Today I've been reflecting on what feels different between writing games and writing films. In writing a game, you go broad and focus on motivation. In writing a film, you go deep and focus on emotion. Both mediums feel enormously challenging to write well for.

In a game, a lot of what you write is setting up the world, the characters, and finding only just the right amount of flavour to motivate players but never take something away from them. You need to provide a lot of room for them, and that comes at the expense of narrative depth.

You're providing more of a stage for them to play on, and writing the minor characters, and doing everything you can to provide just enough of a character framework that they understand their role, and then you have to kind of step back in a lot of ways.

Films are able to communicate much more intense, mich deeper character emotion, but your story is presented in a much tighter, much more constrained format. You have so much less room to breathe, and have to be much more disciplined about what you choose to keep.

In games, when we talk about narrative pacing we're mostly talking about *variety*. In a film, pacing is about structure -- you get the pacing wrong and things don't hang together properly. Your audience will know it doesn't work, even if they can't pinpoint why.

It's also amazing how differently you write based on how much of an uninterrupted experience you think your audience will have. You write a movie expecting someone to sit down and experience it, uninterrupted, for 90-150 mins. In a game, you really have no idea.

It's no wonder that the games that hew most closely to cinematic storytelling techniques are able to present the "strongest narratives". But these narratives are largely borrowed from the medium of film. They are certainly the most familiar, the easiest to recognize.

The purest form of narrative in games is the one derived from game systems -- this is player narrative. A layer of more traditional cinematic storytelling can add a sense of structure & pacing that helps create an emotional connection with the player -- this is authored narrative

You can also create an extremely strong emotional connection with a player via system story (player narrative), but this tends to be outside the traditional cinematic narrative model. That is more about anecdotal story -- like how you would recount a sporting event.

This is the kind of player story I shared recently as I recounted an experience my son and I had had playing Sea of Thieves together. That story had nothing to do with any traditional narrative framework in SoT. It was 100% about systems and player behaviour.

You see experiences on both ends of the spectrum. An experience like Dear Esther or Firewatch is almost entirely authored story; there are no systems per se. A game like Minecraft has mostly systems-based (player) narrative. Both these approaches influence the ownership you feel.

Big open world games tend to embrace both systems and authored story, and combine them in one experience, allowing the player to opt in to whichever end of the spectrum they wish, and also to coast along a middle ground through the majority of the game.

It would be very interesting to see what narrative/systems story innovations could come from an interactive narrative approach -- a game genre or format -- that offered the constraints of a film/screenplay. For example, a 60-minute game (ignore the biz viability for a min).

Would that format stagnate at one point and become mostly about content variety while the platform and interactivity stagnates? I guess that's kind of what happened to Telltale games at some point...

It's likely there is more to learn, narratively, from the relationship between game storytelling and long-form linear storytelling like TV. Not meaning games should adopt an episodic structure, per se, but that the rules of delivering story in TV are probably more applicable.

Between GaaS/"forever games" with open-worlds and drip-feed narrative drops, and more of a Westworld (theme park) approach to living world content, there's a reasonable chance that games and television essentially cross-over in the next 5-7 yrs.

And by "cross over" I mean, become essentially indistinguishable from each other, as a medium. Like why watch TV if you can lose yourself in an incredible, story-rich game setting continuously for 5, 7, 10 years.

My guess is this is part of why Netflix is experimenting with interactive narrative via TV. They can see the writing on the wall. This is also why game sub services like GamePass feel like the future -- we'll essentially start selling our annual "shows" to the platform holders...

...so that they can retain a subscription paying audience, month after month.

If you are a developer/creator of games, you should be thinking about this, and how you should build your team and IP in order to capitalize on this multi-year shift.

I think it's clear that all the major IP in games are slowly shifting to this model. And also then using film/TV now as an audience acquisition tool. It's not longer a case that games should be used to bring an audience to a film. Films will be used to bring audiences to games.

Cementing games as the dominant entertainment form of the next 100 years.

(If we can fix toxicity in our communities. If we can't, we are fucked and our medium should just die off.)

/FIN

I don't have any Bitcoin to sell or buy from you. Sorry!

(FWIW, I consider myself to be about a 7/10 in terms of mastery of interactive narrative (storytelling in games, through systems) and maybe a 5/10 in mastering the film/script storytelling format. So I'm hardly an expert and there is still a lot to learn!!)