Game narrative: an overview

A lot of people out there consider Final Fantasy VI (released in the U.S. as Final Fantasy III) to be the best Final Fantasy ever and one of the best console RPGs. While I haven't played the game for at least a decade, I count myself among the adoring masses.

One of the things I enjoyed so much about Final Fantasy VI was the story. There were lots of characters with full story lines (and some without), the story went on forever and had a truly epic scope, which I always love, and it had a villain that everyone loved to hate.

Rather than bore you with a litany of things I like about this game, I will direct you to Blogging Final Fantasy, which is written by worthier nerds than I.

The point, though, is that compelling game narrative is a thing rarely achieved. The reason has been debated for some years now, and there are too many viewpoints to cover in a single post. The crux of the issue lies somewhere around the issue of agency. Agency is the sense of power or control that a player feels within the game world.

Most games attempt to tell stories using cut scenes, which by definition remove agency temporarily to convey some narrative material. This convention leads to the logical idea that gameplay and story are somehow opposed and cannot coexist. A story, after all (according to most definitions), exists in the telling of events, rather than the living of events, which is presumably what agency allows us to do within games--to live a series of events, however mundane. A game without agency is no game at all.

So is game narrative just a film narrative broken up by periods of gameplay? I don't think so. There must be some deeper possibilities, but they may require adjusting our definition of narrative. Take Myst, for example. The "game" consists of puzzles, but these puzzles uncover a narrative, told through the two brothers, Sirrus and Achenar. Still, this narrative is not the story of the player's experience -- the player arrives after most of the brothers' narrative has concluded.

Ah, but there's the thing: in Myst, the player's experience completes the story. The two brothers are locked in limbo until the player arrives to decide their fate (and his/her own). An unbroken sense of agency becomes necessary for the narrative, not opposed to it. What's more, in another brilliant move, the makers of Myst made agency the ultimate goal of the game. The only reward for "correctly" completing the game is the continued ability to explore. An incorrect decision traps the player in a prison book and removes agency--the player can no longer move or interact with the world.

Narrative in games, then, perhaps lies somewhere between traditional storytelling and straight-up, means-ends gameplay. And maybe the quality of game narrative should be measured by how successfully compelling events can unfold without removing the sense of agency.