When Stories Happen on Their Own

Everquest had its own stories, but the
best were those created while
playing with friends.

For the last 30 years, stories have played a big part in video games. It all started as the industry transitioned out of high score focused content a la Pac Man, Frogger, et al, and into saving princess / the world / the universe. Sometimes they could be pretty simple like in Super Mario Bros. where players helped Mario rescue Princess Peach from Bowser, other times things could be a lot more sophisticated with RPGs and adventure games leading the charge.

This has continued to the current day, but all of these have been pre-written stories laden with scripted events, dialog trees, and the like. There's a fairly fixed path laid out before the player with only so many options available to them as to how they can progress, which is a natural outcome of having a game that goes for a passive form of storytelling in the same vein as film or literature. It's been the staple of how narratives unfold in games for decades now, but things have slowly started to change as online multiplayer has cemented itself in the medium. New types of stories are starting to unfold in games, often events that developers never expected for their creations. It's happening as players make their own stories organically by naturally making their way through a game. While still in its infancy, the trend is picking up steam, and making for some very interesting experiences.

I first noticed it in the days of Everquest when I'd be playing with friends and we'd be doing our thing, staking out an area to fight monsters, exploring, or whatever. We didn't really give it much thought at the time, we were just playing a game. However, when we met up at school or work, we'd get to talking about what we did in the game the night before, laughing about a battle gone wrong, some interesting NPC we met, or a tough boss fight we did. It was pretty much a story of our own adventure rather than something entirely pre-planned from start to finish in a single-player game.

Dota 2's best stories can be what happened with that guy that
screwed up mid.  "Best" may necessitate air quotes in this case.

Granted, this is something that has existed for centuries with people meeting up to do something, whether it was to socialize, play a game, or something else, then going on to talk about it later at the pub or some such, as opposed to partaking in the narrative of a book, film, play, and so forth. It's just that now the activities have expanded into the virtual world, where all sorts of wacky hi-jinks can take place. Those Dota 2 matches, MMO raids, and marathon sessions of Counter Strike are now just as much fodder for organic narrative as going out with one's friends was prior to this.

It does lead me to wonder, though, if this can be guided somewhat by a more focused direction being pushed from a game itself. Can it be multiplayer and open-ended while still touching on certain themes, and getting participants to think about them in a certain way. In real life, shared experiences can shape a group of people, and sometimes they are indeed focused in a certain area, like friends all going on a trip somewhere, or maybe a bunch of people taking a class together. To what extent can games do this? Can they give gentle nudges to the people playing to get them thinking about certain things, while leaving things open enough that players can approach it from a wide variety of angles?

Sandbox games can do this too, but not to the same
extent.

To an extent, I think sandbox games have been trying to do this. They can have extremely open worlds for players to explore and make their own fun in. There are a lot of things to do, and the overall themes of these games tends to veer in fairly specific directions, but they do still feel quite rigid in how they guide those playing them towards specific events. They're like stepping onto a movie lot. There could be all sorts of scenes and props everywhere, but as many of these as there may be, their possibilities still feel somewhat finite. As fun as the Saints Row games are to play with a friend, the story still progresses in a linear fashion without much deviation, and the same goes for other such games. I suspect that it could turn into quite the major undertaking to make a game that was open-ended, multiplayer, and that could combine the opportunity for events to unfold organically as they often do in online games with a strong theme that could get those playing the game thinking about certain things.

In the end, though, the simple fact that games have increasingly allowed stories to unfold on their own is great. I don't think it needs to become the be-all, end-all of things. I still quite enjoy the Planescape: Torments, Shin Megami Tenseis, and Legacy of Kains of the world, but it's nice to see that more and more opportunities are arising for organic narrative, and I do hope that this continues to grow well into the future.