Ahh, the tyranny of the blank page. For a writer, there is nothing more daunting than staring at an empty space with a deadline looming. Yet that's what wordsmiths do every day -- dig deep to find the content, the signal amidst the noise. However, it's one thing to sit and write a novel, where it's just the writer and the story, with the audience taking a static, non-participatory role. When one writes for a video game, the audience becomes an active part of the experience, and the writer must take that into account.

Yet often, the player merely sits through the story portion of a game, frequently told through cutscenes. Even those games which tout branching storylines with multiple endings do little more than offer closed choices, offering only the illusion of audience control. Are there any real choices to be had to affect a game's plot? Do narratives merely interrupt gameplay? What exactly is the role of story in video games?
The heart of any story is conflict -- two opposing forces contending for something. This frequently takes the form of a protagonist and an antagonist, usually people, who each want something. Sometimes they want the same thing and must vie with each other for it. Sometimes one of them wants something, and the other just doesn't want them to have it. This type of conflict is the basis for most video game plots.

Yet if conflict is story, then any video game contains a story, whether or not it follows the protagonist/antagonist structure. Even the simplest game has a recognizable tale -- take Pong, for instance. Each player wants to win the game by accruing the stated number of points. Rudimentary as it is, that's still a story. But is it an engaging one?

When video games were first invented, they probably weren't meant to be mediums for telling stories. They were more likely meant to be diversions, ways to exercise certain capacities in human brains. The "twitch" element of gaming has endured to this day, and rewards the player who is able to appropriately manage her reflexes to ensure victory. However at some point, mere stimulus/response tactics weren't enough to engender engagement. There was a need to expand gameplay beyond simple reaction, and involve emotion.

Maybe the need for the structure of storytelling is inherent to human nature. As any student of Greek myth knows, the truly lasting stories are the ones that incorporate an element of catharsis -- a release of emotion or tension that restores the spirit. For catharsis to work, the audience needs to be able to empathize with the story's characters, to identify with them. Yet there was a level of abstraction in the early video games that made it difficult for the player to think of the tiny sprites under their control as representing themselves. After all, how much personality can be seen in a simple vertical white line?

So it wasn't until the introduction of recognizable characters to video games that emotional player involvement could be said to truly take place. Suddenly, merely running around a maze gathering pellets seemed more important somehow. For as basic a shape as Pac-Man was, he was still a recognizable character, and the addition of his four ghostly enemies made the emotional engagement complete. Players weren't just playing a game, they were keeping a creature alive. Yet even then, the personal investment into the game could only stretch so far. Pac-Man was cute, but that was all he was.

Enter Mario. When Donkey Kong appeared in arcades in 1981, it quickly became one of the most popular, most-played video games of its generation. This was in no small part to the likability of its protagonist Mario, arguably the most recognizable video game character of all time. Mario was on a mission to rescue his sweetheart, Pauline, from her abductor, a giant ape strangely named Donkey Kong. Surely the name of the game itself had a large part in enticing players to try the game, but they stayed for the story, told engagingly through its gameplay. Players ran, jumped, wielded hammers, and otherwise navigated a peril-laden landscape to reach the top of the screen, only to have their desires thwarted time and again by Kong's escape with Pauline. Yet eventually, the final set of hurdles was leapt, and Pauline was rescued, while Kong fell to his (temporary) death. Catharsis achieved, and the cycle resets.

So it appeared that having story elements in a video game enhances play. The question then became "Do more complex stories enhance gameplay to a greater extent?" And following that, "How do we create games with more complex stories?" Judging by the success of one of the most storied franchises in game history, Final Fantasy fans would give a resounding yes to the first question. Yet for all their complexity, with multiple characters, interweaving plots, and overarching theses, story progression occurs mainly through video cutscenes, or at best, in-game narratives during which the only interaction the player enjoys is the ability to enact the next round of conversation.

In fact, the inclusion of a story into a game is by now a foregone conclusion -- it would be harder to find a game these days that doesn't feature one. What's much more difficult to find is a game that incorporates story elements in a way that gives control to the player beyond merely clearing text and advancing the next paragraphs. After all, the main difference between playing a game and reading a novel is the interactivity in games.

As popular as the narrative-heavy game Mass Effect became, there was little innovation in its presentation of its story. Players were offered more dialogue choices, but the overall story was still read more than lived. So if this type of mechanic isn't the answer, what is?

Machinima gives people a new way to tell stories by using games as a springboard, but this is an outside approach and is not the solution to the issue. Ironically, perhaps it's in those games without dialogue options that truly player-led stories can live. For example, games like Black and White and Fable (both by Lionhead Studios) concern themselves with the spectrum of moral choices that all people go through during their lifetimes. Both of these games allow players to act their own stories out, with immediate representational consequences. Even apparently "story-less" games such as The Sims offer players a virtual blank canvas upon which they may tell whatever tales they wish.

However, that becomes its own issue, for if the player is telling her own story, then what of the intent of the game designer? Are video games truly viable vehicles for storytelling? Are they nothing more than the equivalent of movies with intermittent action? Clearly, adding story elements to games was a step in the right direction. Narratives add depth to otherwise empty mechanics, and players who are emotionally motivated derive greater satisfaction from gameplay. The challenge now facing developers is in pushing the boundaries of the interface between watching and doing; letting the player become an autonomous figure, able to make her own decisions, yet still dependent upon the narrative structure to inform those decisions and give them meaning. This is a challenge more than worthy of our full attention, for to paraphrase Friedrich Nietzsche, when we gaze into the abyss of the blank page, the page gazes also into us.