gaming equivalent of the “show, don’t tell” rule is “do, don’t show.” In games, you
want to keep players actively involved in the story, “doing” actions instead of
being “shown” them. In-game storytelling is a key part of that. In addition to maintain-
ing the players’ immersion in the game-world, in-game storytelling makes the
players active participants in the game’s story instead of just flashing it in front of their
eyes.
External Materials............................
Many games have used external materials to tell their stories. This was particularly
true in the 1980s when disk space was severely limited and designers could not fit all of
the story they wanted to include onto a single 400K or smaller floppy disk. Some
designers used manuals to communicate the game’s back-story, writing a narrative that
would lead players up to the point where they would start playing the game. Some
games, such as the classicWasteland, even used “paragraph” books, where the game
would play for a while, and then when players got to a storytelling juncture they would
be instructed “Now read paragraph 47.” Sometimes this referencing of the manual was
used as a form of copy protection, in that players would be unable to play the game with-
out having a copy of the manual.
Arcade games also used external materials. Often the names of the game’s charac-
ters were written on the side of the cabinet instead of in the game. Some cabinets even
included a few sentences further explaining the game’s setting and the mission at hand.
The artwork featured on the sides of arcade game cabinets used superior graphics to
add a small amount of depth to what meager story lines the games may have had.
These days storytelling in manuals and other materials is generally frowned upon,
and rightly so. We are certainly no longer presented with the technological limitations
that necessitated storytelling through external materials. Furthermore, often the sto-
ries told in the manuals were not written by the game’s designers or even with their
consultation. Therefore these stories can hardly be considered a part of the game itself,
but rather the marketing department’s attempt to create a game-world they could hype
on the back of the box. Sometimes a few text pieces that set up the game’s action are
216 Chapter 11: Storytelling
ThoughThe Suffering
did use some cut-scenes,
a lot of storytelling was
done using in-game
storytelling techniques.