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What Narrative-Driven Games Taught Me About Screenwriting
My procrastination hobby became a storytelling cheat code
You’ve probably heard of The Last of Us, even if you don't play video games. The TV adaptation’s success proves what gamers have long known: video games tell complex, nuanced stories that rival the best of film and television.
When The Witcher 3 hit 80 hours on my playthrough clock, I knew the gameplay alone hadn’t kept my attention longer than an entire television season. It was the story. I’d replayed the Bloody Baron questline three times, each playthrough revealing new layers I’d missed. The same went for The Long Dark’s survival story, and Kingdom Come: Deliverance’s medieval drama.
These games weren’t just my writing procrastination; they taught me the core of sustained storytelling. Game narratives can't coast on momentum in a medium where players can quit at any time or continue nonstop. The well-executed stories create self-renewing cycles of engagement, reveal, and reward. There’s much to learn about storytelling from narrative games.
Moral Dilemmas: Where Character Meets Audience
Early in The Witcher 3, a medieval fantasy game about a monster-hunting outcast, you encounter what seems like a simple choice: spare or kill a spirit trapped in a tree. The spirit promises to save orphaned children if freed. Sounds noble, right? But when you return later, you discover your choice unleashed an ancient evil that slaughtered an entire village. This isn’t just clever plotting — it’s a masterclass in thematic storytelling.
The game presents the choice and forces you to live with its consequences. The quest continues as you discover the orphans were saved, but at what cost? You must face the villagers’ grieving families, see the destruction firsthand, and carry that weight into future decisions. Even minor choices ripple outward, often in ways that challenge your assumptions. These moments of moral struggle bond player and character. When you agonize over choices with no correct answer, you move beyond playing a game to living the story.
There’s an essential screenwriting lesson: theme works best as an engine that generates story and is stronger without clear answers. Consider Nolan’s The Dark Knight ferry scene — two boats, two detonators, civilians versus criminals, each facing the same impossible choice. Or The Florida Project’s ending, where we wrestle with whether the mother’s love for her child is helping or hurting. The audience can’t help but wrestle with what they would do precisely because there is no easy answer.
Theme Exercise: Before your next moral dilemma scene, write three different outcomes, each defensible but deeply flawed. Then, ensure your chosen outcome creates consequences that echo throughout your story.
Character Building Through Dialogue
Every conversation in a narrative game is a chance to shape who your character becomes. Unlike passive media, games give players the power to choose their character’s responses, and these choices ripple through the story. In Firewatch, a game about a fire lookout in the Wyoming wilderness, conversations between Henry and his supervisor, Delilah, unfold naturally over the radio, revealing their personalities through player choices. Simple decisions — whether to be honest about your past, use humor to deflect, or maintain professional distance — accumulate to create a distinct relationship between these characters.
Before writing any key dialogue scene, try this game-inspired exercise: Write dialogue three ways (diplomatic, confrontational, and evasive), then identify how each approach would affect later scenes. Even if you only use one version, understanding what your character considers but chooses not to say deepens your understanding of their motivations.
Environmental Storytelling
Games excel at revealing character and plot through the world itself. The environment becomes a puzzle that actively narrates what happened before you arrived. In The Long Dark, players don’t just see the frozen wilderness — they can investigate every abandoned cabin, examine every left-behind photograph, and piece together the stories of those who tried to survive here.
The Last of Us masterfully uses interactive environmental storytelling to build its post-apocalyptic world. Players can pick up and examine a child’s birthday card dated the day of the outbreak, flip through abandoned family photos, or trace their fingers across the layers of propaganda posters that tell humanity’s descent.
The important note to screenwriters is to treat every environmental detail into a potential discovery. While film audiences can’t physically interact with the environment, your scene description can guide their investigation through carefully chosen details that reveal themselves over time.
- Let Locations Reflect Emotional States: In Parasite, the Kim family’s semi-basement apartment floods during a rainstorm. A physical manifestation of how their scheme to infiltrate the wealthy Park family is drowning them in consequences.
- Use Visual Details to Reveal Backstory: In Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Clementine’s hair colors — bright blue, orange, green, and red — are a visual storytelling device that reveals her personality and backstory.
- Layer Sound to Enhance Meaning: In Arrival, the way sound echoes differently in the alien chamber versus the military base subtly reinforces the film’s themes about communication and perception.
Environment Exercise: List ten environmental details that could reveal your character’s emotional state. Then, for each detail you implement, challenge yourself to cut a line of dialogue that conveys the same information.
Scene Transitions: Continuous Momentum
Games face a unique storytelling challenge of maintaining narrative momentum across dozens of hours without traditional act breaks or episodes. The story must flow seamlessly from moment to moment, keeping players invested through both gameplay and narrative beats.
The Witcher 3 masters this continuous flow through careful scene weaving. A merchant’s gossip during a casual trading interaction might lead Geralt to discover a new mystery. A child’s dropped toy in the street could unveil a monster’s hunting pattern. The game never announces, “This is a transition” — instead, it makes each story beat feel like a natural discovery that pulls you forward. While screenwriters work in a tighter timeframe, this principle of layered discovery can help map meaningful transitions:
- Use Transitions as Discovery: Transitions should be natural story extensions rather than forced plot devices. Transitions as moments of discovery keep the audience engaged and reward their attention without breaking immersion.
- Leverage the Setting for Natural Transitions: The physical environment can be pivotal in guiding transitions between scenes. Just as The Witcher 3 uses environmental shifts — like moving from a serene forest to a chaotic battlefield — screenwriters can use similar changes in setting to create smooth, impactful transitions.
- Reinforce Themes Through Transitions: Transitions can move the story forward while echoing its deeper themes. Such thematic reinforcement enriches the narrative and resonates with the audience.
Transition Exercise: Map your scene transitions. For each one, identify a visual, audio, or thematic element that could bridge the gap while deepening your story’s meaning.
Making Your Audience Active Participants
Games reveal a vital storytelling principle: audiences enjoy the rewards of active participation. When we let audiences discover character through action instead of exposition, present them with moral choices that defy easy answers, and scatter breadcrumbs of backstory for them to follow, we transform viewers into players, piecing together the puzzle we’ve crafted.
Great screenplays, like great games, create a dance between story and audience. Whether your story unfolds through a controller or the silver screen, the goal transcends the medium: create a world so vivid that stepping into it feels like coming alive, populate it with characters whose choices echo our struggles, and trust your audience to be not just witnesses, but participants in the journey.
What unexpected storytelling techniques have you discovered from other formats?
