Everything I Know About Writing Stories I’ve Learned from Video Games
By: Nancy Lovering
Tags: Stories, Videogames, Writing, Parenting, Human Nature

Everything I Know About Writing Stories I’ve Learned from Video Games

My teen’s insight into the human experience of storytelling

Photo by Garrett Morrow from Pexels

My son’s final project for a high school English class involved the creation of a piece of literary work. Students were given a list of submission options that included choices like a collection of poetry, a short story, or a novel chapter. He chose to write a short story, and when he had reached the word count limit without a successful wrap-up, he changed his format choice to “the first chapter of a novel.”

“There’s been too much character development and not enough plot advancement to resolve this in a short story, and I don’t want to take anything out.”

Curious, I asked if I could read it.

I still think about his first chapter and wonder what would have happened to the protagonist if my son had finished the novel. From the opening lines, the main character was alive and authentic. He had challenges and goals. He navigated his way through common hardships while encountering the not so common help of a mysterious, magic-enabled mentor. It was realism melded with elements of alternate world fantasy that only creative fiction can deliver.

How on earth?

My son is intelligent, but not academic. Instead, he’s creative, and his brain is usually found somewhere floating around outside the box that imprisons the rest of us. He consumes ideas like candy and his mind is seldom at rest, but he doesn’t spend much time reading for fun.

How can you write if you don’t read? How can you sing if you don’t listen, or draw and paint if you don’t look?

His answer was not even remotely close in depth and complexity to his fiction piece, but it was equally as compelling:

“Everything I know about writing stories I’ve learned from video games.”

I don’t confuse easily, but if you google popular video games from my teen era you see screenshots of a yellow mouthed circle navigating lines of dots. There’s no dialogue or backstory. The plot is simplistic at best, and there’s certainly no character development. Even the snippets of modern games I’ve seen on my son’s screen have featured frenetic movement, pursuit, and capture, attackers and targets, but no apparent opportunity for the type of conflict that leads to life lessons.

My attention was inevitably diverted from the topic (life will do that to you) and I never pressed him for an explanation until one day he happened to mention watching a game on YouTube.

Ok, really? I mean, you watch other people play? How is that fun?

He directed me to my laptop where he showed me a video playthrough of “The Last of Us” (rated mature 17+ by ESRB), which we then opened on our TV’s YouTube app. Written by Neil Druckmann, this PS4 product isn’t just a game — it’s a story. It’s a movie if you view the cut scenes only, and if you add all of the gameplay segments (which my son opines are necessary for full insight into character development), it’s the equivalent of an entire season’s worth of triumph over adversity with characters connected by backstories and bonded by shared experiences. It’s fear, hope, and human survival in a violent, kill or be killed post-apocalyptic world where the enemy (the Infected) is still in full force, and where the two courageous and resilient leads — Joel and Ellie — live rent-free in your head long after the screen is turned off.

Now that I’ve seen Joel grieve the loss of his pre-outbreak life, Ellie gain insight into the world that existed before her birth, and the two of them become trusted allies and friends, I understand what my son meant when he said video games taught him about stories. As it turns out, he’s done plenty of “reading,” just not in the traditional text decoding and page-turning kind of way that we’ve always considered to be a writing prerequisite.

“The Last of Us” is just one of a seemingly endless number of story-based games that have existed in video game culture for decades. Nintendo’s “Donkey Kong,” released in 1981, is the first video game to use cut scenes to tell a story. The newest offerings are more enticing with their hyper-realistic animation, provocative sound effects, and skilled voice acting, but the fact is that stories and gaming have been brothers in arms for a very long time.

I spent the next several days down multiple rabbit holes, digging up questions about how stories end up in video games. I learned that video game writers are part of a creative team, and that game creation is an incredibly collaborative process. I discovered that writers can wear many hats, and may use skills like coding and design. It’s hardly an autonomous job, as the writing is influenced and directed by the technical requirements of the game, and writers are asked to make changes based on the workflow needs of the game development team. The story itself is merely one part of a larger goal.

Then came the click and creak of a door opening to a room I hadn’t thought to enter: a question of not just the how and where of stories in games, but also the why. The reason for the gaming partnership between narrative and gameplay is player engagement. Interestingly, game completion sits at a mere 20% when there is no plot to follow or cast of characters to ally with or root against. Game completion rate triples to about 60–70% when players can immerse themselves into a world that includes a story they want to see through until the end. That story might be a single piece out of many game elements, but it’s an important one.

We’ve been captivated by stories for a very long time, from early cave wall etchings to modern-day adventures on every screen and in every book, play, poem, and literary work included in our collective experience. From “The Epic of Gilgamesh” (the saga of a king and his adventures, written 1500 years before the penning of the Iliad by Homer) to “The Last of Us Part ll” (the 2020 sequel of Joel and Ellie’s adventure) and every other plot and cast of characters along the way, stories focus the lens on who we are. They mirror aspects of our lives and help us decipher our world, whether they’re acquired passively through reading or part of interactive gameplay.

Stories separate us from other living beings by demonstrating our capacity to work through moral dilemmas. They reinforce our theory of mind by giving us additional time engaged in socially enriching experiences like empathy, friendship, and cooperation. Stories help us practice being human.

These stories are our therapeutic workbooks. Certain themes always return, like good versus evil, triumph over adversity, personal growth, coming of age, friendship, and the list goes on. Choose the theme of a favorite tale and you’ll find it repeated in different genres and mediums, throughout multiple eras, serving yet again as a way for its creators and consumers to work through their own growth. The lessons are the same. Human nature doesn’t change, only the culture and technology through which that nature is expressed.

My son got a “B” on his English assignment, likely because video games don’t teach grammar and punctuation. Still, for my non-scholastic and head-in-the-clouds creative kid, it was probably the easiest B of his life. For him, it may have been merely an assignment that came and went, but for me, it was the gateway to a whole new perspective in our uniquely human need to share stories.