A Game Development Blog

GDC: Ken Levine’s Secrets of Game Story

In his speech he offered fascinating insights into the development of Bioshock, and how the game’s underlying story had evolved as well as how it came to represent a high-point of in-game storytelling.

“The truth is that nobody cares about your stupid story that you’ve been working on since 11th grade. The audience doesn’t care, no matter how much love and detail you have put in there. In fact, the more detail you put in, the worse it is. Detail may seem to you to represent all the hard work and all that’s best about your story, but it isn‘t your friend at all. It’s important to make things simple.”

“When we started out with Bioshock we had dozens of characters, love triangles, a huge back story. We had to strip all that away so that each character represented a theme for the gamer.”

He said that stories in games should not be pushed to the gamer, but should be available for the gamer to pull, if he wants.

“You have to accept that some gamers are not going to care too much and are going to miss elements of the story. That’s fine.” He explained that gamers relate to story in three ways. “There are gamers who just want to know where to go and what to kill. Then there are some who understand who it is they are killing and what relationship they have with the world. And then there are some who cannot get enough detail and want to know everything. We have to create games that engage all those types of gamers.”

He added, “The best narrative in games is not cut-scenes, but the worlds themselves. That is what we render best. That is what the player is engaged in and what he sees all the time.” Levine said that Bioshock’s world represented the game’s story and that he had attempted to offer as much as possible through Rapture, Bioshock’s underwater city.

“All the warehouses and sewers that are created in games are wasted opportunities,” he said. “Worlds give the player narrative.”

Levine said that many game designers pull the player out of the fantasy by trying to do too much. “It happens most in open worlds where the player realizes that some doors cannot be opened, or that some characters aren’t interactive. With naturally constrained, believable worlds like underwater cities or spaceships, you can avoid that.”

An important facet of in-game narrative is mystery. “It’s more important to be asking questions than answering them” he said. “Look at Lost. Those guys are always asking question that they take a very long time to answer.” In Bioshock, the player understands Rapture slowly. In fact, Levine said the game suffered in the third act because many of the mysteries had been solved. “Even though the gameplay in those sections was the best in the game, it definitely suffered,” he said. “We learned from that.”

Levine returned to his theme of simplicity and clarity in story. “Make the story goals the game goals. Make sure the gamer always knows what his goal is. That way you can afford to throw  lot of detail at him because he always understands his ultimate goal. Look at Indiana Jones. At every point in that story we understand that he is looking for the Ark. That never changes.”

Levine paid tribute to Valve for its pioneering work in Half Life, which cleverly moved story forward through the game world itself. He said that Bioshock had sought to further that process using a number of techniques, such as empathy for the Little Sisters, dropping lots of clues into the visual game world, and introducing characters way before the players meets them. “By talking about a character before you meet them, you invest the player with an emotional attachment. At the end of the day, these characters are just AI with machine guns. But the player knows who they are and is therefore invested.”

He concluded, “Respect your audience. Trust in mystery and empower the gamer.”