Books and films are a linear form – a one-way communication from author to audience. Games are interactive, and increasingly players are discovering that the stories that matter most to them are the ones that they express through the game rather than the one that the game’s predefined narrative attempts to tell them. From the Machiavellian wrangling of Eve Online’s player-sustained universe to that last, improbably perfect, sticky grenade that garners you a Killtacular, player expression is rapidly overshadowing the script and setting. Here, we talk to three veteran writer-designers about where, if anywhere, traditional narrative belongs in a medium where interactivity is king. Ubisoft’s Clint Hocking, creative director on the narratively experimental Far Cry 2, is joined by Valve’s Chet Faliszek, master of Left 4 Dead’s mutable multiplayer storytelling, and FunCom’s Ragnar Tørnquist, the man behind the rich fiction of Dreamfall: The Longest Journey and the mysterious upcoming MMOG The Secret World.

What was the last game in which you became really invested in the narrative?
Clint Hocking: Honestly, I find that a very hard question to answer. I can’t think of one off the top of my head. I’m so rarely invested in the fiction and the narrative. I’m usually getting a beer when cutscenes are happening.
Chet Faliszek: Maybe Grand Theft Auto IV? I got interested in your choices there – who you got to hang out with. The storyline kind of opposed the goofy gameplay, so there was a point where I just kind of got aggravated with it and wouldn’t have minded just being able to watch the cutscenes. Some of the early ones, at least, were really well done. Call Of Duty 4 as well is another one that has a really simple story, but when I’ve just got to shoot bad guys, that’s fine.
Ragnar Tørnquist: I think two games came up last autumn: Dead Space and Fable II. Fable II has a silly, silly story but for some reason it’s a very gripping narrative – I think it’s the involvement you have in the world that makes it much more engaging. And Dead Space because it’s a great abandoned spaceships story, and that always works for me.


_{^{Clint Hocking, creative director on Ubisoft's Far Cry 2 and Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory}}

That example of Grand Theft Auto IV – with its opposition of silly play and gritty storyline – do you think this points to a larger problem with the way narrative and interactive media go together?
CH: I think there are great problems. For me the great story of GTAIV was the playing of GTAIV. I actually stopped playing it after about five or six hours because I didn’t want to pay attention to what was going on with the characters and the authored narrative. Dead Space was a blast, but for the life of me I couldn’t tell you what it was about in terms of its authored narrative. For me it was about this moody ambience – and all of that stuff is authored narrative as well, but it’s experiential. The story of an alien artefact on some planet? I found it totally forgettable. So I think there is some kind of incompatibility there. For me, the story of Left 4 Dead is a couple of orders of magnitude more interesting than the story of Half-Life 2, just because the story of L4D is what I’m creating with other people, minute by minute, solving real problems in an interesting way.
CF: That was definitely the goal that we had for L4D. When you played it, we wanted you to walk away not talking about the story of Louis and Zoey, but about the story of you having that social thing. To me that’s so much more interesting. It’s always going to be gameplay first. Even if you have a great story and lousy gameplay, I’m still going to have to do the gameplay. You can’t close your eyes during the boring parts.
RT: Obviously I disagree with some of this. I come from the narrative side in gaming and for me games and narrative can go hand in hand brilliantly. It doesn’t have to – you can have a great game and even a great game story without the narrative, but I think a well-told story in a game has the potential to really involve you and to let you explore it in way that other media can’t. We have so much potential here and far to go, but I definitely think they go really well together.
CH: If we can use games to explore narrative then that’s great, but I don’t play very many games where I can. For the most part, the extent to which I am manipulating the story is detracting from the story, not enhancing it. Until my interaction with the story makes me care about it more, I’d rather play a game and then read a book than play a game with a story that isn’t as good as a book – particularly when it’s wrecked by the difference between what I’m doing and what I’m told is actually happening. I’d rather have two distinct experiences than one that feels like a bastard child.