Part 1
Modern artists like to talk a lot about storytelling. If you look close enough, stories appear in every art form. Novels, films, paintings, poems, and music all tell stories in their own ways.
So, how do video games tell stories? The stereotypical "story game" probably comes to mind, full of scripted dialogue and cutscenes. In this stereotype, the gameplay doesn't tell a story – it's a totally separate part of the experience.
Yet, I've always felt like gameplay tells a story of its own. For example, I just played a game of Rocket League. I was losing by three points, but in the final minute I mounted a huge comeback. I tied the game up, and then tragically lost in overtime. That's a story, even if it isn't terribly interesting.
This isn't a particularly innovative observation. In fact, it underpins the often-discussed notion of ludonarrative dissonance. Critics use ludonarrative dissonance to identify conflicts between two key components of a game: the gameplay part (ludo) and a story part (narrative). In other words, ludonarrative dissonance occurs when the game's "narrative" and its "gameplay" tell conflicting stories. I like talking about ludonarrative dissonance because it acknowledges the story that gameplay tells.
That being said, I have a few bones to pick with the phrase. First, the terminology is vague and limiting. If gameplay tells a story, then how do we distinguish it from the separate "story" part of the game? Indeed, we need new terms: emergent story and framed story. The emergent story develops naturally as the player engages with the game, while the framed story is developed ahead of time by the game's designers. Emergent stories usually occur during gameplay, while framed stories often appear in cutscenes or text.
Furthermore, it irks me that ludonarrative dissonance is a phrase in the negative. This makes it a great tool for critics, but diminishes its usefulness for designers. Why do we talk about ludonarrative dissonance when we can talk about ludonarrative harmony? Unfortunately, that's not a phrase I've ever heard anybody use.
So, let's put this framed/emergent dichotomy to work. I'm going to talk through four of my favorite games, and show how each one combines a framed story with an emergent story to create a more meaningful and cohesive experience.
The Last of Us
The Last of Us is the pinnacle of framed story. It tells the tale of a grumpy man (Joel) who smuggles a spunky girl (Ellie) across a zombie-infested America. It's a classic road story about the cruelty and tenderness of humanity.
The storytelling in The Last of Us is 99% framed. For the most part, the game tells its story through cutscenes, which completely wrest control from the player and force them to watch the game like a movie. Even when the player is in control, they're just fighting zombies – not making choices that meaningfully impact the story.
Because the game's designers keep such tight control over the game's story, the work feels extraordinarily intentional. The script is super tight, drip-feeding the audience with character reveals and moving the plot along at a steady pace. The actors carefully portray their characters' psychological states and create believable relationships with one another. Frankly, a story of this caliber cannot occur emergently. Emergent stories develop instantaneously, as the player presses inputs on their controller. A framed story like The Last of Us develops over years of careful thought and consideration.
Despite the overbearing strength of the game's framed story, it still has an emergent story, too. In The Last of Us, the emergent stories start and end within each encounter with enemies. The stories are simple: "I ran into a room full of zombies, then I had to shoot my way out;" "I saw a bunch of bad guys, but I snuck past them;" "I ran out of bullets, so I died." These stories are engaging enough, but they aren't especially meaningful.
Although the emergent story is mundane in isolation, it shines when combined with the framed story. Throughout the game – and especially towards the end – Joel is confronted with tragic moral conundrums. When he inevitably makes selfish and violent decisions, the player must carry them out in gameplay. So, the emergent story forces the player to confront Joel's choices and struggle with them firsthand.
In the framed story, Joel makes an evil choice. In the emergent story, the player shoots a bunch of bad guys. In the composite whole, the player has to talk themselves into empathizing with Joel and bring themselves to carry out his actions.
Hollow Knight
Hollow Knight is a game about exploration. The player must descend into a vast cave network, and they can do so in any manner they see fit. Because the game gives the player so much freedom, it is an absolute gold mine for emergent stories. Thus, Hollow Knight is the polar opposite of The Last of Us – the player is given complete control over the story that is told. If the player happens to go west, they'll find themselves in a lush green forest. If they happen to go east, they'll find themselves in a beautiful crystal cavern.
Let me tell you a story about the first time that I played Hollow Knight. The story began when I found an ominous entrance to a dark cave. I walked past mountains of dead bugs – it seemed like there had been a great battle. As I proceeded, the cave grew smaller and darker.
Eventually, the cave started to slope downwards. Then, it practically turned into a well, going straight down further than I could see. I decided to jump in.
After falling for quite a while, I landed deep in the middle of a spider's den. Over the next few hours, I fought my way out. Because the cave was so dark, I had to wander for hours to find the right path. Yet, I eventually found my way out of that pit, returning to safety.
This story is so memorable because it is an emergent story. It was my own choice to go into that cave, and the ensuing battle to escape occurred organically within gameplay. Because of this, the story feels totally authentic. I was the protagonist in this story, not Joel.
Even though this story is emergent, notice how many framed elements are key to the story's retelling. The piles of dead bodies foreshadowed the treachery that lay ahead. The oppressive darkness made me fearful and confused. Most importantly, the layout of the level let me fall down a well and trap myself in the spider's lair. The game's designer put all of these framed elements in place to elevate my emergent story.
In the emergent story, I overcame a surprising challenge. In the framed story, there was a spooky cave. In the composite whole, I heroically fought my way out of the grasp of an evil nest of spiders.
Undertale
Many games feature framed stories that offer discrete choices to the player. These games play just like a choose-your-own adventure book: the player is given a few choices, each of which kicks off a different framed story.
Mass Effect is a popular game that uses this format. Frequently, the game offers the player a few options for their character's dialogue. This usually impacts the scene the player is currently in, and sometimes has longer-lasting impacts on the rest of the game. Although the player has influence over these kinds of stories, they are still written long before the player picks up the controller. For that reason, I think of them as framed stories.
Just like Mass Effect, Undertale tells a framed story with many possible outcomes. Unlike Mass Effect, it has a totally unique interface between the player and the framed story. In Undertale, the player does not just choose from a well-defined set of dialogue options. Instead, they simply play the game, and the outcome of their gameplay controls the trajectory of the framed story. In other words, the emergent story controls the framed story.
Consider the sequence of Undertale about Papyrus, a goofy skeleton character. Papyrus selfishly wants to capture the player character so that he can become more popular. At the same time, he clearly has a heart of gold, so it doesn't seem like he's actually capable of hurting the player.
This conflict comes to a head when Papyrus challenges the player to a duel. During this battle, the player can choose whether to fight back. Because Papyrus is not a very talented warrior, he's easy to accidentally kill. However, if the player chooses to not attack Papyrus at all, he will eventually realize his own inability to hurt the player and become friends with them.
The outcome of this fight deeply impacts the framed story afterwards. If the player kills Papyrus, then all of the game's characters will regard them as a violent monster. However, if the player befriends him, then he'll help out in later fights.
Undertale displays an unbelievably deep connection between its framed and emergent story. The framed story feeds the player information about Papyrus, which the player uses to make choices in the emergent story. Meanwhile, the outcome of the emergent story comes back around to impact the framed story. Needless to say, neither of these stories could exist without the other, and they thrive in each others' company.
In the framed story, Papyrus questions whether he should capture the player. In the emergent story, the player questions whether they should attack Papyrus. In the composite whole, two foes measure each other up and experience the consequences of their judgments.
INSIDE
Much like The Last of Us, INSIDE features a framed story that offers the player no high-level choices. Every player will follow the exact same path, traveling from the rural countryside into an ominous corporate lair.
Yet, unlike The Last of Us, INSIDE's story is told entirely through its environment. The game contains no dialogue, text, or written language of any kind. There are no cutscenes that break the player's feeling of control. On top of this, the protagonist is a complete blank slate. They have no voice, gender, or face. There's nothing to stop the player from thinking of themselves as the game's protagonist.
INSIDE use these techniques to play a perceptual trick on the player: the overarching story feels like it's totally emergent, despite the fact that it isn't. At any given moment, the player is experiencing an emergent story: "I have to get past this angry pig;" "I have to get up that wall;" "I have to open that door." Although the player only ever directly interfaces with emergent stories, the experience as a whole is super thoroughly planned; every player will see the exact same events in the exact same order. However, because the game offers such a persistent sense of control, the player feels like they're calling the shots.
In the framed story, the unnamed protagonist discovers the secrets of an insidious corporation. In the emergent story, the player plays out every single step of that framed story. In the composite whole, the player feels like the framed story is truly their own.
Framed Story, Emergent Story, and Your Story
What does all this mean for your game? First and foremost, the dichotomy of framed and emergent story can help you better understand your own work. What is your emergent story about? What is your framed story about? Which one dictates the game's structure, and which one is playing second fiddle? Ideally, these two stories cooperate to create something greater than the sum of its parts.
At the end of the day, these terms are just tools. I can think of many more games that combine framed and emergent stories in even weirder ways, and I'd love to discuss them in the future. And, I'm curious what game designs you can dream up based on this framework.
Part 2
I wanted my piece to reach other game designers because I see my argument being most directly useful to them. After all, game designers do this stuff for work, so new frameworks like this can be extremely useful. Also, game designers are bound to be invested in the stories they tell in their own games. This gives them a reason to stick around and see how to make better game stories.
I also have my own selfish reasons for targeting game designers. Here at USC, there is a pretty sizable community of game designers, but I feel like the discourse around story is so often narrow-minded or simplistic. Oftentimes, the conversation starts and ends at cutscenes and writing – what I refer to as framed story. I wanted my piece to demonstrate the power of emergent stories, but I also wanted it to emphasize the depth that's possible when we fuse framed and emergent stories in creative ways. So, I saw this blog post as a means to shift the discourse in my game design community. If I feel good about this piece in a couple of days, perhaps I'll send it to some friends and see what they think.
I decided to write a blog because it is a very shareable format that can work well for niche communities such as game designers. Some blogs do have huge bases of readers, and it is undeniably a great format for reaching a general audience. However, blogs work just as well for smaller communities, too. There are even a few notable game design blogs out there, such as Click Nothing, a blog from game designer Clint Hocking. Coincidentally, he created the term "ludonarrative dissonance" in one of his blogs, which reads quite similarly to the piece I've written here. Considering how popular the term is now, his post was clearly an effective way to spread that idea. This probably occurred because of how easy it is to share a blog post. Anybody can instantaneously send a link to their friends, who can view the post immediately. So, I chose a blog post because it could be an effective means to distribute my ideas among the game design community.
A blog was also quite well-attuned to the type of rhetoric that I wished to engage in. Throughout my time at USC, I've been forced to read many academic papers about game design. Generally, I find them quite terrible. One reason for this is that they are often detached from the experiences of actual players. The blog post was the perfect format to completely reverse that trend. After all, blogs are often dedicated to recounting the daily events of the author. So, I felt comfortable spending many paragraphs describing my own experiences with these games. This grounds my analysis in the cold hard truth, which distinguishes it from the academic game design papers that I detest.
At the same time, the blog format allowed me to share my own opinions freely, without feeling too much burden of proof. Why did I discuss these particular games? Because they're some of my favorites! Why is Undertale really good? Because I said so! Some may interpret this lack of proof as a shortcoming, but I see it as a necessity. After all, my intent was not to write a thorough review. I simply wanted to share some of my game design philosophies, and to achieve that goal I had to move rather quickly through a wide array of games.
The blogging format proved useful in a few other ways. For one, I used a bunch of images to break up my text. These images were incredibly useful, since they let me communicate so much information without throwing a ton of jargon at the reader. I could tell you that INSIDE is a platformer with a 2D control scheme and a 3D world – or I could just show you a single image. I found images especially useful during my personal anecdotes, since they contributed tons of clarity and made my stories more engaging.
Another key feature of blogs is their serialized release pattern. Although I don't intend to write a follow-up to this blog post, I can certainly imagine what such a post would look like. The post I've written offers plenty of room for further exploration on the same subject, since I could analyze more games or introduce new vocabulary. Furthermore, I can imagine plenty of different game design subjects that I have similar types of opinions about. I'd also be curious to see comments from readers, since my post expresses so many opinions and creates so many new questions.