Films and television guide the audience through a fixed sequence. The director controls the camera, editing and timing, while viewers interpret what they see.
Video games add another element: action. Players move through the world, follow rules, make decisions and sometimes determine when or how events occur. This participation can make a fictional experience feel personal even when the main plot is largely predetermined.
That does not make games better storytellers. It gives them a different set of tools.
Agency is more than choosing an ending
Player agency is often associated with dialogue options and branching stories, but meaningful participation does not require dozens of endings.
Agency can be as simple as deciding where to explore, how to solve a problem or whether to take a risk. Janet Murray’s Hamlet on the Holodeck describes agency as one of the important pleasures offered by responsive digital environments.
The player is not free to do anything imaginable. Every game establishes rules and limits. What matters is whether the available actions produce an understandable response.
In The Last of Us, players cannot rewrite the central story, but they still spend hours protecting companions and surviving alongside them. That shared activity can create an attachment that a cutscene alone would have difficulty producing.
Game mechanics can carry meaning
A film tells its story through images, dialogue, sound and editing. Games use those tools too, but they can also communicate through their rules.
In Papers, Please, the player works as an immigration inspector. Checking documents is not an activity placed between story scenes; it is the main source of the story’s moral pressure. Working quickly earns money for the character’s family, while careful decisions can help strangers but create personal consequences.
The mechanic puts the player inside the conflict instead of simply showing it.
Game systems can also create stories the writers did not script in detail. In XCOM 2, soldiers can survive several missions, develop useful abilities and become important to the player. If one dies, the loss may be memorable because of the history created during play. A GDC presentation about XCOM 2 describes how these player-created experiences became some of the game’s strongest stories.
Environments reward observation
Games do not have to stop for an explanation every time they reveal information. Rooms, objects, architecture and sound can show what happened in a place.
An abandoned camp might suggest that its occupants left in a hurry. A locked room, damaged machine or collection of personal items can reveal part of a character’s life without using narration.
This technique is known as environmental storytelling. It works particularly well in games because players can choose what to examine and how much time to spend investigating.
Level designers Steve Gaynor and Nina Freeman explained in a GDC session about Tacoma how the layout of a space can shape the order in which players discover a nonlinear story.
The information may be designed in advance, but discovering it feels active.
Freedom can create narrative problems
Interactivity also makes storytelling harder.
A film editor can control exactly how long a tense scene lasts. A game may tell the player that disaster is minutes away while still allowing hours of side missions and collecting. This conflict between the story’s urgency and the player’s behavior can weaken the drama.
Choices can create similar problems. A decision feels shallow when every option produces almost the same result, but creating substantially different scenes for every possibility requires more writing, design, animation and testing.
Developers therefore balance freedom with structure. Some games offer major branching decisions, while others use exploration, relationships or combat systems to give players a sense of participation without changing the ending.
The player helps complete the story
Players do not become the sole authors of a game. Designers still create the world, rules, characters and possible outcomes.
What players contribute is a particular path through that design. One person may remember a difficult decision. Another may remember discovering a hidden room or barely surviving an unscripted encounter.
This is why people who complete the same game can describe different emotional experiences.
Film and television excel at precise composition and controlled pacing. Games trade some of that control for participation. Their distinctive power comes from connecting narrative meaning to what the player sees, chooses and does.
Sources
- MIT Press, Hamlet on the Holodeck: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262533485/hamlet-on-the-holodeck/
- Game Studies, player agency and open-world design: https://www.gamestudies.org/2103/articles/hutchinson
- GDC, nonlinear story discovery in Tacoma: https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1025178/Level-Design-Workshop-Designing-for
- GDC, emergent and environmental stories in XCOM 2: https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1024943/Exploring-Hidden-Stories-in-the