Mindless humanoids march in single file, shoulders hunched forward and heads bowed down. A young boy sneaks into this systemic traffic of beings, mimicking the others’ movements while an overhead spotlight watches his every move. Without dialogue or text to contextualize the situation, you begin to wonder: What brought him here? Why is he being hunted? Is he running away from something, or towards it?
Playdead’s Inside tells an ambiguous story about an oppressive, Orwellian world. Speaking volumes without a single word, the narrative creates an emotional connection through its nightmarish atmosphere and leaves the rest up for interpretation. A loneliness creeps over you as you move from one rundown environment to the next; and it’s especially effective because of its perpetual silence.
Inside is far from alone in this feat. Several game developers are creatively ditching words, giving their games a more ambiguous story, or one that isn’t spoon-fed to the player. It can increase the player’s engagement as they try to piece together a story, or it can create a more atmospheric experience. Games such as Inside, Hyper Light Drifter, and Virginia are turning heads by leaving words behind altogether, and use creative approaches such as distinct character body language and minimalist stories to build sophisticated and engaging words.
A Creative Constraint
There are several reasons behind tackling a wordless game. For tight-budgeted indie developers, it can be an economical solution, as voice work can be expensive and time consuming. For the developers at Variable State, however, ditching dialogue altogether for Virginia was a pragmatic approach so that other aspects of the game could be focused on more closely. While this was most practical, it also became key to building the complex story they wished to tell.
“We knew we wanted to make a game that would in some way be about storytelling, but we embarked on some different concepts initially, things that were perhaps more simulation-based. Those were too ambitious,” says Jonathan Burroughs, co-founder of Variable State.
Variable State was founded about three years ago by Jonathan Burroughs and Terry Kenny. Both had worked at large triple-A studios, with Burroughs previously at Electronic Arts and Rare, and Kenny had worked on the Grand Theft Auto series at Rockstar as an animator.
“With Terry’s background as an animator, we knew we wanted to have a large cast of characters, and I think we just got a little daunted by the idea of doing dialogue as well,” Burroughs says. “I think for practical reasons, we shied away from doing dialogue. Although ultimately, I think it proved to be a useful decision for creative reasons as well, and kind of fed into the ambiguity of the storytelling.”
Virginia tells the story of FBI agent Anne Tarver, and the story goes through the motions of betrayal, depression, and mystery without saying a word. Taking major influence from Twin Peaks and other David Lynch works, Virginia feeds off the idea of putting faith in the player to interpret and piece together an ambiguous narrative. Without words to affirm players’ theories, it meant they would have to search for their own answers, even if those assumptions aren’t spot on.
While a wordless narrative is far from easy to tackle, Burroughs doesn’t recall the act of writing Virginia’s story to be the most challenging. Instead, it was connecting pieces of the puzzle, such as animation, visual cues, and highlighting subtle story beats to the player, that required the most patience to get right.
“We knew the storytelling would have to be very visual,” Burroughs says. “[For example], the scenes you’d be entering – you’d often have to find the characters either just after a conversation had occurred or before one was about to begin. I think it felt far more like a useful creative limitation.”
Looking away at the wrong time, or not catching even the slightest hint of body language, can make you feel like you missed an entire cutscene in Virginia. Variable State put huge emphasis on animation, so players have to pay attention to the subtlest of details to comprehend the tale.
“I think one thing I remember [Terry] saying is he had never in his career up to that point had to animate anything as precise as someone removing and putting on a wedding ring,” Burroughs says. “There are a lot of animations like that, very subtle, particularly the facial animations, that would require quite a bit of iteration. Terry would put together a performance, and we would play it through, and it just wouldn’t read in some instances and you would have to go away and do that again. That process is very time-consuming.”
While these challenges were difficult, adopting the wordless narrative concept was decided early in development, where the team wanted to create a story “as broad and unconstrained as possible.”
from www.GameInformer.com - The Feed http://www.gameinformer.com/b/features/archive/2017/01/15/how-developers-are-creatively-building-silent-interactive-stories.aspx
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