What Fiction Writers Can Learn From Video Games

Note: This article was originally published on Litreactor in 2019

I’ve been playing video games about as long as I’ve been a writer, and for several years I was in the game industry - as a tester, designer, and writer. 

Many of the fiction writers I know don’t play games, especially those from an older generation, and often look at them with disdain - like they’ll rot your brain and give you rickets merely by engaging with them. But games have evolved a lot since the days of early Mortal Kombat and Pac Man, and are now more complex, engaging, and narrative rich than ever. They can do things that may change your perspective on your fiction, and offer a richer palette of experience to draw from.

And if you like games, and just needed an excuse to play some, here it is.

Error is the Best Learning Mechanism

A game is often defined as a structured form of play with rules. And in my opinion: in order for a game to truly be a game, it must have a fail state. In order for a win to matter, there must be a way to lose. Otherwise there's no challenge. No reason to struggle. No feeling of accomplishment.

Franchises like Dark Souls were designed so that you would die. A lot. The appeal of the game is mostly how challenging it is to complete it. Other games, like Stardew Valley, don't have fail conditions per-se, but there are more and less optimal ways to play. (Some may even argue it isn't a real game, but a 'simulator'.)

When you first start out playing a game, you are probably going to be bad at it. You don't understand how the controls work. The best strategies. The paths to take. There are hundreds, probably thousands, of hours of videos on Youtube on how to improve your skill on League of Legends. And oftentimes when you're playing a particularly difficult sequence in a game, the fun yields to frustration. You feel like quitting. Maybe yelling at the game. 

But if you push through that feeling, you get to the other side. You keep going. The frustration gives way to satisfaction. And you'll often find that there's nothing you can't do if you put enough time into learning the mechanisms and getting through it.

To think of error as something that can be avoided is an error itself. It should not even be thought of as a failure. 

So it is with writing.

Work through the frustration when you get stuck. Don't berate yourself for "failing" when you write something that isn't quite landing. This is just part of the game, and the only way to fail is to stop playing. Yes, it sucks to write 3000 words and then realize you can't use any of them, or realizing that you need to shelve a story because it's not conveying the message you wanted. But you had to get there to realize it wasn't working. You could not have achieved a success state without a fail state.

If you start thinking of it as just part of the process, it will stop hurting so much. Failure is just how these things work. 

And if you couldn't fail, it wouldn't feel so good when you succeeded.

The Medium is the Message

Video games are the medium of interaction. They are different from every other kind of art in that sense. There can be art installations that are interactive, or video-games that are art - but each has its intrinsic medium, a core that if removed, would make it something else. Without being able to interact, a game would cease to be a game.

Like every piece of art, a game tells a story. Story seems to be the thread that runs through every human medium. 

The best game designers understand that the story of a game should be told via interaction iself. An excellent example of this the Japanese designer Fumito Ueda, who created Ico, The Shadow of The Colossus, and The Last Guardian. There is almost no dialog in either of these games, and the stories are told via the happenings in the game.

In Ico, a boy with horns is left to die in an abandoned fortress, where he meets the queen's captive daughter, a young woman named Yorda. During combat Ico must protest Yorda or she'll be captured by shadow enemies and dragged to a portal in the ground, thus ending the game. Ico must also hold her hand as they walk along exploring the fortress, and if he leaves her for too long without supervision shadows will come and drag her way. The idea that Ico must protect Yorda is thus not created by dialog, but by the mechanics of the game itself. 

Every element of the game - the animation, atmosphere, art, music, combat, and controls - come together to create a story that could not have been told via any other medium. 

Contrast this to a game like Last of Us, a critically acclaimed game that basically thinks it's a movie. While it has great dialog and art, most of the story is told via cut-scenes, and the gameplay itself is incredibly basic: Sneak around, kill zombies, place ladders to get to other places where you can place another ladder. Don't get me wrong, The Last of Us is a good video-game. But I think it falls short of being a masterpiece, because instead of using the medium of a game to tell its story, it relies on fallbacks like cinematic cut-scenes at most of its pivotal moments.

It's important to remember when writing books, that you are not creating art, a movie, or a game. You are telling a narrative via text. Too often writers will try to create a story like they are describing a movie, and it shows. The text is sparse. They set up a "shot" by describing everything in the background. The "camera" of the POV is zoomed out, so we never get a glimpse into the character.

I think this comes from a fundamental misunderstanding that the medium is the message (And read more books, damn it!). Text is not just an inconvenient vehicle for your vision. It is a part of the narrative itself.

Writing fiction does things that other mediums cannot. So if you want to create a masterpiece and not just a second-rate movie made out of text, you have to utilize the medium itself. 

When you are writing: Experiment. Play with text. See how certain words leave different flavors on the page. See how shaping the paragraphs changes the meaning. Explore the rhythm of sentences. Use more specific words to see how they subtly change the image left in your mind.

Change the Background to change the scene

Back when I first started playing games in the 90s, it seemed like every game on a console followed the same formula: There would be a forest level, a city level, an underwater level, an ice level (I hated the goddamn ice levels. Couldn't see a damn thing.), and a fire/volcano level. Now games tend to be a more sophisticated in their level design, with more subtle areas of interest, but it was a good way to keep things fresh. Game mechanics can often get repetitive, so it was important to switch up the backgrounds so that you felt like you weren't just doing the same thing over and over again. A great example of this kind of "old" game style is Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time.

Of course, the best games don't just have different backgrounds, but different kinds of game content: But creating new mechanical systems, with lots of coding hours, is often way more complicated and more expensive than just uploading several new art assets.

Resident Evil 7 is a good example of a more modern, "grown-up" kind of level design, (Heavily taking inspiration from the defunct P.T.,) largely taking place in a single lot in the middle of a swamp, but with different levels that feel seamless, from a flooded basement to a garage with hanging bags of meat, to a house full of bugs, to a weird underground Saw-esque trap maze, that make you feel like you're progressing and retains visual interest while maintaining a cogent theme.

This is related to writing because oftentimes I read stories that seem to take place in the same, gray miasmic environment. Fights take place outside of bars. Existential crises take place inside of bars. People drive longingly past bars. You get the picture. Or I guess, the lack of one.

Even while reading plain text, we're visual creatures. We need stimuli to engage our minds in the story. A simple trick to keep people more engaged in your fiction is simply by creating different kinds of landscapes and environments for your characters to interact in. Instead of having an existential crisis on a bar, imagine if it was while parachuting, or on a canoe, or while hiding underneath a bed while the boyfriend of the girl you just slept with is hunting you down. And simply by moving the environment, the context changes, so that your fiction will feel more fresh and engaging as a result.

Think of it as a trick to allocating less mind resources while getting pretty much the same results: You're creating art assets, not building expensive code.

One great example of this is the game D4: Dark Dreams Don't Die, which features one of the most epic button-mashing brawls to take place on an airplane.

Humans love movement, even supposedly arbitrary movement. When things are moving, our eyes are drawn toward those things, because generally if something is moving - that means it can potentially kill you and you should be paying attention. That's the reason why everyone stares at you if you decide to go running. Not because they're judging you (They probably are), but because our eyes can't help but be drawn to an object of interest. In fiction, this also implies. 

People are more likely to pay attention if your character's declaration of love takes place while they're running from a giant prehistoric crocodile in a swamp, vs. in yet another bar. That's just science.

Humanity is the X Factor: Multiplayer Games

I know, you're sick of hearing that characters are the most important part of fiction, but I swear this is a fresh take.

While I just talked about changing up the environment to maintain interest, some games do not take this approach. League of Legends is a MOBA (Multiplayer Online Battle Arena for you neophytes) where every match takes place on the same map. People log thousands upon thousands of hours on the same environment. It's probably one of the most addictive, most played games of all time. The League Championship Series gets more views than the super bowl.  So what keeps the game from becoming boring?

For one, strategy becomes more important when novelty wears off, and everyone else knows what everything is on the map. There are also tons of characters with different skills to master, and that means tons of different ways to play and team compositions.

But most importantly - it's the people. People are fighting against people in the arena, and it's the only thing that changes every game. People rarely behave in the way that you expect, and when you are teams of 5 vs. 5, the combinations of ways in which people can act are almost infinite. Whenever you play multiplayer, the people become the most important part of the game. Games aren't sophisticated enough so that they can change with enough variability to create endless content on their own. But people can do that.

From the game production side: It doesn't matter how many times Quality Assurance tests your game, how brilliant your designers are, or how much focus testing you do - when a game is released people will behave in unexpected ways, and play/interact with the game in ways that the designers never intended. (For example, speed racing in Mario 64 or on the darker side, money laundering via the mobile game Clash of Clans.)

(That's not to say people don't behave in patterns. Sometimes they behave in patterns over and over again that people refuse to understand or acknowledge, because they don't know enough about human nature. There is  a universal rule when it comes to custom content that developers rarely acknowledged in the past: If you allow custom content in your game, people will find some way to create dicks.)

Playing a multiplayer game can be an interesting study in psychology and sociology, especially if you must work on teams to achieve a common goal. If most of your understanding of humanity is via movies or other kinds of fiction, your characters will probably be stale and wooden, and follow predictable paths that were designed to create Hollywood-style arcs.  You need to experience how real people interact, deal with problems and solve them. A fast, easy way to do that without ever leaving your couch is via games, and in such an environment you can see how people deal with crises and confrontation more often, even if its simulated.

People exist outside the realm of fiction, outside the goals of plot, and every single one of us is the protagonist in our journey. Although there are patterns, people do not always follow rails, and there will always be those looking to break out of them. 

Not Just a Hero's Journey

Not every journey is a hero's journey. The reason the hero's journey is so often repeated is because it is the universal story of self-actualization. You start out weak, become strong, and then defeat the monsters that are trying to destroy you. Everyone can relate to that, because it's the story everyone wants to have. Story formulas aren't just things bestselling writers "made up", they are resonant pieces of our psychology. A bestseller often becomes a bestseller because it has more resonant components than other stories.

Then Joseph Campbell identified the hero's journey, saw the recurring patterns, wrote a book about it, and gave every wannabe Tolkien an easy to follow guide to create their own resonant stories. All well and good. We learn how to write better stories because of those who paved the way before us, and who identified the patterns that make up good stories that could then be easily replicated.

But the hero's journey is just one of many stories. And I would argue there are story formulas that we have yet to identify. Some of the greatest stories of all time, like Taiko by Eiji Yoshikawa or War and Peace or Game of Thrones, are not psychological stories, but sociological stories. Stories about large patterns, and how the psychological components intersect to create societies. And they have much more complex, moving parts than a hero's journey. (And as such, are more difficult to pull off.)

In order to create new stories, we often have to look to different mediums. There are plenty of video games that follow the hero's journey, but many of them do not. Games like Rollercoaster Tycoon and Sim City don't feature you controlling a single character, but you are a God-like omniscient present that creates a city or an amusement park.

Kenshi is a game where you start out as just another ordinary person, with no special powers or questlines, and you spend most of the first few hours getting the crap beaten out of you by wandering thugs. You can rise to power, but not because you're ordained to it - but because you worked to get there.

Even with games that seem to have no possible story - like Tetris or Solitaire - the player creates a drama in their head, with highs, lows, stakes, and victories and defeats. We can’t help but see stories. We think in stories, because a story is just the contextualization of data. And it’s possible that games can help you learn to tell new stories, and reframe the way you think of plot formula.

Recommended Games For Writers

Okay, if I’ve convinced you to play some games to improve your fiction game, here are my top game recommendations for writers. Most of these recommendations usually just feature Gone Home and Firewatch (Two excellent games, but they are in every goddamn list like this), but I’ve included a wide range of games that pertain to the sections above, not just games with a fiction-like narrative. Some of these, like Rimworld and Kenshi, are difficult games and best suited for people with at least some gaming experiences. Others, like Portal or The Walking Dead, are excellent for beginners.

Portal (1 & 2)

Soma

Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice

The Sims

The Walking Dead (Telltale, Season 1)

INSIDE

Rimworld

Bastion

The Fall

Kentucky Route Zero

Her Story

Saints Row: The Third

Kenshi