Game Writing and Narrative in the Future - Professional Techniques for Video Game Writing - page 174

could be freelance writers. But the unifying factor will be that professional-level
writers will be involved early on.
Additionally, game writing may eventually emerge as its own discipline, as op-
posed to being considered a mere subset of game design. Game audio—for many
years also considered a design subset—has already begun to emerge in this fashion,
much like game design itself broke off from game programming so long ago.
16.3 Far Future: The Emergence of Emergence
What about further down the road? What form might video game narrative take in
20, 30, 50 years? In order to even begin to guess where things are headed, it's useful
to get some perspective on where they really are today.
When we look at modern video games, it's easy to stand in awe of their eye-
popping graphics, motion-picture-quality digital audio, bone-crushingly realistic
physics, and continually evolving gameplay mechanics. And even in the arena of
story and character dialog, while the industry as a whole continues to lag in this area,
there are still shining examples of excellence in game writing.
However, in terms of the size of the story possibility space, today's games remain
shockingly limited with regard to what the player can actually do and how many
different ways the fiction can react to him.
How many meaningful narrative choices can a player make in a video game?
Choices that can propel the game story into entirely unexpected and original new
directions? The fact is, while many modern games do give the player the illusion of
choice or perhaps even provide a small set of meaningful choices that can result in
a small set of variable game outcomes, no game has come close to providing a truly
open possibility story space for the player.
Sandbox games tend to provide the player more of an opportunity to chart her
own course, but often the resulting “story� is not really a story at all, just a series
of events that may or may not be related to each other or form any kind of rising
action. The outcome (assuming there is one) is either a narrative mishmash that has
no perceived cohesion at all or a play space that regularly and inevitably corrals the
player back through the narrative gates that lead to the next sandbox.
Size Doesn't Matter
Modern video games, especially in the RPG and action/adventure genres, have more
and more voiceover lines, usually topping out in the tens of thousands. However,
despite these impressive numbers, the main limiting factor continues to be the need
for a human to write each line—meaning that someone has to anticipate every single
thing in the game that can be said by any character, ever.
This is a brutally constricting limitation, and it's a big part of the reason that even
games with hundreds of thousands of recorded words still have very limited narrative
choices and possible outcomes.