Hannah Nicklin

storytelling in games is made up of backend tools, material gameplay and design decisions, narrative, UI, character design and development, text styles and effects, and writing, as well as plot, world building, and filling in the gaps between them with dialogue.

Narrative design is the practice of game design with story at its heart.

Following is one choice expressed in three different kinds of ‘voices’:
Move on.
Priya wants to leave.
Priya: Come on, let’s go.

Two of the most over-referenced books in screenwriting are Robert McKee’s Story and Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat. They present a set of principles for screenwriting as a recipe for storytelling success, which at this point is extremely outdated, and has formed the basis for so many works that they have become overwhelming cliches.

Do not trust someone whose only source is McKee and Snyder with game story decisions.

Line (a single piece of action or dialogue/monologue)
Scene (a collection of action and dialogue/monologue usually centred on a single location/time)
Act (a collection of scenes, or a single scene, which forms a key unit of the overall storytelling structure)
Play (the whole storied event)

In the movements in art and storytelling in the 20th century, you see artists and authors disrupting all of the following:

Avant-Garde Videogames: Playing with Technoculture (Schrank, 2014)

Games for Actors and Non-Actors (2002)

I offer his work here as an example that actually agency – and the offering of it – is a radical gesture in storytelling that we should by no means take for granted. It can (and should) change our thinking. There is no such thing as ‘film plus interaction’; there is only interactive storytelling. And also, we should think of storytelling as a potentially radical (and therefore potentially status-quo maintaining) means of presenting or re-presenting the world, and think carefully about the ethics of portrayal, interaction, and agency as we work with videogames’ affordances.