What will the player do, and what choices will they have? The player experiences your story through the actions the game allows.
Perhaps a player searches rooms, repairs equipment, negotiates with strangers, or decides how to use limited supplies. These repeated actions, together with the rules that govern them, form the game’s core mechanics. These interactions let the player participate in the story and, within the game’s limits, influence how it unfolds.
It’s easy to become absorbed in a character’s history or in the environment and philosophies of an imaginary kingdom. All of that matters to the writer. But eventually, someone on the other end of the creative process will pick up a controller and start making choices within the world we’ve created. Because video games are participatory at their core, the writer’s job is not only to provide a great story but also to let the player decide what matters now.
Let’s imagine a video game we’ve been commissioned to write. It’s about a woman returning to her hometown after a flood. Her family has run a repair shop there for generations. She plans to restore the building, sell it, and leave. That’s how the story begins. The player assumes this is the task. But before she can finish, a neighbor arrives with something that needs repairing and asks her to reopen the shop. Now her plan to sell it and leave gets complicated. As a writer, you could tell much of this story through conversations between repair jobs. But repairing things is central. What can the player discover through the repairs themselves?
Suppose the neighbor has brought in a damaged radio. Inside the radio, the player finds evidence of an earlier repair made by the woman’s father. His initials are scratched into a replacement part. The neighbor admits he fixed it without payment. Had he done that for others? What else about her father’s life has the woman misunderstood? Now the player has a practical task and something to wonder about. The discovery grows out of the repair. We’re letting the player uncover the father’s history by doing the work he once did.
You can start introducing conflicts. After the flood, the shop has enough parts to complete only one of two urgent repairs. One customer offers the money the protagonist needs. The other needs the equipment to help the neighborhood recover but doesn’t have the money to pay for it. The player is now faced with a moral dilemma. Give the player enough information to understand what is at stake before choosing. Taking the paying job might help save the shop. Taking the unpaid job might help restore the neighborhood. Whichever the player chooses, let that decision affect what happens next.
Character conflicts will work their way into the story. If every customer praises the protagonist regardless of the choice, the decision may start to feel weightless. In this story, perhaps the customer who can’t pay understands why their needs can’t be met, but they can’t hide their disappointment. Perhaps if the woman takes the profitable job, it will allow the player to help restore part of the shop, but at what cost to the town?
A consequence doesn’t have to punish the player to make a choice meaningful. It needs to make sense within the story and affect what the player faces next.
Throughout, as you write a video game, always keep the carrot in mind. Give the player something worth pursuing. The reward might be progress, a discovery, or a better understanding of someone they thought they knew. Leave room for the player to absorb what has happened, too. A useful exercise is to stop periodically and describe what “play” looks like for five minutes without recounting the backstory. Write down the player’s actions, what those actions reveal, and what changes because of them. Most video game assignments I’ve been involved in have been commissioned work. In those collaborations, I work through these questions with the developer. The goal is to keep the player engaged. If the most important story material appears only when the player stops participating, ask whether some of it could emerge through the activity itself. Conversation can be part of that activity when the player asks questions, chooses responses, or decides whom to trust. Keep the player involved.
A story-driven game may also use dialogue, written passages, and scenes the player observes. The question is where each part of the story works best. What should the player witness, and what should they discover or decide through play?
That brings us to the character arcs. In our repair-shop game, the protagonist’s evolving relationship with her town might gradually become visible through the work and actions the player chooses. By the time the woman decides whether to sell her business and move out of town, the player has spent hours discovering what staying might entail. Now the player understands what the decision will cost because they have helped shape the circumstances surrounding it.
As writers, we establish the possibilities. The player gives those possibilities a particular history through their choices. Even when the destination is fixed, the player’s actions can change what it means to arrive there. Build toward the ending your game needs, but give the player choices worth making along the way.
