The Video Game Toybox

Hey there! This post is part of an indie game project I made in August 2022. There’s a lot more ground to cover other than what’s covered in this post. So when you’re done reading, check out the full project here.

I never spent much time thinking about a story’s purpose in a video game. I enjoyed the narratives and plots but it never occurred to me how important they are to making a game fun.

This might sound odd at first. Especially when you consider that games rely the most on gameplay to keep players engaged. I won’t argue with that as it’s definitely true. Stories, however, enhance the experience and make the gameplay more fun. They accomplish this by tapping into an often overlooked concept in game design: playing pretend.

Hitting toys together

Think back to when you were a child. Did you play with action figures? Dolls? Or did you just run around in your backyard with a big stick? Perhaps you made your toys fight or pretended your treehouse was some sort of vessel. From the outside looking in, all you’re doing is smashing your toys together over and over again or staring off into the distance looking like a weirdo. But in your mind, much more is going on.

Your action figures aren’t endlessly colliding into one another. They’re engaging in an epic battle between good and evil with the fate of the world hanging in the balance! You’re not just standing motionless in your treehouse looking out the window. You’re an adventurer who’s just boarded an airship and is looking out at the storm brewing in the sea of clouds!

It’s all about perspective. You may just be swinging a stick around, but the narrative you’ve woven inside your head gives the action purpose. With purpose comes a feeling of accomplishment and satisfaction. That’s what makes it fun.

Saving the princess

Game industry titans like Shigeru Miyamoto have taken this concept and made some fantastic games using it. Take a simple platformer game for example. You run and jump to get from point A to B. Now tell me which sounds like more fun to you: running through an obstacle course to get to the store or running through an intense gauntlet of traps and enemies to rescue a princess?

Did you pick the latter option? Good choice. Because it’s the original Super Mario Bros.

Both examples I mentioned use the same type of gameplay, but the higher stakes of saving princesses from fire breathing turtles gives what you’re doing a sense of purpose.

Playing pretend with the player

Stories in video games increase the amount of fun a player has by tapping into a power that a lot of people lose touch with as they become adults: imagination. Granted, video games do a lot of the imagining for the player. But is a game played with action figures or dolls any less impactful just because you play with someone else? Does letting him dictate some of your make believe world’s elements suddenly take away from the experience?

Of course not! If anything, it enhances it. Because now you don’t necessarily know what’s going to happen next.

Video games function as a game of pretend played with someone else. The only difference between that and a normal game is that the “someone else” just so happens to be thousands of game developers working hard to make your sojourn into the make believe realm as immersive as possible.

So whether you’re working on a game with a massive adventure into lands unknown, or just creating a cooking simulator, give the player a reason to care about what he’s doing. Give him a purpose.