What Video Games Have Taught Me About Writing

Some writing tips from the “Halo” and “Crysis” series of videogames (or practically any FPS game with a narrative)

I wouldn’t consider myself a hardcore gamer, but every now and then I spend long hours immersed in certain genres, like the occasional first-person shooter if there’s a good backstory that interests me. This has been a guilty pleasure of sorts, with me always thinking that I should be doing something else (such as writing) instead of whiling away the time playing. But still, gaming offers a welcome break, and even a means of contemplation, and I think they’ve made me realize fundamental ideas about writing fiction.

Everything is part of the story

When I first played Halo: Combat Evolved, I didn’t like it so much for the gameplay itself but for the storyline. The first-person shooter (FPS) genre is vast, but this is the sort of FPS game that I’ve always liked, those with a detailed story which you uncover as you go along the game, as if you were in the story itself.

You seem to be to given all the freedom to move and do (or at least shoot at) anything — but there’s always a point where someone or something will block your way. And I like that they do that; I’m always annoyed when I can’t get to wherever I’m supposed to go. So thankfully there’ll always be that door that is just a door, a mere decoration that somehow the player will know is not meant to be opened. Here I remember actually tinkering with Halo while in the level where you are in an alien ship, navigating its maze-like innards. Doors that are lit green are unlocked and will automatically open as you near it. Doors lit red are locked and are simply not meant for you to get into. I had a hack where anything I shoot at will simply be deleted and I shot at some of the locked, red-lit doors. Some actually opened alternate routes to places I was supposed to go to, but some just revealed a black space — the developers didn’t put anything there because you’re not meant to go there. It’s just for show, and it would crash the game if you tried to go there. So even if the game world appears so vast, you usually always know where you need to go. If you’ve played these kinds of games, you just know intuitively that a path is meant to be blocked; you’re supposed to go somewhere else.

The same goes for fiction: the skill is in making it seem that what’s happening could happen. It doesn’t matter how wild or mundane the story is, or if it has droids or druids in it. Your story can’t go on forever so you have to decide which things, characters, and events to put in, and they better help your story. What you need is calculated contingency. You have to make sure that the things you do and don’t explore in your story adds life to it and don’t make it contrived or leading. Everything is part of the story or, I should say, every thing should have a part in the story, no matter how small or secondary.

Don’t underestimate description, but don’t overdo it as well

Another similar game in the FPS genre is the Crysis series. With the first game set in a jungle island, the second in a modern metropolis, and the third in a blend between the two settings, I can just imagine the effort put into realizing all the elements in the game, all to create the reality of the game world. The series is mostly set in an apocalyptic scenario, so things are really messy. The things that strike me are the small, mostly useless items, like those gas cans or chairs you disturb as you move from place to place, or the cast-off TVs that you can “turn on” just to show static. They don’t add anything to the functioning of the game — you can finish it well without them — but it surely won’t be an immersive an experience if these things weren’t there.

So as you trudge along, say, a fallen hotel building on the way to somewhere else, you see the building’s shattered remains all around, but they’re not the point. You have to go somewhere else. It’s nice to see the burning remains of a sofa and even some dead people lying around, it looks like they really were caught in the middle of something, but I doubt bothering with these things will help you finish the game. Description works best as you go along your story. Eventually your character will struggle as you try to get across a chasm where you’d otherwise fall to your death. That’s when you’ll start looking among the rubble for something to jump from. Had the game designers not put in all the elements, small and large, that make for a collapsed building — from the rabble, the broken furniture, and the corpses — then you might as well be just traversing an obstacle course and not going through the remnants of a disaster. And this is where, if you were writing, you’d want to focus on showing just how ruined the place is. Your story world always “exists”, even if you haven’t thought about it yet, it’s just a matter of knowing when to bring it up without sounding like you’re describing a wreckage in a news report.

Worth comes from struggle

In a way, a video game is just a matter of working your computer’s controls to achieve some goal and in response to stimuli. If that mission of traversing through a wreckage were simply displayed as prompts to press this button or that and you respond accordingly, it would still technically be a game, but I doubt it would sell much. It’s the specific tragedy of a devastated community that fuels the desire to go through that particular part of the game. It makes the otherwise bland activity of gameplay worthwhile. The same can be said of fiction. Why do we even bother to read about made up people? Because they hold our attention. Characters always have a goal, but something stands in their way. It’s the journey of achieving their goals, and whether they achieve it or not, that builds tension in the game where, just as in stories, the pleasure seems to come more from the process of going through it than in finishing it.

Always be in motion

I don’t think I’ve ever played a game with a level for you to “explore” the game world without purpose, just so you can immerse yourself in that created world. Sure, you eventually explore the entirety of that world, but it’s done in the process of playing the game. Since your character has goals, it must act accordingly in the face of obstacles to those goals. In both games and stories, such play between goals and obstacles must fall well into the desired outcome. We can’t tell story characters what to do, the writer writes what they do, so that’s obvious enough for fiction (unless you have that alternate or multiple ending bit that you have in both stories and games). So notice as well how games force you into a particular ending. If you do something “wrong,” you’ll be set back or die and have to repeat the process. Something always happens and characters must react in some way, eventually either achieving their goal or not. It doesn’t matter whether you react intelligently or not; there are bad players just as there are unwise characters in stories.

Art is an attempt to imitate life, but only selectively

My point all boils down to this: that video games, like fiction and all other art, are a selective imitation of life. They all attempt to represent life, but only a part of it, and that’s what makes them so appealing.

But that art is a selective imitation of life is not because of some arbitrary choice, like the artist making aesthetic decisions. As we should have realized by now, we can’t represent “life” in its entirety.

What’s so attractive about games like Halo or Crysis anyway with their militaristic and combative scenarios? Like any story, they’re about something. It’s like life trimmed down to just the interesting bits because life itself eludes definition, and because we can’t write a story “about life”; each story has to be about something, and “life” is not something. In a way, part of the reality of our lives can be gleaned from such sad affairs of war, violence, and death in these games and — as with the most compelling stories — these aren’t really what we consider to be the good parts of life.