How to enhance storytelling in video games (featuring friends and scattered notes)
Spend time with your friends, leave notes everywhere. Implicit and explicit.
Core ideas
Storytelling may be implicit or explicit. Implicit refers to methods where the hero is not told directly what to think. Explicit ways give the hero the meaning of something directly. The hero should not be forced to agree with the meaning.
Implicit, show-don't-tell information may be more interesting. It gives players and readers a more active role, where they can decide meaning on their own.
Your world is as important as your characters.
Friends and companions are just as important. Make them their own characters, do not use them as narrative contraptions.
Combine any type of media and genre which suits your game.
Make the hero's home a place to rest, to spend time with companions, to enjoy visiting. The home may be part of quests. It may act as contrast to the more active parts of the adventure.
Use different kinds of recorded knowledge: written, audio, visual. The contained information may be anywhere between explicit and implicit.
Sprinkle small lore details everywhere in the story, to achieve complex worldbuilding.
Systemic, randomized, and procedural design may be used to add variety, choice, and replayability. Do not use them alone. First, fill your world with hand-crafted storytelling focused on quality. Add systemic gameplay to support custom made content.
What's the story?
Every game does not need a story, or a complex, award-winning branch of events. By virtue of the medium, video games can live with simple or non-existent stories.
Stories can augment gameplay and transform games into classics because they make us care about the characters and their world.
Games are great at conjuring their own meta-narrative - chess, Civilization, many others create organic stories while unfolding under the player's control. That said, there's a bunch of ways to enhance storytelling.
Implicit and explicit, show and tell
Players are your friends. You invite your friends over to regale them with your amazing adventures. When you're done, your friends may be astounded. But they'll remind you to maybe invite them along for the ride instead of simply telling about the amazing times you've had.
Showing is better because it places readers and players into a more active role. Instead of explicitly telling players how to feel, we let dialogue, action and world design do the talking.
Players become active participants, and decide the meaning of events on their own. In games, let your characters and world design do the work.
Give players choice in how to deal with characters and events. As good writers, RPG designers should exist in the background, and not force players onto a set path.
Even if you have strong convictions, in RPGs they should be delivered by characters. Couple this with notes, events, world reactivity, and your players are free to decide their own fate.
Implicit refers to more or less indirect means of characterization: quest endings, world design, general reactivity.
Explicit means are direct ways to deliver information: character opinion, the game telling the hero how to feel, and standard linear stories.
Complexity from simple systems
At the micro level we have to know what each system does, and how to achieve its purpose with minimal design. At the macro level, all the small systems will interact to achieve complexity.
In writing style, complexity may be done by using a simple structure: short sentences made of simple words.
In narrative design, we get complexity by telling the stories of multiple characters. Each one needs enough time to develop properly, essentially becoming their own sagas. Not every story needs multiple intertwining threads, so this approach is intentional.
In worldbuilding, we combine endless small details, explicit and implicit, to achieve a complex impression of the universe. When characters act, react, and have different opinions on the ideas which define a world, you create a complex cosmos from simple interacting elements.
In game design, we create simple systems with a clear purpose. Different systems grow in complexity, but for a game's vision, we must always know what each system does. To achieve complexity at the macro level, we want to have as many simple systems as possible to interact and affect each other.
Notes galore, in various forms
A cliche, to be sure, but an effective one.
People leaving written or audio diaries everywhere is suspicious, but it works. Notes are a direct, point-blank means of developing the characters and their world. They're explicit - obvious as exposition mechanisms - but effective, especially when other means are costly.
Writers, remember brevity, the universal law of art. No matter how much you'd like to drone on forever, it is imperative you adhere to the tenet of sticking to the point. Short and pulpy does the trick.
The hero’s home
Everyone wants their own shelter to brave the narrative storm. The protagonist's home offers a natural contrast - the urgency of the main story versus the calm enjoyed in their own love nest.
Nothing may happen at home, but it's better if a lot does, though not all at once.
The hero may simply sleep alone, read, organize his or her artifacts and expensive furniture, or spend time with friends and family.
Quests may begin or take place at home, though never treat the home as a quest dispenser only.
The home acts as meta-narrative mechanism - after a long and murky dungeon, you rest away the night while contemplating your new Sword of Flaming Ice.
Your mind wanders with the heroics of the day while dreaming of the dragons of tomorrow. Don't forget the window to a beautiful view and the moody ambient music.
Spend time with friends
In the game.
Friends are not only useful to pass the time. They can tell you stories you haven't enjoyed yourself. Stories that have been, are, and will be.
Visit your friends, tell them your stories, and listen to theirs.
Spend time away from saving the world. Speak with friends about your grand adventures and about the tiny beautiful details which make the world its own character.
Companions may be mixed with other gameplay systems.
Companions may follow you along and take advantage of your loot-collecting ability.
Companions may visit you at home, maybe stay for the night if they're agreeable.
Companions may agree with you or not. They may influence quests for better or worse.
Companions should be their own characters. Always treat characters as the heroes of their own story. Avoid using people as narrative contraptions.
Companions may turn on the hero eventually. They have their own quirks and intentions, which may put them at odds with the hero.
Jokes aside, spend time with friends, both in games and life. Good friends are always inspiring.
Systemic stories
Systemic design ia a somewhat abstract concept, because you cannot always plan or predict its outcome.
Complex systemic interactions results when we combine many simple systems.
In games, these systems are character abilities, gadgets, AI response, world design, and all the ways they interact. Systemic design may be a double-edged sword: it ups gameplay complexity, but it may result in chaotic behavior.
Nonetheless, RPGs benefit from a complex web of interacting systems. The increase in complexity should lead to multiple ways to bypass obstacles, and different outcomes for player action.
In modern times, this may be easier thanks to artificial intelligence. In abstract, systemic gameplay functions the way text and art generators do:
First, the system is created with a basic set of rules, for a general understanding of player action and effect.
Second, the design may be trained by itself and with examples of behavior, to understand how humans use different skills in different contexts.
Third, it may use another layer of "censorship" to decide if positive effects are useful enough, and if negative ones are not breaking the game.
Here lies the paradox of systemic design: the more you plan it, the less free-form it may be, and thus not be systemic at all. Systemic gameplay implies a degree of unpredictable chaos in its design, which must be controlled with pre-set rules.
Examples of systemic gameplay:
Allow the player to destroy walls and natural formations. The locations must be as free-form as possible.
Combine player abilities to create new unknown skills. For the chaos element, add a random effect to new abilities.
Give the player items with chaotic affects, both friendly and negative. To balance usefulness, create a large pool of useful effects and keep the negative ones to a minimum.
Infuse characters with minor randomized changes in preferences. The changes are more or less unpredictable, making use of personality traits and thresholds. Personality changes may be friendly or hostile to the player, and should be justified depending on the character.
Create a large pool of random encounters, each with their own randomized parameters. For each rule, make sure the player can deal with encounters in at least two ways.
The caveat: systemic gameplay is a part of randomized design and procedural generation. In most games, it will not replace custom-made hand-crafted content. Randomization, procedural generation and systemic gameplay should be used alongside hand-crafted worlds and design, to add variety, choice, and reactivity.
The eternal return of environmental storytelling
You set out to explore the magical post-apocalyptic world filled with raiders, mutants, cannibals, and cannibal mutant raiders.
What is one of the first features you know you'll find in the fire-bathed wasteland? The skeletons still hanging around after hundreds of years, of course.
The geographic, topographic, natural or man-made cliche of storytelling environs remains strong thanks to its naturalism. The world reacts to natural laws or to human intervention, potentially providing new locations to explore.
As always, there is no escape from naturalism.
Consider:
What kind of events make sense in your world.
How much time has passed since the event took place.
How the landscape has changed.
Skeletons strewn everywhere make sense depending on the context. But not so much when the world is filled with them and raiders refuse to pick their pockets.
As always, environmental storytelling is more or less explicit:
Natural or man-made formations, intact or not.
Different types of media which reveal world and character details: audio, visual, written.
The remains and remnansts of major and minor events: wars, battles, inter-faction conflict, family brawls, angsty sports fans proving their frustration.
Small epiphanies
A "secret" of good storytelling is to not fill any scene with an inordinate amount of details.
Good storytelling and lore rely on diversity of naturalist elements and pacing. To let your writing, your characters and your reader breathe, spread your lore snippets across the story.
A character that has a strong opinion and can reveal a new facet about the world.
A controversial event that will not be immediately explained and leaves the hero wondering and seeking information.
A note, recording or love letter that reveals emotional information about peoples' lives.
Worldbuilding and lore snippets spread out like seeds are small epiphanies. They do not need to be complex or explained immediately.
They are the unsung heroes of lore, details which make the world a character of its own, alive and lived-in.
Ideally, do not crowd scenes and pages with myriad details. Spread, sprinkle and spice worldbuilding details across the story. Let each scene breathe and achieve its aim by avoiding irrelevant details.
Gather your party
There's no adventure without the heroes and their friends. Characters come in all shapes and sizes: humans, creatures of myth, supranatural beings, mysterious eldritch entities, personified natural elements. And just as important, the world.
If you have difficulty distilling what a piece of storytelling - quest or object - should do, remember characterization. If storytelling feels bland, you may almost always point to a core issue: lack of characterization.
To amend, return to core principles: relationships and dimensionality. Consider if the current storytelling scene develops the character's relationships with people and ideas, or their presence in time and space.
Experimental techniques and media
When you design a game, tell stories through every medium and genre that fits your setting and style.
Combine all the above methods and mediums: visual arts, sound, music, mechanical design, writing, cinema, theater, breaking the fourth wall, dialogue, silence.
Here stands a core advantage of games: to combine all forms of expression, to enjoy the strengths of each medium and genre. Implicit or explicit, games can do everything and mix different mediums to various degrees.
Implicit storytelling is more interesting because it lets us distill meaning on our own, and serves our need for discovery.
Treat your players like smart explorers and let them discover and decide meaning without an excess of explicit hand-holding.
Combine any medium needed, more or less explicit, to let players decide the meaning of something on their own.