I've been reading *Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative*, as recommended in this excellent talk by Christopher Morrison. This is fantastic -- one of my favourite writing-focused books I've read for a while. I strongly recommend it.
This has had me thinking (more than usual) about design and pattern in *games* narrative. I have already been preoccupied by some of the ways in which games lacks the affordances of writing in other mediums. A lot of core dramatic techniques that we take as given in those require intentional design choices to show up in games.
A big one is the tendency for games to use contiguous time -- with the player not breaking continuity of experience with the character they are playing (not just in time, that, but perspective overall). *Meander, Spiral, Explode* contrasts 'scenic time' (time unfolds proportionately on the page with the speed of time passing in the story world), 'summary' (the page affords proportionally less space on the page to the events taking place in the story world -- an afternoon passing in a sentence, for instance), and 'dilation' (a lot of space on the page proportionate to time elapsing in the story world -- a frozen moment).
Games most often seem to unfold in 'scenic time' -- or at least, the speed at which time passes in the presentation to the player remains consistently proportionate to time unfolding in the story world, certainly as far as the narrative is concerned. We might show some short of summary or shortcut, but most often when the player character is also experiencing that in the world, e.g. by sleeping or waiting. That's not quite summary as it appears in prose, in terms of effect, and the proportion of passing times feels consistent there, to me.
(It is more complicated than that -- time between plot beats can be wildly long or short, depending on how long a player delays a given objective. But I think, generally speaking, *as far as the narrative is concerned*, those tend not to be significant.)
Even the basic notion of having *scene*, a given in most other forms of dramatic writing, in games only arise out of specific narrative design choices. They might just not be in the envelope for a given game, in which case, a lot of assumptions and advice about writing go out the window! For instance: the notion of tight framing -- jumping into a scene as late as possible, and cutting as early as possible. Even the notion of cutting!
(I said 'most other forms of dramatic writing' -- I'd perhaps flip that to say 'not all games seek to be dramatic writing' to begin with, and are in fact Something Else, whereas dramatic writing tends to be the default state for a lot of other mediums that look somewhat similar at a glance -- TV, film, novels, theatre, etc. It becomes a problem when your default assumption is that games *are* dramatic writing and you use lenses and tools for your writing that are rooted in *dramatic* writing specifically.)
There are, pretty obviously, examples for all of the above where games *absolutely* have those affordances. A game that incorporates prose writing has access to many of the affordances of prose, of course. But rather than disproving it, I think that *is* my point -- games have access to these only as a result of design choices; in other mediums, they are the default position.
I think games writing is, if it has any kind of default state, fractal. You are replicating the same structures at multiple scales. Telling many stories that all tell one story.
This is the root, in my mind, of why games treats narrative design as a (somewhat) distinct and specialised discipline, in a way that other mediums don't. Other mediums have a strong default set of design choices (so strongly that they are often not perceived as design choices at all), and don't deviate from them without good reason. As far as games have *any* kind of default, it's a weak one; you're not quite figuring things out from scratch every time, but there are design decisions that *need* to be made (separate from the story design decisions required of all comparable writing), which benefits from specialised knowledge.
Then, in the writing itself, you've got to understand what you're working with this tim around -- the lenses and tools that you need to use for this specific project. And here, a toolbox geared solely around dramatic writing may work against you more than for you. (And I think this encapsulates the major stumbling block for non-games writers picking up games projects. You can be the best at dramatic writing that there is, but those might not be the tools you actually need here. And the real arse of it is when *that isn't obvious*, so you don't know there's a problem to disentangle.)
(The original thought that inspired this wander was about economy in writing. I learned to write through short fiction and games -- two forms that really emphasise *economy* in how much you are writing. Write short, okay? It's something I have to unlearn a bit when thinking about other things, e.g. long-form prose -- where brevity isn't necessarily the goal.
Coming from that starting point, I have internalised thinking of economy in writing as a strict virtue -- which it isn't. There are all kinds of effects that contraindicate economy that are valid and good. Prose can be meandering or all the rest and still very good. One of the reasons this doesn't tend to work in commercial games is that, in those mediums, *the writing isn't competing against other elements of the work*. That's a constant tradeoff in games -- what else is the player doing? (which means you can't rely on the writing having their full attention), and what else do they *want to do?* (are you just holding them up from getting on with the next level, which is what they really want). Which means you need to think about economy of writing as part of building the desired player experience. (And recognise this continually when in might actually be *faster* to write more.)
(Which is to to say that in other mediums the work as a whole doesn't have to compete to hold the audience's attention -- it does. It's just that the work doesn't have to balance how it competes with *other aspects of itself* for their attention.))
New rule of thumb for these posts -- when I start double-nesting parentheses, it's time to stop.