Environmental Storytelling

 

One trend I’ve started to notice and become increasingly critical of is the concept of ‘Environmental Storytelling.’ Basically, instead of using overt character dialogue or narrative text to let the player know what’s going on or any relevant history, Environmental Storytelling (ES) uses physical space, art design, and object placement to convey a narrative or background lore. Put another way, instead of explicitly telling the player what happened, the game shows the aftermath of an event and lets the player piece the story together as if he’s a forensic scientist at a crime scene.

 

In my view, ES is similar visual effects in movies – when they’re done right you don’t really notice them, but when they’re done badly it’s impossible to not notice them. And there are games that have definitely done this in the right way. I hear Subnautica and Bioshock do it well, though, I’ve never played them. Most of the examples I’ll be using will come from Breath of the Wild (because I’m very familiar with that game), which does have some ES mixed in with deliberate lore dumps and narrated cinematic cut scenes.

But I think a lot of games that say they're employing ES are only doing so as a plausible cover for laziness. I find them similar to those, “Spoilers without Context” memes floating around Reddit, in that they’re only meaningful to those who only know what happened ahead of time. But you give those clues to five different players trying to figure it out from the ground up and you’ll get five different stories. The artsy-fartsy crowd will then use the ‘death of the author’ philosophy to say that all five interpretations are equally valid due to each player’s unique, perspective and interpretation based on their own personal history/beliefs. But where I tend to approach things from a scientific, analytic point of view, I just want to know what actually happened, and not my own head canon version of events says happened.

Some examples of weak/poor ES include:

• Not leaving enough clues around, or illogically placing connecting clues so far away (either temporally or physically) to make the connection. Hypothetical examples might include finding someone’s diary in a dilapidated gas station bathroom that sheds some light onto why the kitchen table was broken in a house seven miles away that you may or may not have encountered yet (in my head I’m picturing something like Fallout).

• Reusing graphical assets so the “crime scenes,” if you will, all start to look like the same thing happened. A BotW example of this is how many of the garrisons or other outposts seem to have basically the same design. If they were all in different states of decay it would be easier to differentiate, like how it’s more natural to conjure up a unique story as to what happened at the Akkala Citidel as opposed to the three flavors of garrison ruins. Hypothetically, reusing identical skeleton models or blood splatters across completely different areas of the game with no unique contextual meaning in a game like Skyrim loses its meaning since they all look the same.

•  Using environmental noise or shoving random garbage and visual clutter into a room to make it look "lived in" without establishing any cohesive history or narrative flow. When all rooms you investigate have the same discarded magazines, the same kind of trash, and the same kinds of clothes strewn about, it leads you to believe that either the same person lived everywhere or that everyone leads the same kind of lifestyle and participates in the same hobbies.

 

The other problem with ES is that it’s really hard to know which things were placed deliberately to tell a story, and which things were placed to just fill the space to look like a normal office or normal house. Should I be able to deduce family history for every NPC in Hateno Village from just the layout of each house or bedroom in Tears of the Kingdom? Probably not. But I get the sense that we can do so for Purah, since she’s a major character and not a background NPC. But for all I know some developer had a backstory for Clavia, the village chief’s wife, and arranged the bedroom furniture to reflect this. But since there’s no dialogue or text confirming any of this, it remains pure speculation and it may just be a case of “reading too much into it” by the player when, in reality, the contents of the house were generated procedurally by a computer in random configurations until it looked good to the programmer who locked it in.

A real example of this problem in BotW is the fan theory that finding salt in the mountains’ ore deposits must mean that this was once part of the Great Sea from Wind Waker, hinting at the timeline placement of the game. But again, this never gets confirmed that the scene was “read correctly” from the developers. We don’t know if it was done intentionally by them hoping that fans would pick up on it, or whether it’s a happy accident that certain elements seem to point to another story/game, or whether they wanted one thing but the fans’ ideas were better so they changed their story. Books like Creating a Champion will shed some light on whether fan theories are correct, but not every game studio can afford to publish a ‘behind the scenes’ type book to explicitly say all the things the game is trying to convey. 

One way to mask the shortcomings of bad ES is to have random computers on with screens open to relevant emails, reading peoples’ diaries, or finding audio cassettes / video logs narrating what was happening. That’s not to say that these lore dumps are the solution, but some games use them well. Metroid Prime is a perfect example of this, where you might deduce what happened from the environment, but scanning the various computer terminals will reveal data logs that fill in the blanks. However, these are all totally optional so the player can ignore the story and just get to the action if he wants to. This is in stark contrast to games like Final Fantasy IV where participating in the story is pretty much mandatory.

 In summary, it’s fine if there really is a story in mind in the background, and there are enough clues to piece together what happened, but often it’s just too vague and nebulous. Programmers can say that they used ES as an alternative to admitting that they were too lazy to come up with something meaningful, so its’ like “figure it out yourself” and it seems really deep to the superfans. But I would argue that this type of artificially profundity, or fake depth, is exactly what Daniel Dennett called ‘deepity,’ and that many players have a cognitive bias where people confuse the sheer difficulty or unfamiliarity of untangling a concept with it having an intricate, profound inner structure.