With Alan Wake hitting store shelves this week, we’ve been chatting with the game’s writer, Mikko Rautalahti. As fans of videogame narrative, we asked Rautalahti how important Alan Wake‘s story was to the game, and whether or not narrative is crucial to the videogame industry as a whole.
“It’s extremely important,” he tells us. “Personally, I definitely put the story first, because that’s my job as a writer. Our gameplay designers put the gameplay first, because that’s their job. And when I do something that doesn’t work for them, they let me know, and vice versa, and then we work it out… in practice it’s nowhere near as simple as I make it sound. Of course we try to anticipate each others’ needs, and it’s become obvious to us that the more communication there is between the writing team and the gameplay design team, the better things work out. They need to know what kind of a scene they’re building, and we need to know when the scene we’ve written doesn’t make for good gameplay. So we try to talk a lot.
“We do try to put the narrative first — not necessarily the story itself, but the narrative, how we tell the story. Alan Wake is all about the atmosphere, we really put a lot of effort into maintaining that, and it can’t be just one thing — we can’t just write an atmospheric story and leave it that. It’s also in the graphics, the gameplay, the audio, the way we pace the events, and it takes a lot of effort and iteration to get it right, a lot of cooperation.”
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Alan Wake’s narrative is “extremely” important, but how important is it for the industry? We asked whether or not story should be taken more seriously, or if it should always take a backseat to the gameplay: “Again, I’m a writer, so of course I think it’s important. It’s my bread and butter, and often the very thing that generally attracts me to a game more than anything else.
“But I think you’re presenting a false dichotomy here; it’s not really a question storytelling vs. gameplay. Over the years, we’ve seen a lot of games where the story and gameplay are almost completely removed from each other — you play the game, and at certain preset moments you get cutscenes that advance the story, and then you play the game again, and the connection between the two is cosmetic at best, but that’s not the way most games do it anymore. There are lots of examples of games that have really made it a point to make the gameplay a part of the storytelling.
“Portal, for example, succeeded precisely because of that: it was a fun puzzle game, of course, but it would never have been the success it was if it hadn’t been for the fantastic and very stylish storytelling. That elevated it far beyond the game mechanics. At the same time, it was the pacing, the fun mechanics and the brilliant level design that made the story flow as well as it did.
“There are other, a bit more recent games that have tied storytelling and gameplay together very well,” he continues. “Heavy Rain may be the most obvious example. There’s room for criticism there, certainly, but at least for me, the way the control system kept me on my toes and grounded me in the game world made everything seem that much more intense. Then there’s Uncharted 2, which was of course far more action-oriented, but everything you did kept Nathan Drake’s personality in the foreground, and they clearly took their storytelling very seriously. You always knew what you were trying to accomplish, what was at stake. It was a very well-written game; it knew exactly what it was, a fun adventure with great characters. There was nothing pretentious about it.
“I’m not saying that every great game needs a great story, necessarily — just look at Tetris, or Peggle. Or Team Fortress 2. And I know there are many people who feel very strongly that stories don’t really belong in games, that they’re just the obligatory excuse you use to justify the action. But I don’t believe for a moment that Uncharted 2 would have been such a tremendous success if Nathan Drake wasn’t such a great character and if people didn’t enjoy being that guy. If you had stripped all of that stuff out and left just the great presentation and polish, it wouldn’t have been the same game. Not even remotely.”
