Thoughts on Video Game Narrative

by Isaac Butler

In the beginning, things were simple. Bowser has kidnapped the Princess. You go to a variety of castles until you find the one she’s in, jumping on, over or under things all the way. In the beginning, narrative existed to justify the mashing of B and A, the cursing and gnashing of teeth, the subscribing to magazines filled with tricks and tips.

Googling around one day, I found a website dedicated to writing a novelization of the video game Heavy Rain. It’s a crowdsourced project in which various denizens of the website try to write the prose narrative equivalent of what happens as you play through Quantic Dream’s neo-Gothic serial killer thriller.

This novelization quest is loveably quixotic and difficult not to condescend to. Heavy Rain is a work of interactive fiction that is unadaptable. It is one of the few video games to fully take advantage of its medium as a vehicle for telling stories. We can see its roots in everything from old Sierra games and Space Ace to recent titles like Bioshock and Fallout 3 and (especially) Uncharted. But the particular ways that it creates story are worth exploring.

In Heavy Rain, you play a chorus of characters all affected by The Origami Killer, a murderer who kidnaps young boys and allows them to drown in rainwater before lovingly burying them. As a PI investigating the crimes, an FBI profiler brought in to solve the latest disappearance, a (sexy female) reporter working on the story and a father trying to save his son, you gradually put the pieces together and use your characters (who are often unaware of each other’s existence) to solve the killings.

Or not. Throughout each chapter, the various characters are presented with a number of options for dialogue, interior thoughts and actions and none of them are guaranteed success. I am unsure how many endings Heavy Rain has, as all four of your characters can die over the course of the game. You can solve the murders or not. You can rescue your son, or not. You can start a love affair between two of your characters or not. You can turn one of your characters into a drug addict or not. You can even solve the murders and rescue your son and the killer can still get away with it.

Here’s the kicker: These are simply endings to the story. They aren’t “Game Over,” they’re just options. You’re always free to reboot a chapter and try a different path.

If you read Heavy Rain or saw it as a film, you’d probably laugh at it. Yet playing it is a profound emotional experience. You may even find yourself worried about the child you are trying to save, or upset about what happens to the characters. When you are given the choice to kill an innocent man to get a clue to save your son, you may hesitate wondering what it says about you, not the character Ethan Marks but you sitting there in the chair and whether you’re okay living as the person who choice [sic] to make one character kill another.

The insertion of choice is the insertion of you the player into the world of the game. That is Heavy Rain’s real genius. Heavy Rain is not the only game to do this. The games from Bethesda Softworks (Fallout 3, Fallout: New Vegas, Elder Scrolls, etc.) and BioWare (Mass Effect, Dragon Age, etc.) create games based on choice as well. But in those games, choice and narrative are serving the game. This is why the choices are frequently binary. Paragon or Renegade. Blow up Megaton or don’t. In Heavy Rain, the choices serve a narrative experience.

Source: Excerpted from Isaac Butler, “Thoughts on Narrative II: Video Games in the Sweet Spot,” Parabasis, March 30, 2011, http://parabasis.typepad.com/blog/2011/03/thoughts-on-narrative-ii-video-games-in-the-sweet-spot.html.