video-games

Something Changes When Story Moves From A Book To A Game

/ Logan Sidwell / Leave a comment

I didn’t start my writing journey with books. It wasn’t short stories or fan-fiction either. My original medium of storytelling was a bit more improvised. 

Star Trek Simulations.

It sounds a little silly, but for the first five years of my storytelling journey, I was a game master. Crews of birthday parties and corporate events would show up, I would give them a mission, put them on their ship, and send them on their flight. Whenever they spoke to the computer or the main engineer or an alien, it was usually me. When the ship took damage and smoke rolled in near the security terminal, I was flipping the switches.

It’s where I cut my teeth. It’s where I learned how to make the big moments of a story pop. And when my time flying starships came to an end and I made the move to telling stories in books, I discovered how unprepared I was.

Telling a story in a book is one thing. Telling a story in a game is something entirely different.

First and Third Person POV

Realistically, it isn’t just a split between games and books. It’s a split between interactive media and non-interactive media. When a reader reads a book, they expect to be told a story. When a player starts a game, they expect to be the story.

In a book, the main character is the main character. In a game, even if there is a main character, the real protagonist isn’t inside the game, it’s the person holding the controls. For a game to feel engaging, it needs to engage not just with the moving avatar on the screen, but with the human being that’s driving the decisions.

Much like in books, games have two main pov styles. First-person and third-person. Note these are different from where the camera is. Those familiar with books and movies will probably understand gaming’s third-person approach to storytelling. There’s a character on screen with a history, traits, and a connection to the world. 

A game like God of War tells the story of Kratos trying to raise his son in a cruel world controlled by the gods. When things happen, they happen to Kratos and Kratos reacts to them. He changes as the story goes on. This makes sense. This is close to traditional storytelling.

For games, first-person perspective storytelling is a complete 180.

A book uses first person to connect more deeply with the protagonist. We’re closer to the main character than ever. We can see their thoughts and how they decide how to act in the world. Games do the opposite. In the first-person perspective, the main character is washed away, made into nothing but a vessel for the player to control. It’s an effort to place the player directly into the story. Now when bad things happen, they don’t just happen to the character, they happen to the person playing. 

In DOOM, the players inhabit a character only known as Doomslayer as they defeat demon hordes. In Legend of Zelda, the players play Link, a character who never speaks and simply reacts to the world. Even though Link is shown as a real person in the game, he has no distinct attributes, only the ones a player projects onto him.

The Gameplay is the Story

When I first began simulating starships, I found the moments that were most story intense were the least engaging for participants. They didn’t care about two other characters arguing between one another to decide the fate of a planet. They didn’t care about the lore that set up the story. 

In a game, cutscenes are skipped. There’s a reason for this: The main character doesn’t need development, after all, the player is the true main character. And if the main character doesn’t need development, then the only kind of story events that matter are the ones that change the gameplay.

In games, a story is what happens to the main character and what they do in response. If something changes in the world, it has to be at least in part triggered by the player’s actions. And when something happens in the story, it can’t just have emotional weight, it has to mean something for the gameplay.

I used to play a typing game. You were in a cage descending into the depths and sharks would emerge from the darkness with words written on their belly. I’d type the words and the sharks would go away. It was fun, but the story wasn’t exactly engaging. In fact, the setting could have been replaced by a hundred other settings and I wouldn’t have even noticed.

This is the trouble with splitting story from gameplay. If halfway down, the operator radios in to tell me they’ve been in love with me for years, it doesn’t mean anything. The operator isn’t real, the love isn’t real. But if they radio in to tell me all our shark research has allowed us to slow the shark’s attacks, that does mean something. It changes how the game plays, so I become invested in that element of the story.

It’s hard to accept. The story of a game is only as good as how it affects the gameplay. This is where the phrase ‘ludonarrative dissonance’ comes from. If the gameplay and the story aren’t telling the same experience, the player disconnects from the half they don’t care about.

In the world of starship simulation, cutscenes between characters became a no-go. If I had something important to share, it needed to be delivered directly to the crew, and it had to change how they approached the mission.

Interactive Storytelling Workarounds

There’s a certain selfishness to a player’s approach to the story. They only care about what affects them. So how do you tell a story about complicated characters and nuanced situations in a way that makes the player pay attention?

I’ve found three ways:

Optional stories, passive stories, and mysteries.

Optional stories are exactly what they sound like. If 50% of players don’t want the lore, don’t force it down their throats. Sidequests are great, but some people are in a hurry. You leave the B-tier material in the game, but as optional content. Games are a bit like a walk down a buffet line. Everyone gets an entree, most people get the sides, and some people pick up a dessert at the end. In books, everybody gets the same experience. In interactive media, we don’t have the same luxury. It’s up to us to meet each player where they are instead of demanding they enjoy things they don’t like.

The idea behind passive storytelling is finding a way to sneak details into the experience without bogging down the gameplay. Gameplay is king. But if we can find a way to deliver a few lines of dialog without interrupting anything, then there’s no harm in it. This is how God of War told a character driven story, they’d give the player a level to traverse and the characters would talk amongst one another on the way. It’s like playing a podcast while working out. The player’s unrelenting drive to do things is fed, but the context of the story sneaks in with it.

Mystery is exactly what it sounds like. Players enter an area, make observations, and form their own conclusions about the situation. If anything, I think mysteries actually are better suited to interactive media than books. My most successful Star Trek story was one where the crew was coming to save a trapped squadron. When they arrived, they’d discover the squadron was gone. After a brief investigation, they’d discover a wormhole leading to who-knows-where. Without telling the crew a single aspect of the story, they figured it all out, and within a minute or two, they’d inevitably enter the wormhole with no plan on how to get home.

Conclusion

Games come with entirely different expectations. A reader expects a story. A player expects an experience. This post didn’t even discuss handling player freedom, needless to say that’s a rabbit hole for another day.

I had to make some adjustments when I switched from interactive media to direct storytelling. I imagine a lot of D&D Dungeon Masters go through a similar experience. They realize the main character can’t just be a vessel anymore, they need personality, background, and a particular view on the world. Every character can’t just talk to the protagonist anymore, they need to be living, breathing parts of the world with their own motivations.

Both mediums are difficult. Both mediums highlight different strengths. For games, accomplishment is the greatest payoff. For books, it’s usually something a little more philosophical.

If you get a chance, consider writing a story for a game someday. Nothing captures the difference in formats quite as much as watching your audience glaze over the moment you force them into a cutscene.

Logan Sidwell is a sci-fi and fantasy writer from Utah. He started as a writer and director in Ed-Tech, he now strives to marry his background in Computer Science and his years of storytelling to create fun, compelling ideas that explore new ground in technological and fantastical settings.


Check out my debut novel: The Human Countermove

“The Night Hunt” Is a Book Structured Like an Action Game

/ Logan Sidwell / 1 Comment

Video games used to be a core of my media diet. One of my favorite genres of games was the action game. Dark Souls, God of War, Hollow Knight, a million more just like them. Whenever one got good reviews, I’d buy it on the spot. As soon as it was downloaded, I’d turn on whatever show I was watching on one monitor, and spin up the game on the other. I knew I wouldn’t need to give it my full attention because the narrative structure of action games is pretty much set in stone. Like walking in a pair of old, worn in shoes.

Reading The Night Hunt by Alexandra Christo gave me that same warm, familiar feeling.

The Action Game Structure

The protagonist of a story has to start out weakened. It’s not wise to give the player full access to the entire control set from the start, we need to start weak so we can get strong. In the Night Hunt, Atia is the last of her kind, and after a terrible mistake, she is cursed. Most of her power is ripped away, and mortality looms over her actions.

How can she get cured? Defeat a vampire, a banshee, and a god.

Games love the number three. Defeat the three undead lords. Ring the three bells. Find the three chalices. I think it’s because three is the perfect number to establish a pattern and let the audience get comfortable without becoming repetitive.

The story of The Night Hunt proceeds like an action game would. Atia and her ragtag band of characters travel to different parts of the world, journey through dangerous territory, and eventually face off against one of the three big bads. The bosses, if you will. With each victory, Atia gets a little of her power back. They do this in games too, best to let the player master one move at a time. That way when they face the final boss, they’re experts on the basics.

Spoilers ahead:

In the best action games, the final boss is rarely the real final boss. It’s sort of a rule of escalation. If you tell the player how things are gonna turn out at the very start, it’s boring. You have to overdeliver on your promises. It’s a bit of a cliche, action games start out with the protagonist beating up slime monsters, and end up killing god.

The Night Hunt escalates the exact same way. Atia has a very particular god in mind when she first sets out on her killing spree, a minor one. But when the time comes for the final fight, she doesn’t fight a minor god, she goes straight for the trinity of light, dark, and balance. You can almost hear the choir chanting latin phrases during the battle.

Characters

So the book is structured like an action game. For those of us who like an action game from time to time, it’s comfortable. From the beginning, you can pretty much anticipate the rate and rhythm of the story. But this isn’t a game, it’s a book. In games, the product is primarily about the tactile feel of the combat. You can give a player the worst dialog in the world, but if the controls are good and the bosses are challenging, they’ll still beat the game. Not so for books, in books, the action scenes have to serve a purpose in forwarding our character’s understanding of themselves, their relationships, or the plot.

There are two POVs in this story, Atia the fear monster, and Silas the Herald that dreams of being human. Despite all the action, what this book really is, is a romance. Two hurt monsters finding love and understanding in one another. Atia goes on a journey to understand the broken state of the world while Silas goes on a journey to discover his true self. Both stories weave nicely into each other by the end of the book, with a few good twists along the way.

This is where The Night Hunt escapes the accusations of being a videogame. The characters and their relationships actually matter. Who a person was, and who they’ve become shapes the outcome of the battles and the end to the story. In a game the cutscenes get skipped and the player hardly even notices. In a book, the action is nothing but a vehicle to get us to the next plot moment.

Is This True of All Stories of Violence?

When I think of the structure of The Night Hunt, I compare it to something like “Death’s Door”, which has a quite similar premise, I start to wonder. Is The Night Hunt accidentally crossing genres? Or have we stumbled across the ‘universal story’ of violent heroes?

Think of movies. Think of John Wick.

He starts off weak, and an unfortunate circumstance forced him to take action. He works his way through target after target, both him and his opponents escalating their skills with each interaction. And once he reaches the cause of the inciting incident, once he achieves his goal? He sets his sights even higher. Burning down not only the people who wronged him, but the entire system that allowed that bad thing to happen.

It’s a power fantasy. We start as a regular Joe, get wronged by some systemic flaw in society, then we build our skill and fix the entire system all at once. Who needs other people when one maverick can do everything solo?

But when I zoom out and look at all the stories like this, John Wick, Nobody, The Night Hunt, Dark Souls, Another Crab’s Treasure. All of them leave off with the same lesson in mind: Once it starts, there is no end to violence, except usurpation. A lot of stories like this end in a cycle. For all the action the hero did, they end up becoming the problem they set out to solve.

The Night Hunts ends on a happy note, but when Atia has the power of a god in her hands I can’t help but wonder, has she become everything she sought to destroy?

The first reviews of my debut novel The Human Countermove are in!

“A thrilling, intelligent and morally engaging novel that rewards both strategic thinking and emotional investment.” – Patricia Furstenberg, 5/5

“I was impressed with how well the author wrote about gaming so that it painted easy images, especially for someone like me who is not a gamer.” – Rosie Amber, 4/5

I Built my Book Around a Board Game

/ Logan Sidwell / Leave a comment

Board games are usually designed to be played by a group of people. The mechanics are built so that each person has high agency over their own moves and can pursue their own strategy to win. When someone takes ten minutes to make a move, it’s because the player has so many considerations, there’s a real need to think. 

If a person can barely track their own moves in a game, how could a reader track an entire game inside a book?

Despite being well aware of the challenges, I put a board game in my first book. In fact, I built the story around it.

LINE. Leadership in Near Emulation. I designed it from scratch. I was able to design a game that was compelling to read about and one that was fun to watch. From the moment I started, I gave myself one important instruction: Keep it simple.

If I ask a reader to track a hand of cards, or all the powerups affecting one of my protagonist’s heroes, I’ll lose them. The only people who understand all the subtleties of a game of Settlers of Catan are the people who played it, and even then, no one knows the entire story. Too many mechanics, too many unknowns, too many surprises. For a reader, an environment like this is hard to track and it doesn’t feel fair to the protagonist.

In LINE, there are only two pieces. Squadrons and walls. The squadrons move from tile to tile and fire on the enemy, while the walls do exactly what walls always do. Simple. At a glance, a casual viewer can glean the entire status of the game. “The enemy army flooded across the map”, or “Every squadron was hunkered down, hiding inside the base and waiting for the ambush.”

Like any good action scene, I avoided over-choreographing the movements on the board. We don’t need to know every intricate detail, we just need to get a feel for the moment, and the challenges facing the protagonist.

On a real board, an attack would translate to a bunch of dice being rolled or a computer running dozens of Random Number rolls. But a reader doesn’t need to know any of that, they just need to know the outcome and what it means for our hero. “The enemy’s walls crumbled under weapons fire. Finally, our battle of attrition was coming to an end.”

As in most board games, some turns completely transform the game, or even hand the victory to one player or the other. But other turns are quiet, an incremental step forward, a plodding move building up to the battle’s climax. When turns like this arise, I use the timeskip. Just like we don’t need to see every piece, we don’t need to see every moment. What I’m really giving the reader isn’t the livestream of the game, it’s a recap with live commentary from the protagonist. All the exciting bits, all the cerebral moments, none of the fluff.

“On Turn 8, a few walls repelled enemy aggression. By turn 24, I had completed ‘The Fallen Star” and set to work preparing an attack.”

But what really defines competition isn’t what happens on the board, it’s who our protagonist is facing. The adversary.

A board game in a book can be exciting on its own. But after a game or two, it gets stale. The audience has seen everything the mechanics have to offer. What really makes a game, or any sport exciting, is the human element.

Every player has their own flavor, their own approach to playing that gives the game a fresh feel. That feeling is informed by the player’s motivations, their intent, and their background. From the way the opponent moves a piece, we can derive how much experience they have with the game. From the way they rock in their chair, we can sense mental distress. It’s these reactions that help us contextualize the game’s importance without having to say it out loud.

Even the protagonist shows these attributes. When they make a mistake, sometimes it’s a ‘clench your fists’ moment, and sometimes it’s a ‘rip your hair out and scold yourself for throwing everything away’ blunder. Since we’re in their head, we know the reason behind their reaction. The whole book has been building to a single game, and now it’s all over because our hero got distracted by a bird for half a second.

But not everything in the story can be a board game. The game may be the most important thing in the protagonist’s life, they still need a reason to play it. The more drama around the game, the better. The harder the opponent, the better.

For my book, I chose the hardest opponents possible. AI Minds. With each game, it’s not just a difficult match, it’s an impossible one. In games like this, the buildup is as exciting as the game. How can Zouk win? What strategy could he possibly use to beat something that plays more games in a week than he does in a lifetime?

The prep matters. It’s like scaling a mountain. If someone casually scales the whole thing on the first try, how difficult was it in the first place? But if we see that person map out their entire approach, do practice runs, and scrape grass from the cracks. We get a much better understanding of the difficulty at hand. If the climber has been practicing jumping from one rock  to the other for months, we’ll be thinking about that challenge the whole way up the wall.

After writing a couple LINE games into my story, I still felt the stakes could be bigger. If these games really are determining the future of Ion, they should be played in a stadium. Even better, they should be played with real people on the field. Every game matters to the protagonist, but a few field games are a great way to turn the dial all the way to MAX.

Zouk’s coach helps him work on strategy, finding the right approach and memorizing hundreds of moves. But more importantly, building the game up in the reader’s head. When Zouk thinks he’s found a blindspot in The Mind of Strategy and Warfare’s Algorithm, he spends the entire game getting his units into that blindspot. The tension builds. We may not know all the little nuances of Zouk’s play, we may be skipping five or six turns ahead at a time, but we know what’s coming. We know everything depends on one moment. Will War notice their blindspot, or will Zouk pull off a historic victory?

The Human Countermove is now available for purchase!