Storytelling across the mediums

Stories are a central part of the human experience. We all love a riveting tale, whether it be of joy and bliss or sorrow and misfortune. The way in which stories are delivered to us in the digital age, in particular, is quite a fascinating one to explore.

Movies (or TV shows), video games, and books. Three mediums capable of delivering powerful narrative experiences. Which one succeeds and which doesn’t? Are there types of stories that work best on one and don’t in another? Let’s find out.

Movies are great for telling stories that require very deliberate pacing. The script is written in a way that creates an emotional attachment to the characters in the first act, sets up the events for the finale in the second half, and then brings it all together in a dramatic climax in the third act. All of this happens in the span of about a hundred minutes.

Every line of dialogue, every frame of the shot, and all of the exposition is intentionally chosen to provide a series of events that unfold very precisely over the span of the movie. Most of the audience watching has similar reactions and emotions to the movie at the end. TV shows are similar, but simply take longer to get to the payoff. One could argue that episodic dramas follow a similar pattern to feature-length films.

Video games, on the other hand, have grown up since the days of Doom. No longer are we seeing an influx of violence-ridden hack-and-slashers but instead receiving top-notch narrative experiences from the likes of developers such as Telltale Games, delivering choose-your-own-adventure style games such as The Walking Dead, The Wolf Among Us, and Tales from the Borderlands. These are choice-driven narratives where the player is faced with options on a story event and they must pick a choice. The outcome of the game, as well as several events within it, change based on player actions.

This introduces a whole new level of player immersion that movies can never touch. These “games” essentially play like interactive movies. The traditional video-games offer even more control to the player, allowing them to free-roam and explore at their pace. Stories that are made for world-building and exploration work best for these kinds of video games. Offering so much freedom to the player, however, can have negative repercussions — such as them being frustrated by scripted events that are out of their control.

And finally, books. The oldest of these mediums and the most widely consumed across the world. Stories that do well in books are the ones that spark imagination and intrigue. Mystery or crime novels in particular work well because the author has many tricks up their sleeve. They can sprinkle a bunch of clues for the reader and mislead them down a certain path, only to spring a surprise in the end. Movies can do this too, to some extent, but they don’t quite do as well as books.

In books, the pacing is out of the author’s control. The reader reads at their pace, just like players play video-games at their pace. The story is “alive” in the reader’s head for as long as they choose to leave the book unfinished. They can skip forward or backward in the story by simply flipping pages and re-reading certain events. Since all words on paper have an equal weight, things are simply left up to interpretation; a writer does not need to employ cinematography tricks like lighting or focal blurring to direct the viewer’s eye to the subject of the shot. The writer must simply write.

So, what actually works and what doesn’t?

Take a story like Jaws. This worked quite well as a movie, but it was even better as a book. It’s definitely terrifying to see the shark in the movie, but there’s nothing quite like letting the reader’s imagination run wild with how downright horrifying or huge it could have been. Every reader imagines something different, so everyone would feel a different sensation of fright. However, I’m not sure how many people would get to the end of the book with a story like this, so from the pacing perspective, a movie does work better. As a video game, this could have been a hit or miss: allowing player freedom to confront the shark early on would lose the impact the end of the story has, but delaying player interaction with the shark and confronting it at the end could potentially provide a more immersive and frightening experience than the movie.

Game of Thrones. Easily one of the highest rated TV shows of all time, but I’ll stand by my firm belief that the books are better. They can do things that the show can’t. There are some characters that have “died” in the second book, but then the author introduces characters in the fifth book who match the description of the dead characters. Most of the “deaths” being either unconfirmed or ambiguous leads to a flurry of fan speculation about how those characters are still alive. In a movie, the director cannot “hide” a character because their face is shown to the audience. Writing in this manner requires extreme finesse. As a video-game, Game of Thrones does well too (another beauty from Telltale Games) but relies heavily on its show counterpart to deliver the narrative emotional impact.

Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons. Here’s one that wins out as a video-game. It’s a puzzle game where you control two brothers to save a dying father. The story is beautifully told through the game mechanic of controlling two characters at the same time. It’s one of those rare games that manages not to create dissonance between the gameplay and the narrative. Sure, it could’ve worked as a movie or a book, but player interaction is absolutely crucial here in order to properly deliver the emotional impact of the finale.

The Fallout series is yet another example. The creators made a ton of content, put a bunch of stories together, and scattered them across a massive, desolate wasteland in the form of quests. The player tackles them at their own pace and pieces together the puzzle of how society was rebuilt after total nuclear devastation by picking up on this. There’s simply no time in a movie or even a TV series to cover the amount of stories being told here. If this was written in a book, it would span over twenty volumes. So a video-game was definitely the right choice here.

There are countless more examples I can think of and I can’t imagine the conflict the creators must have faced when deciding what medium to deliver the story in. There are economic concerns (books are the cheapest) but also fears of the full emotion of the narrative not coming out in that particular medium.

Basically, it comes down to very simple things. If your story requires precise pacing, tell it in a movie. If it relies on the audience’s imagination to fill in the blanks, write it in a book. If it needs player immersion to interact with game mechanics and make choices, tell it in a video-game.

I personally think that the “ideal” medium is a mix of all three. A narrative adventure told in a movie format in a video-game. And it’s already happening. Games like Life is Strange, Gone Home, and Her Story are blending mediums together like we’ve never seen before. And it’s working. These video-games are being critically praised and are incredibly well-received. It’s only a matter of time before Netflix catches on and starts releasing choose-your-own-adventure style TV shows where the screen pauses and asks the viewer to make a choice about the story before moving on, creating a whole new genre of TV shows with multiple endings and branching paths.