One of the big concerns some people have with in-game storytelling is that players
may miss some of the story. What if players fail to see the story being told? Since play-
ers never lose control of the game with in-game storytelling, this makes it possible for
players to avoid talking to characters, witnessing scripted NPC behaviors, or reading
signs. It is true that locking players in front of a non-interactive cut-scene or scrolling
text is one way to guarantee that they see exactly what the designer wants them to see.
But, as I have stated previously, one needs to remember that games are an interactive
form, and the fact that players do not experience every last element of the story is part
of the nature of interactivity. If players are interested in getting the entire story, it is
their responsibility to seek it out. If players would prefer to just charge through the
game focusing solely on the gameplay, that is their choice to make. Indeed, having dif-
ferent layers of the story that can be discovered on playing the game a second time can
be a significant incentive for replaying the game.
InThe Sufferingwe used a number of in-game storytelling techniques. These
included simple methods, such as voices coming over the PA system, haunted tele-
phone calls the player would receive, notes you could pick up and read at will, scripted
scenes involving supernatural creatures, and the human companions players would
meet as they explored the game-world. All of these techniques stood on their own with-
out triggering a cut-scene or doing anything else to break the player’s immersion. One
of our more innovative storytelling devices was what we called in-game “environmen-
tal flashes.” These were basically visions of events from the game’s back-story,
typically played in slow motion with various screen effects overlaid on top of them, but
with the player maintaining control of the main character and still having the freedom to
look around the environment. Indeed, sometimes an environmental flash would be set
up to trigger when the player was literally standing in the middle of the apparitions, and
thus would want to rotate the camera around himself to see everything before the
vision suddenly came to an end. We found that, both for the environmental flashes and
other in-game scripted scenes, though players might miss them if they happened to
look away once the scene had started, the majority of players would see the scenes to
completion if they were oriented in the correct direction when the scenes started.
Thus, getting the scenes to have a good chance of being seen was a level design chal-
lenge where we had to place them where players naturally tended to be looking as they
ran through a level. Furthermore, we used special triggers that were not just based on
the player’s position, but also on where he was looking. These triggers would only acti-
vate once the player had a certain portion of the environment in a certain place on the
screen, further ensuring that the scripted event would be seen as we intended, all with-
out actually breaking the player out of the game. Finally, we were careful to include far
more story content in the game than you would need to get the gist of what was happen-
ing with the plot. Thus, if players only saw 75 or even 50 percent of it, they would still
understand the story and enjoy their experience.
Almost everyone has had an English teacher who emphasized the importance of
showing instead of telling in creative writing. Instead of being told that the people are
wealthy, readers should be able to read the author’s description of an area and from that
deduce that the region is populated by a prosperous people. For games, in-game story-
telling is the equivalent of showing, while out-of-game cut-scenes and other methods
are telling. Taking the idea one step further, Noah Falstein is fond of saying that the
Chapter 11: Storytelling 215