Video games can tell powerful stories without words

Video games can tell compelling stories through sound, images, tasks and rules, even without dialogue or on-screen text, Tartu University literary scholar Agnes Neier told ERR’s science programme Atlas.

Neier leads the university’s “Narratives of Video Games” microdegree programme, whose first cohort began this autumn. Interactive storytelling is due to become available as part of a master’s degree programme a year later.

Neier said video games can be studied using narratology, the study of stories. In interactive works, researchers can also examine how much influence players have over a protagonist’s actions. A game’s narrative is not conveyed only through dialogue, she said, but also through its sound, visuals, tasks and rules.

Neier entered game writing after fellow literary studies student Märtens Rattasep invited her to write for a computer game. Her earlier research focused mainly on the relationship between visuals and narrative.

She cited Disco Elysium, a game made with Estonian participation, as an example of how player choices shape a story. The murder mystery’s outcome remains fixed, but players make choices that shape the protagonist’s personality and how the story unfolds.

Neier said a video game writer could one day win the Nobel Prize in Literature, though that would require a broader cultural shift in how society views games. She pointed to Bob Dylan, who won the prize in 2016, and said games with powerful stories appear every year and can affect people much like literature.

The global video game market generated $200 billion in revenue last year, about three times the combined revenue from cinema tickets and recorded music sales and streaming.