environmental storytelling.  What players have
been exposed to, the white, perfect rooms of Aperture, gives way to deeper, troubling factors: the cake
you are promised is a lie, whatever that means, something is far more sinister than sarcastic with
GLaDOS, there is an entire area of Aperture behind the walls that you may never see, and you may not be
alone in the facility.  All of this can be assumed through the environment, and it all adds to the narrative
experience.  As the player progresses, they can encounter more of these rooms, reinforcing what they
may have inferred in an earlier hidden room.  Entrance and exploration of the rooms is not required to
complete Portal, but it tells a story unto itself, just by using the environment around it.

Dead Space (2008) tells the greater part of its story through its environment: exploring the USG
Ishimura, players can see the destruction that an outbreak has left in its wake.  Bodies and carnage
everywhere, yes, but the panicked, bloody  messages on the walls, the strange  symbols and
objects drawn and carved into the ship’s halls, all lend to the setting and the story.  After seeing and
understanding how Necromorphs  move around the ship (through the ventilation, if the image is
unclear), players begin to view every vent on the ship with trepidation, influencing the story in that way,
through the player’s reactions.  Further, the textual, audio, and video logs left by crew members
magnifies the experience, adding to the story in a way that just following the main plot doesn't, at least
not to the most effective degree.

Fallout 3 (2008) relies heavily on the visual, from the well-kept, sickeningly clean interior of Vault 101 to
the ravaged overworld of the Capital Wasteland, both in the open and in the remains of Washington D.C.
 Looking closer at some areas may give way to ‘between the lines’ stories: toys and playground remains in
a small grouping of houses, alcohol in a cubicle’s file cabinets, a pair of scorched  skeletons in a
destroyed house, and a failed motorcycle ramp-trick, all tell a story about the world the player is
exploring.  However, they are stories that, unlike the quests and main narrative, the player can have no
narrative impact on; they are only observers to an event long past.  Even in a moment that they could
have no hand in, good or bad, it helps to suck players into the world, telling stories through objects and
places instead of dialogue. 

Bioshock (2007) does more enforcing than it does telling: when players enter Rapture, they see it’s not
the glistening, underwater metropolis they thought they saw, but a genetics-fueled nightmare straight out
of hell’s darkest recesses.  They can see that through the grisly trophy-bodies, the dead overdosers, the
bloody graffiti, but what sells the entire point is in the combat: the enemies, as Weise discusses.  “A world
full of madness and death is one in which all people behave as expected: violently or not at all.” (Weise,
2008)

The crazed residents of Raptures, Splicers, have mentally devolved from their overuse of Plasmids and
other genetic enhancements, and it shows through the very existence: their movements, wild and flailing;
their voice, panicked and paranoid; their appearance, deformed and grotesque from Plasmid overuse.
 Everything about them enforces the ideas of Rapture introduced to the player: it’s terrifying, terrible,
and has transformed even the greatest minds into animals.  Conversely, one can look at the  Big
Daddies to understand another side of the story.  Big Daddies will bang on portholes throughout Rapture,
summoning Little Sisters to gather genetic material from Rapture’s dead, and will protect Little Sisters
unto their death.  At points after a Little Sister has been removed from the field by harvesting or freeing
them, Big Daddies will still knock on portholes, but after seeing no Little Sisters coming out, will turn and
leave in a sullen defeat.  Both their unwavering defense of the Little Sisters and apparent sadness at their
absence tells a story within itself, same as every aspect of a Splicer adds to what players learn about
Rapture and its collapse.

For an older and novel example, there was Metroid Prime (2002) on the Nintendo Gamecube.  Exploring
numerous areas that the player was totally unfamiliar with, it was almost a necessity to learn about Tallon
IV, the setting-planet, through the environment.  Prime does a great job conveying story through the
environment: players can strongly assume that Tallon IV was the home to a great civilization, the Chozo,
before something drove them out.  Likewise, players can infer about the strange experiments and
resource harvesting from Space Pirate establishments and facilities.  Prime takes it to a different level by
encouraging players to use a Scan Visor, a vision mode that allows the main character, Samus, to scan the
area around her for important information.  The Chozo left detailed lore about their world’s fall, and the
Pirates recorded their scientific and militaristic exploits, all of which can be scanned for
more  information, weight to what’s going on around the player.

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Interactive Storytelling -
Narrative Techniques and
Narrators
Methods in Video Games
The Cave, Bastion
Main menu
Normally, narrators are employed in fairy tale films or gritty old detective movies.  In some cases, the
1. Project Description narrator is creeping its way into video games, and rarely as an omniscient ‘storyteller,’ like a reader of an
unabridged book: the most effective narrators in recent games are narrators who are characters unto
2. In the Beginning
and Throughout themselves.
3. Telling the Story
and Immersing the For example, Double Fine’s The Cave (2013) has the narrator introduce itself as the Cave in question
Player
before introducing the available characters.  Once character have heard (or skip over) the characters’
4. The Impact and the
Aftermath
stories, they venture into the Cave, wherein the Cave’s voice follows you and your characters throughout
their journey.  What makes the Cave a particularly fine narrator is how it adds to every situation: if one
5. Conclusion
ever finds a chance, playing through the game sans-narrator detracts from the entire experience, almost
sucking the life from the narrative.  Without the Cave’s voice, players don’t know why they’re doing what
they’re doing, may not think as deeply about their actions, and may not laugh at their otherwise macabre
Search
situations.  The Cave adds everything, from humor to thought to motivation, to the experience, and is the
View Recent first and last thing players hear in the game.

As mentioned, the Cave adds to the experience: joking about the situations the characters find themselves
in and they cause themselves, from inconveniences to deaths of those around them; expressing disbelief
or disgust as players press forward on a destructive (yet predetermined) path; quipping about the
fragility of our lives in the face of our desires, giving pause in an onslaught of sarcasm and underhanded
insults; the Cave drives the entire experience, giving players a myriad of emotions they wouldn’t have felt
otherwise.  Just as the Cave controls itself and the experiences of the characters, it drives, controls, and
magnifies the experience of the players as they venture into its depths.

Supergiant Games’s Bastion (2011) has their character introduced fairly early on as Rucks, an old
survivor of the worldwide Calamity who retells the story of the Kid’s (player character) exploits across the
world to power their haven and make things right.  The entire narrative, as players move through it, is
told as a story that Rucks is conveying to another character as they wait for the Kid to return from his
final mission.  As something happens in, what appears to be, real-time for the Kid and player, Rucks is
able to talk about it with experience; for him, it’s already happened.  That’s the powerful thing with Rucks
as a narrator in Bastion: he reacts to the player’s actions.  Move through the game on the linear path?
 He’ll talk about it.  Pick up a new weapon, or swap out a particular weapon?  He’ll talk about it.  Get
punched by bad guys a few times?  He’ll talk about it.  Fall off the edge of the playing field and seem to
fall to your doom?  Rucks will even talk about that, and any other number of ways the Kid seems to die.
 In many ways, Bastion is a good game(hyperlink, accolades), but it truly was the narration that propelled
(hyperlink, Wired review) it leaps and bounds above other narratives.

The dynamic narrator, reacting to the player’s decisions in-game, helps to immerse players in the world
they’re exploring; that’s powerful in itself.  But Bastion goes even further with Rucks: he’s weathered, has
seen a lot, and it shows in his voice.  He’s seen the world die around him, and sees its only hope off into
the great unknown.  Aside from being a narrator, he is a character, both in and around the narrative; he is
his own person, for all that he is describing the story as it has already unfolded.

Like many other features, a narrator can be used well in a story, or it can be poorly tacked on to the
product.  The pitfalls are large with narrators in video games, but if one can clear the gap as The Cave
and Bastion have, they open up a new level of storytelling.

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Interactive Storytelling -
Narrative Techniques and
Breaking the Fourth Wall
Methods in Video Games

Main menu
Next »

Spec Ops: The Line

1. Project Description

2. In the Beginning Breaking the fourth wall in video games is not a new phenomenon; horror games use it to frighten
and Throughout
players, bosses use it to “read the player’s mind,” and plot devices use it to convey information
3. Telling the Story
and Immersing the
past a character and towards a player.
Player

4. The Impact and the Spec Ops: The Line (2012) uses and shatters the fourth wall, not to impress or impart wisdom, but
Aftermath to mentally tear down a player.  As players continue in Captain Walker’s crusade through Dubai,
5. Conclusion the loading screens, once fonts of  basic knowledge and tips and tricks, take a turn: instead of
informing you how to throw grenades, they begin asking,  “How many Americans have you
killed today?”  “Do you feel like a hero yet?”  Reminding you that “There is no escape,” “This is all
Search your fault.”  Suddenly educating you on the characteristics of white phosphorus after using it
unwittingly to take out a platoon and kill a camp of civilians, on the idea of  cognitive
View Recent
dissonance, quoting military suicide rates.  Assuring you that, amidst everything you have
controlled Walker to do,  “You are still a good person.”

Captain Walker never sees these loading screens.  Only the players will.  Each one speaks directly
to them in a way that the acts in-game, however shocking they may be, simply don’t.  While, yes,
players control Walker through a field of white phosphorus-fueled destruction, up a building in
which every ‘enemy’s’ life back home is shared with them, around the damned city of Dubai on an
attack helicopter firing at full power, and help orchestrate the slow and eventual death of every
person in the city, it’s so different.  The  moment of pause the game provides with just the right
quote or question in a loading screen is sometimes just as powerful as first seeing the destruction
caused with white phosphorus earlier in the game.

For me, it was asking if I  remembered why I even came to Dubai.  I couldn’t.  The game had
swept me up so perfectly in everything that I, as a player and orchestrator of all that happened,
could not remember why I had allowed Walker to go this far and keep going.  And more than a
boss examining your memory data to see what games you’d been playing, more than a game
pretending to glitch and restart, and more than an ancient god turning to me, the character-
controller, and sharing life-changing in-game knowledge with me, not the character, more than
any of that, The Line forced me to pause my game and think about everything I had done up to
that point, trying to retrace every life I took to get to where I was in-game.  And I couldn’t.  But I
didn’t stop.  The game burrowed deeper with a few  quotes than many others have and ever will.

And of course, there’s the moment when players finally find the soldier they spent the whole game
looking for, and all he does is berate Walker for his actions.  But who controlled Walker?  Who
kept going, laying more and more waste to the aggressors and innocents around them?  Who
wouldn’t stop?  Even though Konrad, the soldier in question, is looking and talking to Walker,
players controlled Walker.  As much as he is talking to Walker, Konrad is just as much  talking to
the players.

That’s the power of breaking the fourth wall.  While it can be kitschy and fun, it is also immensely
powerful as a narrative tool, especially if used with the  intent to impact.

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Interactive Storytelling -
Narrative Techniques and
Works Cited
Methods in Video Games
Nintendo EAD.  Super Mario Bros.  Nintendo, 1985.  Nintendo Entertainment System
Main menu
Nintendo R&D4.  The Legend of Zelda.  Nintendo, 1986.  Nintendo Entertainment System.
1. Project Description
Nintendo R&D1, Intelligent Systems.  Metroid.  Nintendo, 1986.  Nintendo Entertainment System
2. In the Beginning
and Throughout

3. Telling the Story Square.  Final Fantasy.  Nintendo, 1987.  Nintendo Entertainment System.
and Immersing the
Player
Nintendo R&D1.  Super Metroid.  Nintendo, 1994.  Super Nintendo Entertainment System.
4. The Impact and the
Aftermath
Konami Computer Entertainment Tokyo.  Silent Hill.  Konami, 1999.  PlayStation.
5. Conclusion

Bungie.  Halo: Combat Evolved.  Microsoft Game Studios, 2001.  Xbox.

Search
BioWare.  Mass Effect.  Microsoft Game Studios, 2007.  Xbox 360
View Recent
BioWare.  Mass Effect 2.  Electronic Arts, 2010.  Xbox 360

BioWare.  Mass Effect 3.  Electronic Arts, 2012.  Xbox 360

Irrational Games.  Bioshock.  2K Games, 2007.  Xbox 360

2K Marin.  Bioshock 2.  2K Games, 2010.  Xbox 360

Irrational Games.  Bioshock Infinite.  2K Games, 2013.  Xbox 360

Yager Development.  Spec Ops: The Line.  2K Games, 2012.  Xbox 360

Bizzocchi, Jim. "Games and Narrative: An Analytical Framework." Loading... – The Journal of Canadian
Game Studies 1.1 (2007): Web.

EA Redwood Shores.  Dead Space.  Electronic Arts, 2008.  Xbox 360

Bissell, Tom C. "Fallout." Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter.  New York, NY: Pantheon, 2010.  Print.

Infocom.  Zork I.  Personal Software, Infocom, Activision; 1977.  PDP-10.

Koster, Ralph. (1999) Video Games and Online Worlds as Art. [Website], viewed 30 January, 2014,
<http://www.raphkoster.com/gaming/games-as-art.shtml>

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