 Hello, I'm Mark Butler, we're standing here in front of the Computer Game Museum and today we're going to talk about storytelling in computer games. Come on, let's go inside. Here in the entrance, we're passing by memorable game fingers like Link from The Legend of Zelda. Here on my right, Lara Croft in Different Incarnations. Some of the earliest game figures, you know, were just simple pixels. You think about Pac-Man, he had his own comic book series and his own animated series. You think about Super Mario, he even had his own feature film. Oh, by the way, here, I mean, this place is full of great stuff. Here we see one of the first, you know, computer game machines, but it's not the first. This is Pong, this is what everyone remembers. The first computer game that was, you know, in the public space is this one over here. This is computer space. It was a rip-off of the first digital action game which was never presented in this form, Space War, which was only circulated among computer hackers at MIT and then computer labs all across the U.S. This was the first arcade game presented, which bombed completely. It was too complex. People didn't know what to do with it. And then Pong came along, which is a really simple game. You know, basically you only have one control here. People took to that and then, you know, history happened. Do games tell stories? Believe it or not, this was a central question that was intensely discussed in the early years of computer game studies, which began as an academic discipline at the beginning of the new millennium. The debate between ludologists, scholars who saw games primarily as a formal rule system, and narratologists who viewed them mainly as a storytelling medium was the first big debate of this young academic discipline. I am not going to go into the fine details of this debate. For me, it is a given that all games have at least rudimentary narrative dimensions and that if they set out to do so, they can tell very elaborate stories. We're surrounded by all these great game artifacts. You know, you see different gaming consoles and personal computers of different generations. Over here is sort of like a mini arcade. You have these old arcade games. Some of my favorites are here. Just follow me in for a second. You know, we have Gauntlet on the right. We have Frogger. We have Space Invaders. In fact, games have been intertwined with stories from the very beginning. The first digital action game, Space War, created by the first generation of computer hackers at MIT in 1961, was inspired by the Pulp Science fiction novels of Edward E. Smith, and its players imagined themselves as taking part in a fictional universe full of galactic battles between warring spaceships. Here's a wall of milestones of the games, and up there they're showing some of them, but what I wanted to show you is here. This is basically where it all started. Right here we see an emulation of Space War, you know, without the controls, but this is the first digital action game which was implemented at MIT on the PDP-1 by the first generation of computer hackers. And, you know, it's a simple game, but it is a very, very intriguing game. It captured the imaginations of quite a few people in its DNA because they had never seen anything like it. They had never seen the possibility of having this kind of visual interaction with a computer in real time for the sake of play. Before then there had been chess programs, there had been Tic-Tac-Toe programs, but here you could slip into the role of the commander of a spaceship and go into direct one-on-one battle with another player. Early text adventures such as Advent in 1976 definitely told stories, even if they only had nameless characters wandering around, navigating unmapped territory and solving puzzles. Yet the first arcade game that is widely acknowledged as having a rudimentary story is Donkey Kong from 1981, which had a clear, simple narrative that unfolded from beginning to end entirely on the screen. Considered by many as the first arcade game to really have a story, let's have a look at it. You've got a monkey on top, so it looks like King Kong, you have the damsel in distress, and we have our hero down here who doesn't have a name yet, but this is the first time Mario appears on the scene, long before he has his own title. Giant ape kidnaps girl, hero chases ape. Ape falls as hero and girl are reunited. This simple narrative was purely visual and left no questions asked. Ape grabs a girl, climbs to the top, right, and then he jumps on the platforms, sort of giving them their shape, and that's the parkour that I have to run through as Mario. Up and out a lot. Is it going to squash me? No! Okay, jump! No! He got me, and she screamed me to help. I didn't save the girl. Bad luck, more luck next time. And finally, to conclude my short historical excursion, contemporary games are pushing the boundary on how storytelling and gameplay can mesh. In the following presentation, I want to highlight the gaming elements and devices through which this occurs. The question I want to pursue with you is how do games tell stories? First of all, they do this through classical narrative devices such as settings, plots, omnipresent off-screen narrators, characters, their dialogues, and internal monologues. In early text-based adventures such as Zork from 1980, these narrative elements were implemented in the descriptive text which set the scene in which the player had to decide what to do. In modern games, these narrative elements are increasingly audio-visual. They are most often deployed in a game's cut scenes, those sequences of a game in which the player is not in control of the action, but is rather in the role of a spectator watching a non-interactive video. These sequences, which were first introduced in 1980 in the Pac-Man arcade game, are akin to short films and deploy the full array of cinematic storytelling devices. In the meantime, they have become highly elaborate cinematic sequences in game companies such as Blizzard Entertainment have their own production departments to develop these atmospheric sequences which enrich the player's fantasies surrounding games such as StarCraft or Diablo. Cut scenes can be pre-produced video files, containing animation or filmed sequences, or they can be rendered on the fly using the graphics of the game engine, which is increasingly the case. Some games, such as Max Payne, don't use the visual language of film at all, but rather that of comic books to advance the game's story in the cut scenes. Cut scenes offer many narrative possibilities. They can advance the plot, introduce characters, and further their development as well as provide clues, offer background information, and convey atmosphere. But, cut scenes also interrupt the flow of gameplay. This is why new forms of integrating narration and play, such as quick time events and scripted game scenes, are being explored by contemporary game designers. Quick time events were first introduced in Cinematronics' 1983 game Dragon's Lair. The entire game consisted of pre-produced animation by former Disney animator Don Blute, which gave the game a never-before-seen visual fidelity in an age of simple sprites. At the same time, the game's interactive affordances were unusually limited for the time. The player was simply prompted to give specific input with the game's controls at a precise moment in order to successfully pass a scene and move on to the next one, thereby unfolding the animated story. Dragon's Lair was the first game to combine full-motion video with traditional game controls and gave the player the feeling that they were controlling the narrative action on-screen without directly controlling it, but only securing its continuation by successfully giving the right input at the right moment. The game was in essence one gigantic quick-time event. This early innovation was a stunning mix of gorgeous, high-quality animation and somewhat awkward controls, but it cleared the way for contemporary games that more successfully deploy quick-time events to combine narrative and game plan. The work of David Cage, for example, one of the most innovative contemporary game designers whose stated goal is to redefine storytelling within games and push the boundaries of how emotionally deep and complex computer game playing can be. His use of quick-time events has become increasingly more refined with the progression of his groundbreaking games from Fahrenheit in 2005 to Heavy Rain in 2010 and most recently, Beyond Two Souls, 2013. Whereas in Fahrenheit, the necessity of having to pay close attention to the game prompts during the quick-time events distracted the player from watching the quasi-cinematic action of these sequences. The two more recent games queued the player more subtly and have a greater tolerance for mistakes so that the necessity of having to interact with the game system and the reception of the non-interactive animated content don't clash with each other. The player is, rather, able to smoothly transition between both modes of the medial experience during these game sequences. For example, in the unbelievably intense scenes of Heavy Rain, such as when the player, as the character Madison Page, has to evade a nightly intruder into her apartment. Another good example for this successful use of quick-time events is the chapter Hunted from Beyond Two Souls in which the player is being chased through the woods by a group of policemen with dogs. Visual cues tell the player in which direction she has to push the joystick in order to jump over or duck under fallen trees, which buttons she has to press to scale a cliff, to wade through a river, et cetera, et cetera. None of the cues, or the reaction time required, distracts the player from watching the scene unfold. In both sequences and their corresponding games, interaction and immersion complement each other rather than undermine each other, attention that has been brought up by narratologists such as Marie-Laure Ryan. Another recent trend in games is to avoid cutscenes completely and instead convey the information normally given through this device in a scripted but interactive game sequence. This can be implemented in such a way that the player has a reduced spectrum of action. They can, for example, just be able to move their figure and look at their surroundings as is the case in the narrative sequences of games such as Half-Life, which popularized this technique in 1998. Alternatively, these pre-scripted game sequences can be done in such a way as to allow the player a full range of possibilities, as is the case in Grand Theft Auto 5, for example, when the player's character has a conversation in the middle of a firefight, or when he gets a call on his cell phone while jostling down the highway being chased by three cop cars throwing hand grenades out the window while he does so.