Despite the title, this post is about game design, not politics.
Specifically it’s about a topic I’ve spent a large portion of my career pondering: how to deliver meaningful, engaging narratives in games.
For some genres the answer is clear. Linear adventure games and other experiences where narrative is the primary focus can lean on traditional approaches from other media – a crafted storyline, cinematic cutscenes, and voice-acted dialogue delivered by interesting characters.
For other games that don’t lend themselves well to a linear story, a compelling narrative can still be generated using the best toolbox around – the mind of the player. With a bit of trickery and features that aren’t necessarily expensive to build, a game that lets the player’s imagination fill in the gaps can still deliver powerful story moments.
The Modern Approach
Once upon a time, innovative experiments in narrative design were primarily undertaken by small developers with nothing to lose.
Dwarf Fortress, in active donation-supported development since 2002, is “aggressively indie,” a passion project built by a tiny two-man team. Nonetheless, its randomly-generated worlds and histories can feel as complete and real as a hand-crafted game universe. Fans of the game took the foundation presented and embraced it, filling in the gaps in ways both hilarious and inspiring.
Big developers also found success with nonlinear narrative designs. Bethesda’s Elder Scrolls and Fallout series achieved great results with open-world games that, though they contained scripted narrative, relied heavily on environmental storytelling. While there’s a lot to criticize about Bethesda’s core design philosophies, their success is undeniable.
The industry, as the industry does, followed the leaders (and the money). These days, open-world games dominate the marketplace, and it’s much harder for a linear story-focused game to find an audience, much less a publisher.
Triple-A releases like Red Dead Redemption or Grand Theft Auto still include scripted storylines and hours of cutscenes. But the vast majority of time players spend in today’s open world titles is on activities of their own choosing, at their own pace, with their imagination filling in the gaps.
Mining for Narrative Nuggets
When I think about what type of games I want Scree Games to build, I want to focus on games that include at least some elements of narrative storytelling.
Building the kind of giant triple-A open world game that dominates the market today is neither interesting nor feasible for a tiny indie studio. And though I’m a huge admirer of what the developers of Dwarf Fortress accomplished, I want to build something more accessible.
One design approach that I’m finding helpful is to deconstruct games and learn from the most innovative features that generate story moments in a player’s imagination, but without being the primary gameplay mechanic or core focus.
Which brings me to Anno 1800 – the latest in a long-running series of city-builders.
The Anno titles are fiddly strategy games, relatively hardcore with extensive production chains and an almost puzzle-like quality, but a genteel pace.
The core gameplay of the Anno games has never really varied, though the settings range from historical Age of Discovery to science fiction. Anno 1800 focuses on the age of industrialization. It’s a fictionalized world, but one that intentionally mirrors history.
Like most city-builders, Anno 1800 casts the player in the role of an omnipotent ruler. You control every aspect of your pseudo-Victorian island nation. The happiness of your citizens (or lack thereof) is in your hands. Even outside the story-based campaign, there is an emergent narrative aspect to watching your sandbox city grow and thrive.
What caught my attention in Anno 1800, though, was not the core city-building mechanics, but a minor secondary feature – the newspaper.
Small Feature, Big Impact
Periodically in Anno 1800, your town’s newspaper editor will (accompanied by an appropriately nervous bit of voice acting) present you with the next edition of the town’s newspaper for your approval. The stories on the front page highlight major events that have happened in your city since the previous edition – trade agreements signed, major buildings built, ships lost – successes and failures both.
Each of the three stories will have a small gameplay effect – perhaps making your citizens pay a bit more in taxes, or pushing them to work a bit harder, or (in the case of a negative story) reducing their morale.
The twist is that the player gets the final say on what goes to print. At a cost of an ingame influence resource, you can replace some or all of the stories with…friendlier ones.
As a feature, Anno 1800’s newspaper is elegant. It reinforces recent ingame events, and at the same time, it creates a narrative decision moment in the player’s head: “I am in charge here. I can let the bad news go out unchanged, and be a champion of the free press. Or I can be heavy-handed and print only the news that I want.”
I don’t want to undersell the substantial effort the developers gave to the newspaper feature. Everything from the humorous text of the articles to the sad resignation in the tremulous voice of your nervous editor as you stomp all over his earnest efforts with a fake news story, is extremely polished.
That said, the newspaper is a tiny part of the overall game. The impacts of your choices are meaningful but not overwhelming – bonuses or penalties that last only until the next edition. It’s easy to see how, once the feature was designed, additional content in the form of a wide variety of possible newspaper articles could be added efficiently and at a low cost.
Still, every time the editor wants to show me the latest edition for my final approval, the history of my island city full of Dickensian factories is a little bit more interesting in my mind.
That’s storytelling – and also good game design!
Small features can make all the difference. What’s a secondary feature in a game that helped keep you engaged, even though it wasn’t part of the game’s core mechanics? Let’s chat in the comments!