Videogames as Narrative Medium
© 2003 Nich Maragos

  1. Chapter I - Are Games Art?
    1. The Case Against
    2. The Case For
  2. Chapter II - Narrative Components of Games
    1. Imagery
    2. Sound
    3. Movies
  3. Chapter III - Conventional Narrative in Games
    1. Plot
    2. Character
    3. Point of View
    4. Setting
    5. Theme
    6. Sidequests
    7. Metanarrative
  4. Chapter IV - Interactive Narrative in Games
    1. The Arbitrary Choice
    2. The Burdensome Choice
    3. The Interpretive Choice
    4. The Behavioral Choice
    5. Rewards
  5. Chapter V - Conclusion
  6. Works Cited

Spacewar, the game commonly considered the first ever created, had rudimentary graphics on a dot-matrix screen in 1962, but games created for personal computers took a step back into manipulating simple ASCII characters on the screen.

The easiest thing to do in this format was the text adventure (sometimes called interactive fiction, though this is probably too broad a term for such a narrowly defined subgenre), wherein the player would receive short descriptions of his surroundings and type in English-like commands (i.e. "look at wall") to proceed through the environments and interact with objects. The visual component was up to the quality of the author’s description and the vivacity of the player’s imagination. There were later attempts at slightly more sophisticated ASCII trickery to create “objects” on the screen, but the first true graphics didn’t come until Nolan Bushnell’s infamous Pong.

Using those two rectangular paddles and square "ball" as a starting point, gaming visuals gradually became more sophisticated. The graphics on Atari systems were still chunky and confined to a flat two-dimensional plane, but they were beginning to take on a certain character. (Technically, all graphics are confined to two dimensions as a property of cathode ray tube technology, but there is an important distinction to be made between sprites, onscreen objects with only two mathematical dimensions, and polygons, which have three mathematical dimensions and are used as the building blocks for 3D models.)

Later home consoles such as the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), Sega Genesis, and the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) made greater strides along the same avenue of development, upping the possible resolution and color palette until the best-looking games came very close to cel-animated cartoons. On the Atari and its predecessors, circular shapes were obviously merely a few horizontal lines stacked atop one another, but by the time technology progressed to the SNES, they were looking distinctively more curved.

Once that basic visual competency was achieved, the artist’s role in game design became more important. In the past, a single programmer could create an entire game from scratch, including the graphic and sound design; his or her actual prowess in such fields were mostly irrelevant, because the primitive audiovisual capabilities of the hardware would not allow the player to easily distinguish between good aesthetic intention and bad. But as the technology advanced, the fidelity between the artist’s mental picture and the final product grew stronger.

The result was the possibility for true visual excellence in games. The SNES game Final Fantasy VI preserved, for the first time, Yoshitaka Amano’s delicate and dreamlike designs of the main characters; his work was previously only seen in printed manuals, advertisements, or packaging. Matters improved even further once CD technology arrived: Symphony of the Night on PlayStation features a host of detailed, well-animated sprites populating its gothic castle, and Chrono Cross on the same system uses lushly rendered still screens as backgrounds for its 3D character models.

The jump into 3D has also opened up a new world of visual possibilities for games. Early NES-era efforts had a limited amount of memory to store data in, and so the designers were forced to pick one overarching visual style for the game which would be used and reused. A quick tour through Super Mario Brothers shows some variation on the basic open-air, underground, and fortress levels, but only so much is possible. Later systems afforded more diversity, but it was clear even in the best efforts such as Super Metroid or Yoshi’s Island that the environments were still made up of the same tiles and building blocks as before, only more sophisticated.

Nowadays, though, a fundamental ingredient has been added to the mix: architecture. Playing through Skies of Arcadia takes you on a quest that spans an entire fictional world, where each civilization is marked as much by the way its cities are laid out by anything else. In comparison, the cities of previous role-playing games like Phantasy Star or Earthbound had only a flat canvas on which to place puzzle-pieces of buildings and periphery upon; the difference might be compared to writing poetry with a free hand or with a magnetic word set. Modern systems with powerful 3D processors give designers that free hand, and the results are ever more magnificent to behold.

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