Video games today have evolved from the basic structures of Pong and Space Invaders to have complex and film-like narratives. In many ways, games and film are very similar. Despite the similarities, how do video games approach storytelling differently than film, and does this affect the audience? The critical difference between storytelling in games and movies is how each medium engages its audience. Games transform the simple observer to a grand director. With active engagement, versus passive engagement, follows a number of other differences, including interaction, variable outcome, and player agency. The horror game Until Dawn is an applicable example of how the active engagement makes a game stand out from horror films with its outstanding …show more content…
Players choose to execute the actions they want and in the order they decide. Every player makes different choices, and players may also make different decisions in various playthroughs of a game. Films are static and unchanging. No matter how many times one watches Cabin in the Woods, it will remain the same — it will play for the same amount of time, it will always happen the same, and it will always end the same. In contrast, even though a game may have a generally linear story, no two playthroughs will be exactly the same. Until Dawn, with a total of 8 possible survivors, has 256 possible endings ranging from No Survivors, Partial Survivors, or All Survivors, as well as numerous means to achieve those endings. Not only are there different endings, each choice branches out to a multitude of other choices, which means there is an exponentially large number of possible routes. Players also often replay the game to experience the multiple routes or to attain a desired ending. If the player does not have the time or willpower to do it themself, they may look up other player’s playthroughs. A simple search on YouTube for Until Dawn will yield varying results, such as a video titled “Until Dawn All Deaths and Endings” that is over an hour in …show more content…
Not only is agency the ability to take action, but as Joshua Tanenbaum stated in his lecture, a player should feel empowerment from the ability to take action in a game world and achieve a meaningful outcome. An effective game design should maximise player agency and provide the means to act (Michael Mateas, p. 140), meaning the player chooses which choice to make and how. For instance, In Until Dawn the player can make a character hide under the bed instead of running out of the room. In movies, we are forced to watch as each character makes stupid decision after stupid decision, getting frustrated as yet another one of them dies. In Until Dawn we exert effort to change the characters’ fates. These choices are not inconsequential — each action is mapped into all the narrative possibilities. (Tanenbaum) In Tanenbaum’s lecture, player agency is also the “commitment to meaning”. Players actually care about the outcome of their actions, and are actively participating in the story through the role of the character. Knowing that there are consequences to their actions provokes players into contemplating their decisions more in depth than they would have otherwise. “If there are many buttons and knobs for the player to twiddle but all this twiddling has little effect on the