Hand in Hand: Building Better Narratives for Games

Game design was a less specialized vocation when I first entered the industry. Teams were smaller and most designers wore all the hats – systems, content, and narrative.

Still, my previous experience as a writer and editor meant I often got tapped for narrative work. My first contract job was creating single-player campaign story content for a game at MicroProse. My first lead design role, on the Blade Runner project at Westwood, was initially focused on taking a simple initial linear script and transforming its scenes into all the story content needed for a nonlinear game.

Westwood was an early proponent of strong story content in games. They had a lot of great storytellers, including a couple of dedicated writers. The studio also had an early motion capture studio and a director on staff. All the famous live-action cinematics for the Command & Conquer series, and all the voice acting for all their games, were done in-house.

It was at Westwood that I picked up a crucial lesson about narrative development for games. I don’t remember who I first heard it from, but the framing of the problem always stuck with me.

The gist was this: a game’s narrative is both better and easier to build when it directly reinforces the game’s mechanics. When the player’s goals match that of the protagonist, rather than feeling disconnected from the story in separate cutscenes that have nothing to do with the gameplay, it makes everything simpler.

The lesson was particularly applicable as the studio crafted the stories for its Command & Conquer real-time strategy franchise. I also remember a pointed, genre-specific variant of the same lesson: if you’re writing narrative content for a real-time strategy game, you’d better be writing a story about a war.

Baiting the Proper Hook

I spent a short stint building a couple of levels for Command & Conquer 2, but my exposure to real-time strategy was more as a player and fan than as a designer. During most of my time at Westwood, I was working on Blade Runner and other titles (such as the pirate game I wrote about last week).

When I left Westwood, I didn’t know I’d spend the next decade working primarily on real-time strategy games – first, as lead designer on Battle Realms at Liquid Entertainment, then a long stretch on Age of Mythology, Age of Empires III, and Halo Wars for Ensemble.

I remember thinking a lot about Westwood’s lessons as I wrote the story for Battle Realms. The game was unlike a lot of other real-time strategy games at the time. The armies were smaller, but the level of engagement with each unit was higher. Thematically, the game was steeped in the mythology of kung fu movies, with stylized art and over-the-top unit animations.

While a wide-scale global war didn’t make sense for the narrative, a small-scale conflict provided the proper hook. We based the story around a hero, Kenji, seeking to reclaim a stolen kingdom – starting from nothing, building up an army, and finding allies.

It turned out to be the perfect narrative approach for the game. The mechanics of what you were doing in the game exactly matched what Kenji was doing in the story. 

With the narrative foundation in place – a simple hook that players were easily able to connect with – we were able to bite off more experimental elements. For the final game, we wrote two entirely separate and parallel versions of the story. The player’s actions in the game’s first scenario organically dictated which version of the protagonist the player would get – the good or evil Kenji – and what kind of kingdom the player would create from the ashes of war.

The choice was ambitious, and in retrospect, insane given the studio’s small size. Building what became two entirely separate single-player campaigns was a lot. In the end, we found the right shortcuts to get it done – leveraging the same maps and repurposing scenarios that fit into both storylines.

But the Westwood lesson proved itself out again. Writing a story that reinforced the mechanics of the game – a personal narrative for a hero, but one that was still about a war, in the form of Kenji’s rebellion – made everything else easier, from building levels to figuring out who the other characters were.

Narrative Sprawl

I didn’t have a hand in the Age of Mythology narrative; it was already set in stone when I joined Ensemble. But I remember thinking it didn’t quite fit the model I preferred. It was a sprawling character-focused romp through Greek, Egyptian, and Norse myths that had to move its core band of heroes through time and space in often implausible and abrupt ways.

Yet, seen from a different angle, the story structure was necessary for the role narrative served in the game. The primary goal was to expose the player to the vast diversity of map environments, civilizations, and options that Age of Mythology offered – a taste of every dish from the vast buffet of the game.

So though it wasn’t exactly a story about a war, the narrative still served the game’s mechanics. Still, we sometimes struggled with making a scenario idea fit the narrative. Why were you starting from nothing yet again, building up an army and a town from scratch? In Battle Realms it made more sense – the protagonist, Kenji, was moving from province to province, reclaiming his kingdom.

When I was tapped to co-write the Age of Empires III story alongside lead designer Greg Street, I tried to fuse the lessons I’d learned working on previous titles. Could we tell a strong character-based story that exposed the player to everything the game had to offer, while at the same time focusing the story on battle and conflict to reinforce the core real-time strategy mechanics?

The problem was challenging. Basic elements like how to plausibly transition the player from environment to environment had to be considered. Continent-hopping through magical gates, as the party of heroes did in Age of Mythology, would have stretched credibility in a more historical game like Age of Empires III. 

We settled on focusing on a single family through the generations and their conflict with a mysterious Illuminati-like cult. This hook gave the player a plausible motivation to dip in and out of historical conflicts – one generation fighting the cult during the French and Indian War, another during Simon Bolivar’s revolution – and also gave the designers freedom to craft real-time strategy scenarios in different eras.

We stretched credibility in the first expansion pack, Age of Empires III: The WarChiefs by shoehorning in two previously unmentioned generations of the same family – but overall, the game’s narrative foundation got the necessary job done.

After a few years at Ensemble, I refined what I’d once seen as the hard-and-fast Westwood narrative lesson. Game narrative is at its most powerful when it reinforces game mechanics – but also when, on the flip side, the mechanics reinforce the narrative.

The Lesson Still Applies

The lessons I describe above apply to every genre, not just real-time strategy games. When I wrote the intentionally goofy narrative for Robot’s Orcs Must Die! I kept it simple – matching the easily understood gameplay. 

The mechanical goal: keep orcs from escaping through a rift with an arsenal of violent weapons and traps. The story: a dumb “bro” character understands that mission perfectly, but not much else about how the world works.

Game design theory has come a long way since I first started in the industry. The next generation of narrative designers inherently understands the lessons I’m describing.

The days of significant disconnects between narrative and mechanics – big-budget games with endless cutscenes that have nothing to do with the player’s core experience – are mostly gone. Players are more discerning now, the standards are higher, and narrative designers are dedicated specialists who work hand-in-hand with the rest of the team.

When I think about the games I’ve played in recent years where the story was the most powerful, there are several I’d hold up as perfect examples of the lessons I learned early in my career. 

Disco Elysium, a game heavy on difficult choices featuring an amnesiac, flawed main character, delivers a deep narrative role-playing experience about starting over and defining who you are. And more importantly, like the old Blade Runner game, you play as a detective – and the game is mechanically about being a detective.

The Game of 2023, Baldur’s Gate 3 – mechanically a near-perfect implementation of Dungeons and Dragons fifth edition rules – weaves an epic and classic role-playing adventure full of interesting characters, placed squarely in the heart of the popular Forgotten Realms setting.

Pathologic 2 is mechanically a survival game with a time limit – and your character is a desperate doctor in the ruins of a devastated town, balancing his own well-being with his desire to help others. The pressures the player feels in the game are identical to the pressures felt by the main character, which in turn synergizes their goals.

In bad games, the narrative and the mechanics compete. In the best games, narrative and mechanics are happily married – walking hand-in-hand, a perfect partnership that’s more powerful than either alone.

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