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Wrestling with Destiny: Storytelling in Perennial Games

  • Conference paper
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Interactive Storytelling (ICIDS 2021)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 13138))

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Abstract

“Games-as-a-service” games like League of Legends, Destiny, and Fortnite have been overlooked in terms of how their storytelling contributes to the audience’s experience. This paper wants to rectify that by defining these games as storytelling experiences, by drawing on long-form inspirations like sports, wrestling and serialized TV. This paper defines and describes the area of “perennial” experiences as live, on-going narrative experiences that are perpetual, temporally continuous, and have a universal chronicle. These experiences are created through on-going interaction between the authors, the audience, and the experience itself. A case study of the game Destiny is presented to understand how these experiences tell stories over long periods of time, how players and authors interact with the game during that time, and how that experience affects the audience. Perennial experiences tell stories very slowly over real-time. This causes strange diegetic behavior where the real world affects the fictional continuously and they create and enforce myths through their own story-making and live events, which the players and audience partake in and share, making them real. Perennial games are some of the most popular games in the 2021 market, and it is therefore important to understand how they tell stories to better understand the player experience of millions of players.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Exact player counts are difficult to ascertain because they are often company secrets unless announced, as e.g. Fortnite did [97], yet there are sources such as the Steam Charts [98] (which only shows Steam games) or the updated Wikipedia entry on most-played video games by player count https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-played_video_games_by_player_count. Purveying these two lists give a clear overall picture of the popularity of games-as-a-service.

  2. 2.

    Referencing the earliest release date for these is inherently misleading, as these games have changed from their release state. Therefore, whenever we reference a specific example, we reference relevant version number or date-identifying information, along with supplemental material showing recorded cinematics, dialogue transcripts etc. as there is often no way of experiencing this inside the game experience today.

  3. 3.

    Spin-offs, flashbacks, reboots, or alterations of the timeline muddle this significantly. The existence of such narrative devices could signify a lack of temporal continuity, but we can still view the audience experience as linear and sequential regardless.

  4. 4.

    The word “chronicle” should be understood in the same sense as in Ryan’s work on curated stories [84]: A chronicle is not a narrative by itself, but rather a series of events that can lead to a narrative when storified.

  5. 5.

    Non-game experiences are almost exclusively universal—non-universality seems to be an affordance of simulation.

  6. 6.

    This doesn’t discount players: Play is necessary for the perennial game to function.

  7. 7.

    This split should not be understood as a person can only engage with one or the other exclusively, but rather as different lenses to understand the experience of interacting with a piece of media.

  8. 8.

    Diegesis is here understood in the terms from Kleinman et al. [54].

  9. 9.

    We discuss Destiny [25] and Destiny 2 [26] as a single franchise and universe. The story is a direct continuation, and they exist in the same narrative world, so there is little reason to distinguish between them, other than distribution.

  10. 10.

    This is evident through a range of dialogue and interactions [36, 47], for example a character referring to the Traveller coming alive “a year ago”, in 2018, referencing an event that happened at the end of the Red War, in 2017 [47].

  11. 11.

    A space station on a collision course with Earth.

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    Bjarke Alexander Larsen & Elin Carstensdottir

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Larsen, B.A., Carstensdottir, E. (2021). Wrestling with Destiny: Storytelling in Perennial Games. In: Mitchell, A., Vosmeer, M. (eds) Interactive Storytelling. ICIDS 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 13138. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-92300-6_22

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