Importance of Employing Storytelling with Games

Storytelling with Games
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Storytelling with Games
Pairing stories and games are good. By their nature, games tend to stimulate the imagination of individuals (Elkind, 2008). Even without stories, games can remain exciting, and players can do without them. However, stories function to give games form and substance. Developers have utilized games for telling stories. It has been one of the ways to motivate players to become more engaged in the game and continue playing. A majority of the popular games have stories included in the gameplay. According to Burks (2015), storytelling with video games achieve something that the other common forms of storytelling do not; they put individuals in the experience. The players cause things to happen or have events happening to them. This essay is based on the ideas of Richard Rouse III. Rouse is a creative director and a designer who has worked in the video game industry for the last fifteen years. Rouse is currently a design lead at Microsoft Game Studios where he has worked on numerous projects like Castle Storm and Sunset Overdrive. As a professional designer, Rouse is best known as the designer of The suffering (2004). He has also authored a book on game design.
Rouse commences by noting that computer games do not necessarily require to tell stories. He gives an example of Tetris which does not have any storytelling and Centipede, where the only story found in the game is in the setting of the game. However, other games like Thief and Halo have incorporated a story and made it work as part of the gameplay such that players enjoy the game more than if it had been without a story (Rouse, 2001). Other games like Myst and Ico have made the story a critical component of the games such that one cannot imagine playing the games without the story. Rouse know that stories are powerful tools that authors utilize to change the way individuals perceive the world. Novels, for instance, can captivate the readers to identify with the characters and change the way they live their lives. A game goes further than a novel and offers individuals the ability to become the main character in a story with the ability to make choices that determine the outcome of the story (Mukherjee, 2015). In his presentation, Jordan Sparks, a multimedia artist, designer, and educator agrees that games should be engaging. Sparks believes that games have more potential than just being “fun.”
In his presentation, Artur Palma Mungioli indicates that stories in movies and games should follow the three-act structure: protasis, epistasis, and catastrophe. In the first act entails the incident where the character and relationships are defined. The second act involves confrontation. Here, a character faces problems while dealing with the antagonist. At this point, character development takes place, and that is why the act is referred to as “rising action.” The last act entails the resolution of the main story and all the subplot. An action sequence in games usually follows it. Mungioli believes that the three-act structure is critical in-game stories. However, Rouse disagrees with such a linear way of writing stories for games. He laments that one of the main stor...