Telltale Games ❤s Storytelling
Telltale Games is a video game company based out of California. They have been around since 2004 and have basically pioneered the genre of episodic video games. Recent years, have led to big successes like the Walking Dead and Game of Thrones franchises garnering the organization Fast Company’s Most Innovative Company in Gaming Award in 2014. Telltale’s singularity comes from its emphasis on storytelling and its story-book style graphics. The games produced by the company are renown for their elements of player choice and agency.
“Player agency describes the ability of a player to interact meaningfully with gameworld. More than simple action/feedback interactivity, agency refers to knowing actions taken by the player that result in significant changes within the world.” — Joey Gibbs, Gamasutra
To further the narrative, the games push players to often engage in split second decisions and elect from one or more branching courses of action, each decision having unforeseeable repercussions that tie into the story later on.
For instance, not helping a particular character early in the game can cause your character to gain a bad reputation that negatively (or positively) affects them later in the story. This particular mechanic, therefore, ordinarily leaves gamers questioning if they’ve made the right decision and curious to find out what the consequences of their actions will be.
Telltale is reinventing the idea of storytelling and design. Learn more by watching this talk from GDC 2015.
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⚠️ Originally written in Winter 2015.
