Finding the Thread: Building Strong Narrative in Games

I’ve finished Starfield’s main story and one of the faction lines, and I think I’m done with the game for the moment. I’m intrigued by their clever NG+ gimmick, and I’ll revisit it after a patch or two. Overall, I’d rank it as a solid game – perhaps an 8/10 – but it never got its hooks in me the way past Bethesda games did.

Of course, playing Starfield prompted me to reinstall Skyrim for the umpteenth time. After the usual multi-hour process of setting up a good mod list, my Redguard two-handed warrior is merrily chopping his way through Forsworn camps in the Reach while ignoring the main quest entirely. It’s like I never left!

What keeps me coming back to Skryim – and the Elder Scrolls games in general – isn’t the mechanics. There are better RPGs out there. But Skyrim’s unique blend of environmental storytelling and a massive breadth of mostly simple content lets my mind freely wander, following a unique narrative for every character I play. It’s great gaming comfort food.

The collective industry wisdom says the main quest in Skyrim isn’t a great story. Various quests and faction threads have creative moments, but players hoping for content approaching the narrative strength of Witcher 3’s Bloody Baron quest or the thoughtfulness and coherence of Disco Elysium’s amazing setting are going to be disappointed.

Still, whenever I dive into Skyrim, it’s not long before I’m fully engaged in my own hero’s journey. It’s illustrative of how leaning on the audience’s imagination to fill in the gaps in a paper-thin narrative can be a powerful storytelling technique.

It’s a critical point for game designers to consider. What approach are they going to take to tell a story? How much should a game’s narrative be driven by a great designer or writer, and how much by the player?

Keeping Authorial Control

A lot of narrative designers are wonderful storytellers. Like a novelist or a movie director, they have a clear vision of the story they want to tell players – the emotions the players experience at each step, and the plot beats the characters will progress through.

A great example of a game with a clear narrative direction is the excellent Gone Home (2013) by the Fullbright Company. The narrative of a young woman returning to her family home and uncovering secrets of both the house and her own family is powerfully told, elegantly presented, and hits a strong emotional beat at the end that recontextualizes everything the player has experienced.

Gone Home, clocking in at around four hours from start to finish, is structured like a short story, where every moment and line of dialogue reinforces the game’s core theme. Despite the player being able to explore the family home’s environment in relative freedom, it’s also a mostly linear experience. Players will be led through a sequence of discoveries, hitting more or less the same story beats on their way to the game’s powerful conclusion.

It’s a perfect example of what most people are talking about when they’re talking about games with strong narratives. Gone Home is a title that is often used to show how video games have matured over the years and are now able to tell stories that rival other media – novels, TV shows, and movies.

The challenge for designers looking to tell very specific stories to the player is how to provide a sense of agency within the tight narrative structure that’s required to get to a powerful conclusion. 

Gone Home does this with a degree of exploratory freedom and the ability to pick up and examine most things in the house. Disco Elysium achieves similar results with roleplaying elements and a diverse array of player choices along the way. Pentiment marries its interesting medieval murder mystery story with a set of difficult decisions that end up changing the player’s perspective, but not the overall plot.

But it’s a mistake to think the only way for a game to have a strong narrative is through a tight, focused authorial vision. Games, unlike movies and novels, have the power to create compelling narratives – even without a writer’s direct involvement.

Imagination Running Free

In the last few years, I’ve had a front-row seat to my son’s growing interest in games. Now fourteen, his interests have mostly leaned toward whatever his favorite YouTuber is playing, but with a developer for a dad, he’s got broader gaming interests than a lot of his peers.

Like most kids, he had a long Minecraft phase. While Minecraft does have a thin veneer of predesigned narrative in its quest to kill the Ender Dragon, for the most part, it’s a purely systemic sandbox.

Nevertheless, the stories my son would excitedly tell me about his Minecraft sessions – or the stories we built together playing cooperatively – could be as powerful as a written narrative. We had exciting escapes from danger, tragic stories of loss from Creeper explosions, and triumph as we completed impressive builds.

Players have always told great stories about all kinds of games. From that last-second victory over an opponent in League of Legends to that alternate history timeline in your last Hearts of Iron IV game, interactive entertainment has a way of generating exciting and thrilling narratives that can equal or surpass narratives hand-built by professionals.

In fact, in this age of democratized content creation, games can be a platform for absolutely fascinating traditional storytelling inspired by systemic content. 

For example, high production values coupled with thoughtful narrative threads are at the heart of YouTuber JLK’s series on DayZ. The series is much like sitting around with a friend, chatting excitedly about your last shared session. JLK’s content amply demonstrates the way great stories are created out of thin air when players interact with robust game systems.

Systemic player-driven stories are at the heart of Skyrim, which I finally talked my son into playing. He’s not at all interested in the main storyline; his eyes glaze over whenever the characters start talking, and he can’t keep the various Jarls straight.

But early in the game, when emerging from Bleak Falls Barrow, he stumbled across an old woman’s cabin on the way back to town. (Those of you with a hundred-plus hours in Skyrim know exactly who I’m talking about.) He had that perfect moment where Skyrim’s game design all clicked – a bit of emergent combat between a flame Atronach and the old woman, easily exploited for eventual profit and a first house to store the books he’d been collecting.

My son loved that experience and couldn’t stop talking about it. It was just one of dozens of great moments in the larger narrative he was building in his mind about his character – none of which was directly created by a Bethesda designer. Instead, the Skyrim team opened up a systemic fantasy playground and let players run wild in it.

Aim for the Right Target

This, then, is an angle to consider for any designer pursuing the elusive holy grail of a great game story: where on the spectrum does your design fall? 

Do you have a tight vision for your story, and want to take the player through precise narrative beats? If so, does building a ton of alternate paths through your game help or hurt your vision? Games like Pentiment and Gone Home end the same way every time, but a player’s second journey through Pentiment is more varied than a player’s second journey through Gone Home.

Or are you more comfortable building deep, robust game systems – creating a game where the players experience a more flexible, dynamic narrative? Maybe you’re building a game like Civilization, and player stories will revolve around how nation-states rose and fell. Maybe you’re making a robust roleplaying game like Skyrim, with hundreds of quests – each one paper-thin, but just enough story for players to fill out the rest of the narrative in their head, placed in the larger context of their character’s overall journey.

When I worked on Westwood’s Blade Runner, we talked a lot about this range of options – though not quite in the terms I’m talking about the topic today. The game gets what I consider a surprising degree of nostalgic credit for being flexible and responsive to player choice. But in the end, Blade Runner leaned far more to the side of the tight, authored narrative.

While we built a few alternate endings, the overall arc of the story was always the same. As in the movie, the player’s detective would hunt down a group of replicants. Within that structure and its Hollywood-tinged script, we had to work hard to find ways to give the player genuine agency.

The player’s character would spare or kill replicants along the way, with a payoff at the end that hopefully felt like the logical outcome of their decisions. Different characters would be replicants on each run, and the player could make mistakes and kill a human if they weren’t careful. 

In this sense, Blade Runner’s structure was closest to Pentiment’s model. Moments of genuine player choice were as real as we could make them and impacted the story, but the choices were still contained in a relatively tight narrative playfield compared to a more systems-driven game like Skyrim.

In the end, there’s no wrong answer. The full spectrum of approaches to building story content – full authorial control, player-driven, or a hybrid – can lead to great games. 

I’m skeptical of narrative designers who look down their noses at more systemic genres of games, but I also think tightly executed narrative visions that drive games like Gone Home are powerful when backed by strong writing.

What’s important for designers is to understand where on that spectrum your game falls. That understanding – paired with knowing your team’s strengths and weaknesses – can help inform the type of narrative you attempt to build.

Narrative in games can mean a perfectly crafted writer-driven story – something like The Last of Us, something so great it leads to awards and lavish HBO adaptations. 

But it’s not the only path to creating compelling game stories that players will love.

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