2023-12-01
Lecture Friday: Death to the Three Act Structure! Toward a Unique Structure for Game Narratives
If you're unfamiliar with narrative analysis, this talk does a decent job giving you a good intro to the concept of analyzing stories to understand their parts analytically.
They then point out that the story doesn't really matter. Did it ever matter? They even start by pointing out every story structure ever becomes hard to fully map. The one structure that seems to map to every story is that it had a beginning, middle, and end. Duh! You can add a bunch of beats or points, but as you do, you find more and more stories that don't fit that given structure or you find yourself picking more and more obscure elements to stand in for the given beats.
Either way, they then point out that in games, people care about the characters and their growth more than the story. But I'd argue good stories have always focused on characters. It's one of the biggest things between great stories and bad ones. Bad ones end up just being a series of tropes. Things to expect in a narrative because they work, not because they matter. Great stories usually revolve around something deeper. Not like a lesson, more like a truth. Something deep and real to connect to, even in settings and stories that are fantastic or impossible. It's always the characters that ground them. How people interact and relate to the narrative.
Just do that, but for video games. Chasing the structure really doesn't matter. Case in point, The Before Trillogy are excellent movies with very little plot, and yet it's the extremely deep and personal characterization that makes them so compelling. You truely get to know and understand these people, warts and all.
Now just apply that to games. It works extremely well in all sorts of games from linear narratives to open world. You get to understand how the character navigates the world, the situations, the experiences. What makes their point of view unique. What makes their actions matter. We relate to them on this deeply human level. The story is not the focus of a narrative, it's only there as a vehicle to allow the characters to show us who they are and how they grow and change. That growth is what's satisfying. The story is only a tool to help achieve it.
I could go on, but it's a great piece to critique both video game narratives but also the role of structure in stories all together. Sort of an emperor's new cloths talk if you reflect on it beyond the context it's presented in. If structure doesn't matter to video games, why does it matter elsewhere? Could it be the medium is the message and the only reason for a beginning, middle, and end is that books, movies, and TV shows as a medium have to have this structure? That stories in them must therefore also have this structure, and that games don't have to have such a structure has opened a whole world of narrative far beyond what these other more limited mediums can achieve?