Analysis: Narrative Exoskeletons & Game Dev Story

[In this analysis, Tom Armitage looks at Kairosoft's iPhone cult hit Game Dev Story, examining the narrative reasons why game creators and players alike are transfixed by the Japanese-created 'build your own game studio' title.] As I played Kairosoft's Game Dev Story on my morning commute, the images that formed in my head fell into two categories. The first were little more than a high-resolution version of what what was playing out on screen - staff coming to work in a tiny development studio, hacking away at a series of passably average puzzle games, sometimes turning up to work in just their underwear. The second weren't on the screen at all. They were visions of the rest of the world that studio existed in: previews in tatty 16-bit era magazines of their forthcoming titles; interviews with the talented producer who only wore his briefs in the studio; kids swapping Game Kid cartridges in the playground. By the end of my first twenty-year playthrough, they were vivid enough that I ended up writing a pastiche retrospective of the fictional company I'd headed up for two decades. I'd written a piece of fanfiction based on a game that, boiled down, is nothing more than a tarted-up spreadsheet. Which made me start to question just why I'd done that. Game Dev Story is interesting, for me, because, when you take it apart: there's almost no Story within the game. It's just a mechanical engine for simulating a games company (and not even that sophisticated an engine). People work; numbers go up; games either sell or don't, with sales figures rarely correlating to review scores. But where's the story? There's a loose theme, sure, with a defined arc: start small, grow into a bigger company by selling more games. There's almost no writing; what there is is weakly translated, rammed into a line or two of the lazy port. There's a lot of Devving of Games, but, in the code that executes, there's relatively little Story to speak of. Just numbers, going up, or down. Every now and then, the game asks you to type something in: the name of your company, the name of a game. And that's where the magic begins. In that little flight of creativity, the game opens up: the player starts writing their own story. The player isn't just typing names into boxes. They're saying the words aloud in your head - and that conjures images of box-art, screengrabs, scathing magazine reviews; cardboard standees packed full of buggy, terrible, detective puzzle games, waiting to be flogged. Sometimes, the companies we invent ring true. Gnarly Games, though named as a pastiche of Visceral, turned out to become a strange mix of From Software and Konami, through their constant return to dour mecha-games and campy vampire nonsense. Their greatest success was, essentially, a Castlevania MMO. Or rather: that's what I saw in my head. A goofy name, combined with two drop-down fields defining the type of game, led to a moment of wishful, what-if? thinking. Sometimes, we just give things rude names for the fun of it. But so often that's a joke that keeps on giving. As the eager secretary tells you again of the wild sales figures for Buggy Shit!! 3, it's hard not to raise a smile. The stories you end up telling yourself are surprisingly complex, too. The rise and fall of little companies, kept down by absurd devkit costs and the inability to shift enough units on consoles with dwindling popularity; the companies that held on to founding staff as totems too long, rather than hiring the staff they need; the companies that failed to diversify out of the genre they first found success in. All that is in your head; all the game presents is numbers and loose encouragement. Game Dev Story exemplifies a kind of mechanical storytelling: stories told not through text or voice-acting, but through coherent systems that cannot help but generate stories. I'm not waving my hands in my air here and making an excuse - "Oh, it has emergent narrative"; my point is that, in good mechanical storytelling, narrative cannot help but emerge. It's designed into the system. Such systems are shaped to tell tales of lower-tier football teams, or the survivors of a zombie apocalypse, or mercenaries in Africa, or little companies trying to make videogames. Experiences you play, and feel, and believe, because you're as much a part of the telling as the machine throwing its myriad D20s. And, for all its lazy porting, weak writing, and repetitive formula, that is something Game Dev Story does remarkably well. It turns out that it's not a story in itself. It's a tool to help players tell thousands of stories. Telling your own stories about running a games company - through the medium of tapping on icons, and waiting - is far more compelling than any description could make out. It's a tool to help you do something. That notion led to the thought that mechanically-realised stories - the kind that movies can't really ever tell, and the kind that games are invariably best at - are a kind of narrative exoskeleton. Exoskeletons can do two things. Firstly, they can enhance your own abilities: they make you better at something you can already do - faster at running, stronger at lifting. And secondly, they can give you superpowers: things you could never do yourself - such as flying, or breathing in a vacuum, or surviving intense heat. The best narrative exoskeletons do a bit of both. Off the top of my head: Left 4 Dead; Far Cry 2; Championship Manager; MUD; Acquire; Illuminati!; Werewolf; almost any tabletop RPG. Stories are baked into systems, but told through the by - and through - the players operating within them. Sometimes, we bring our own stories and personalities to the table, and the system amplifies them - the individual relationships between each player in a Left 4 Dead game add as much to their realization as the characterization in the script. Sometimes, those systems allow us to do things we could never do: they kill off characters we were too fond of; they force us to move out of our comfort zones; they have a grace of language or performance that we might be unable to attain. I'm fed up of talking about stories in games (and I say that as someone who has loved many narrative-heavy, densely-plotted titles). Games are much more effective - and interesting - as tools for delivering stories, and, given that players will find their own stories anyway, why not build interesting systems that will shape their tales in exciting and unexpected ways? Why not build story-telling engines, and narrative exoskeletons? And that's why I like Game Dev Story so much: for a game with so little of what most games would call "story" in it, it turns out to live up to the promise of its name in so many ways. [Tom Armitage is a Creative Technologist at Berg, a design consultancy based in London, where he writes code and words. He has also played a lot of games. He has spoken on games, technology, and social software at conferences in both Europe and the US including ETech, Reboot, Develop, the NLGD Festival of Games, and GameCity. He writes about games, design, programming, and much more, at infovore.org, where a version of this article originally appeared.]