A solid story in a video game can be such an incredibly immersive experience can, if done well, feel like coming home. Sometimes if the journey is stunning enough, the replayability of it goes through the roof, giving a feeling of rediscovering old friends within a universe outside of ourselves. It’s beautiful, and no stranger to creating such worlds is the team behind Life is Strange; a tale of twists, turns, turmoil, and overcoming the unbelievable.
When EA made an offhand comment last year following the closure of Visceral Games about how “nobody wants” single-player linear games, the community – including developers and publishers – rallied to prove them wrong. The intense success of the most recent God of War also proves that, with perfect scores around the globe. Still, it’s good to see that not every business name in the industry has the same thought process as the mega publisher, and one Life is Strange writer recently spoke up about the rising surge of quality narrative experiences.
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Narrative director ak Garriss recently spoke with GameIndustry to discuss the evolving nature of story-driven games and how many publishers are actively looking to support this venture.
“It’s definitely evolving,” Garriss began when addressing the evolution of tailoring a narrative experience. “I think you’ll see stories that embrace evolution themselves in this regard are the stories that are resonating and succeeding with fans. Mechanic fatigue is real, particularly within the story-driven genre, and this goes to another arena in which we’re evolving as interactive literature. We’re telling more sophisticated, pathos-driven stories in games than we have in the past. We’re telling stories now that make people cry, or make people question their own sexuality, or their identity. We’re telling stories that are going to places that, in and of themselves, are complex and dramatic enough to resonate with people’s identities and dramatic experiences. That’s what literature strives to do and what narrative strives to do, and has been done for like 10,000 years. And I think what we’re seeing in games is we’re just going to darker, more resonant, more human spaces.
“And a big part of that I think is a willful interest in the dev community to push beyond simply empowerment narratives. We’re not just making games that are about having a jetpack, or being super-strong, or being able to shoot 100 dudes in the head. I mean, all those things can be really fun, and we are continuing to shoot dudes in the head, but we’re also trying to do other things now. We have games like Journey, like Life is Strange, Edith Finch, that are weird, that are odd, and that aren’t hinging completely on the coolness of flying, but are rather actually trying to talk about real human experiences.”
When developers and publishers are in cahoots regarding a creative direction, gamers win. At the end of the day, gaming is about enjoyment whether it be multiplayer or singleplayer, but the option to choose and to have a healthy selection is vital to the industry.
To read more about what Garriss had to say, you can check out the full interview here.
