Games provide unique opportunities to use fluid narratives, allowing individuals to tailor their experiences to fit their own ideas of what will happen next. Highly fluid narratives reward players for decision making, but there are times when it can go too far, and constraints on budgets, time, or resources can lead to issues.

For the sake of this discussion, I'm going to address video games and tabletop games in both general and distinct cases, but generally it is tabletop roleplaying that winds up with the largest amount of fluidity due to the social nature of play and the fact that these games often involve human-driven storytelling in ways other games don't.

Between a desire to tell stories and a need to present mechanics to facilitate these stories, narrative fluidity is often lost or pursued in ways that make the narrative too obtuse to players.

Image from Pixabay

What is Fluidity?

The important part of understanding how game narratives can function in a fluid manner comes in the way that they are established from the start.

There are a lot of games that take a cinematic approach to storytelling, with particular scripted scenes at key moments that are intended to be quite powerful and draw their inspiration from cinema and film.

One flaw of this philosophy is that a game often has a large portion of game elements which are not told in this cinematic style, but between the scripted scenes there is an interactive portion that makes up the core of the gameplay. Not only are the key story moments dissociated from the gameplay, they are also locked away in special segments. This is not necessarily a terrible thing; Metal Gear Solid, especially in its fifth installment, does a good job of blending cutscenes with gameplay that can further the story and gives other opportunities to advance the plot.

However, cutscenes are also a point of limitation, as cinematic "gameplay" in the form of choice dialogues or quick-time-events can often get in the way of player agency. Having a long scripted segment (and this includes having Shakespeare-esque soliloquys or contrived series of events in something like D&D as well as the cutscenes in video games) can leave players without a chance to really do what they want to do.

This isn't to say that it's not fine in practice to an extent. One of my favorite examples of this sort of storytelling in a video game is in Warframe, where the player often gets simple choices throughout the plot that simply change how a scripted event will play out. The reason that this works well is that Warframe is very good at delivering characterization and building empathy (through its player-driven narrative in part, but especially in its use of important archetypal themes, imagery, sound, and backstory).

Another way that games can handle the strain of this system is to simply have the entirety of storytelling take place through emergent or semi-emergent mechanics. Games like Deus Ex or Morrowind do this incredibly well, with slightly different approaches.

Deus Ex tends to blend a lot of player decisions during play with some limited, typically short, cutscenes and dialogue sections that serve to realign the player to whatever the main drive of the plot is. This is the also the method that Metal Gear Solid uses, with MGS V in particular using a lot of found narrative elements like audio recordings and Deus Ex using a lot of found documents to allow the storyline to unfold during play.

Other games, like Morrowind and Divinity: Original Sin tend to rely a lot on scripted interactions, but provide so many of these that the player is given a large degree of freedom in which to explore their world. If they want to attack someone, they can (though it may not be prudent, and it may jeopardize the plot), and they can also engage in a multitude of dialogue choices.

The storytelling in these games takes place almost entirely through player-driven choices, which makes it very fluid; Morrowind and its later successors are open-world games (though both Oblivion and Skyrim place more emphasis on scripted sequences and main plot elements than Morrowind, which has no cutscenes or invulnerable NPCs). As a result, players are entirely free to pursue whatever goals they want to, with some minor annoyances if they do not (such as, in the expansions of the game, infinite groups of assassins that attack once in a while when the player rests).

Divinity: Original Sin does this method as well, but makes their world presentation tie into a main storyline more closely. The areas that the player can explore give them many opportunities to solve problems, and the player is ultimately free to choose whatever path they want, so long as it leads them in the right direction.

There are limitations to this, of course, since unlike Morrowind, where the main plot is almost a side-note, Divinity: Original Sin and its sequel have certain expectations of the player.

Nonetheless, it provides a fluid narrative. Each playthrough, even with the same intent, can turn out wildly different due to different character tags and simple chance (for instance, on my first run of Divinity: Original Sin 2 I was fairly peaceful toward the Magisters, on my second run I had the whole island of Fort Joy cleared of their presence by the time I left, because I had managed to make all but a couple permanently angry at me somehow).

When a player can inadvertently cause major changes to the world state, something has gone right in your storytelling fluidity.

How to Achieve Fluidity

When working on fluidity, you need to remember that there is a set of universal rules for good storytelling. To simplify this: you must build tension from the start of a story to a climax, and come up with a reason for players to care about your characters.

This is often represented in something like Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey, which is a great and very well-tested archetype that I suggest using, but it can be difficult to really do this well in a story without having a few guidelines.

Build the Frameworks

When you're building a game, you need to think about building a story via a framework method, rather than writing a complete script and trying to fit the whole game into it. I divide this into two parts: the emergent framework and the narrative framework.

Emergent Frameworks

Emergent frameworks represent the mechanisms that the player has for changing the world. For instance, if I'm playing a game where I can resurrect my party members, can I do that to other characters?

If I make decisions, can the game accurately predict consequences?

These emergent frameworks need to be designed carefully to match the player's agency. If I can destroy a bridge, then it may interfere with the story down the road (sorry for the pun). Either the story needs to be written in such a way that player action is accounted for, or these elements need to be accounted for in an emergent framework.

One example of this comes in Bethesda's quest system in Skyrim. While Skyrim has been perhaps rightly panned for having a lot of "filler" content, it does very well with anticipating potential character actions and accounting for them (e.g. allowing a player to complete a quest before receiving it, creating dynamic quests based on entities in the world) considering the current state of most emergent frameworks.

However, another way to handle this is to create plots in an immersive system. I recommend an old roguelike called GearHead for an example of this, since the game even generates plots based on the player's chosen personality traits and their actions during the game, offering certain elements to players based on their reputation, how lawful or criminal they are, etc.

In something like a tabletop roleplaying game, the actual game mechanics themselves serve directly as this, usually in conjunction with a human storyteller. The players decide on a course of action that they want to attempt, and that is filtered into the rules and, usually via a random number generation system, the result is then tweaked by what the players chose.

Narrative Frameworks

A narrative framework is the other part of the framework design that I suggest for storytelling in games.

Simple randomness isn't a good driver of plots. GearHead, which I mentioned above, has certain core plot elements in both the first game and its sequel, though I believe the second installment has more than one core plot. The best reason for this is to get around the fact that randomly generated stories, while potentially compelling in the short term, cannot outpace players' demands for engaging content.

The narrative framework is basically a series of checkpoints and events. The more broad you make these events in scale, the more they can interact, but there is a limit to it. For instance, you could have five events that are progressing in sequence, and players' actions can change the next event in those sequences.

The problem with this is that you wind up with a potential to really overwhelm or confuse your players when they lose track of the plot.

However, even a simple narrative framework works well, and since players generally follow one thread at a time there's no shame in giving them just one thread.

Take, for instance, something typical of a mission objective in Deus Ex.

The player could be looking for someone with known ties to a crime syndicate, and the following pieces of information are available (either told to the player or discovered through investigation):

• Their apartment has been torn apart, but nothing of value was taken.
• The last person they were seen with has been found dead.
• Their computer has an unintelligible email from a sender not known to the player.
• The crime syndicate they're involved in has recently had internal strife.
• The police are turning a blind eye to the case.

Each of these can serve as a point for further investigation from the player.

The player can use emergent systems to bridge the gap between these points, and they all lead to the same conclusion, but the player is rewarded with agency. Having the ability to gather all of this information may reveal a conspiracy that would permit the player to take an alternate course of action to get a better result, or it may simply provide them a greater window into the world.

By providing pieces of a story and allowing the player to assemble them rather than simply forcing one approach on the player, the storyteller can provide a deep and substantial story that gives the player a stake due to their investment and rewards them for their choices.

This isn't a sure-fire method; there are still chances that a story is poorly written despite allowing players to have agency, but by allowing them to make discoveries and connect dots on their own you are forced to tell a story that can logically come together. The penalty for failing is greater, admittedly, as the player will likely be incapable of carrying the story forward; something that cannot be said of all but the most inane linear storytelling. However, the addition of fluidity to a story provides players with a reason to play a game instead of just watching a movie or television show, which are difficult to compete with in terms of story and plot.

Paying attention to archetypal stories is important here as well. Things need to keep moving forward and building tension, even if players have choices. As they go about their goals, players should face greater challenges, or approach lesser challenges in ways that reflect their new abilities and experience.

React Creatively

Once you've built your frameworks, the next step is to react creatively. You need to anticipate many things if you are designing a static plot (whether that takes the form of a video game or a tabletop roleplaying scenario), and account for things that might be possible.

This is heavily dependent on each situation, but one good way to make sure that this works is to simply build experience with storytelling and pitch your scenarios to people, either in playtesting or just asking people what they would do.

It is also useful to go through a few of these scenes by putting yourself in the likely mindset of characters in the story. I personally like to use a couple scripted characters who represent extremes; one who seeks to maximize violence and confrontation, one who seeks to minimize the same, and one who seeks to gather all possible information.

If all three of these test characters go through the same scene with the same results, I rewrite it. There should always be something that is discovered or changed based on the approach the player takes.

One caveat here is that you need to then figure out how to get the plot moving forward, or how to get it back on track. You can have parts get skipped, characters be replaced, or new plots open up based on the actions of the player, and this is reasonable. When I run a roleplaying game session, I always make sure that my players have choices that reward (or, in the case of players who resort solely to violence, discourage) their chosen actions.

Wrapping Up

Fluidity in game narratives is about giving players meaningful choices. Providing this doesn't necessarily mean providing every possible choice, but rather giving enough options that the player can move from one point to the next on the basis of their own choices.

Providing fluidity means knowing when to let go of narrative control, but it also extends beyond that giving players the resources to make changes in the narrative with the tools that you provide them in the form of game mechanics and choices that they can make in the plot.