Writing 103: Video Game Stories
Greetings and Sweven! Anne supposedly has these lots; I don’t, because I have aphantasia. Anyway, welcome! Today’s post is… well, I’m going to let my co-author and writer describe it because it’s her turn, go ahead, Anne! Vivian Out!
(Anne:) Thanks, Vivian! For once, I’m going to try not to live up to my name of Lady Verbosa, so let’s see how it goes!
What’s our topic today? Why, story structure in video games, of course! …Didn’t you read the title before clicking? Well, that’s fine, players have a marked tendency to click first, think later.
Story is All Important
First, I want to be crystal clear: I am talking about story structure here, NOT worldbuilding. The main place where this throws people off is with open-X things, like open-ended stories vs open-world games. Those are similar, yes, but different! Obviously, you can have open-ended stories in open-world games, like Skyrim, but you can also have more traditional, interactive stories in open-world games, like Breath of the Wild/Tears of the Kingdom, and open-ended stories in fairly small worlds, like Animal Crossing. We’ll get to that. But just keep in mind: I am talking about story. Not world.
Vivian always starts with definitions, and I think it’s great to pause here and actually define story, since that’s what we’re talking about. And… well, that’s where it gets tricky. There are so many definitions that I’ve read, many of them contradictory, most of them genre-dependent. Literature in particular tends to have a definition opposite to what it is in games, so toss it out the window. Here’s what we’re going with:
Story is the sequence of events that takes place throughout the game, tying together a game’s essential elements, whether that be gameplay, mechanics, character development, plot, emotional engagement, theme, or other unifying principles.
This is a very broad definition on purpose, and I’m including things like gameplay and mechanics deliberately so that games like Tetris and Cookie Clicker have a story: the story of increasingly complex gameplay/mechanics. This is an immediate story, or story told by the player themselves, as opposed to an imposed story, or story told by the writers/designers of the game to the players, but it’s still story. (We’ll come back to those terms, don’t worry).
Traditional Structure
Are we at the games yet? NO! We’re still at everything that’s identical to other media! I’m not really going to cover this since I covered it exhaustively and in incredibly great detail in my magnum opus on dramatic structure, which covers every type of dramatic structure under the sun. Definitely check it out, but take some time, savor, take notes, enjoy. Anyway, yeah, I won’t repeat what has been said perfectly already. Suffice it to say, 95% of stories are variations of the 3-Act Structure, so brush up your skills and you’re set.
But wait! I hear you saying. How can there be a beginning, rising action, and resolution in a video game that might have multiple endings? Aye, there’s the rub. And thus begins the interesting thing about video games, which is the amazing variety of types there are, and varying degrees to which story plays a role.
It’s an Interactive World
One of the defining features of video games, perhaps the defining feature, is interactivity. It’s the reason people play games: you’re not just reading a story or watching a story, you’re changing a story to fit what you want, no matter how slight that change may be.
Okay, another definition for us!
Interactivity is the ability to impact a story in the short term, medium term, long term, or any combination, based on a player’s conscious choices.
I’m sticking conscious in there, not because every single choice has to be - a lot of them aren’t - but because if at least one of them isn’t, it isn’t interactivity. The player has to be aware of their choice in the matter to some degree in order to realize they are participating in the story and thus interacting.
Note that this is not interacting with the medium. It’s not the same as changing the pacing of a book by turning the pages faster (or scrolling through certain types of visual novels faster) - that’s engaging with the medium but doesn’t impact the story in any way.
It also isn’t mere cosmetic changes that have no story impact. If you get to pick whether Princess Charming has brown or green eyes, but that has no relevance whatsoever, it’s not a game. But if, at the end of the game, the Good Witch rewards a brown-eyed Princess Charming with her own queendom and a green-eyed Princess Charming with money to start a bakery, that just might be.
One more thing about interactivity that’s kind of annoying? Yeah, players will not do what you want if you’re the writer. They just won’t. Want them to turn right? They’ll go left. Want them to go into the nice little cottage with the next quest giver inside? They’ll blow it up. You have to accept this about players and then either limit the amount of interactivity you allow them (“okay, NPCs are immune to fire magic”) or else accept that certain parts of the story might never get told (“Well, if Bob gets KO’d then the Magical Dough Rising quest just won’t happen”)
Interactive Structure
You might think games with an interactive structure would have the most sprawling, nonlinear stories ever, but they’re actually the most conservative. That’s because interactive games prioritize interactivity, which, as you recall, is all about the player making choices that impact the story even long term… but it’s still one story. Now, don’t get me wrong: nonlinear games are also interactive! They’re just interactive plus more!
At the end of games closest to traditional media like books and movies with very limited interactivity, stories are fairly straightforward with pretty much intact dramatic structures. Again, study up on that 3-Act Structure, and have I mentioned the Hero’s Journey? Because that is GOLD in the world of gaming, where you have literal heroes as your PCs.
Then we start getting into nonlinear territory, so let’s hop on over to that.
Nonlinear is the Way to Go
Along with interactivity, a key feature of video games is nonlinear story. It’s not exactly required per se, but common to the point of being assumed. So what do I mean by this?
Nonlinear story is when individual elements that make up a traditional story can be told in any order or skipped entirely without losing the meaning of the overall story.
How does it work? Well, people are weird creatures who see patterns in everything and are constantly making logical connections where there aren’t necessarily any. This is great for game writers and designers. This is really the key reason why nonlinear stories work. Because if a player gets scenes A-B-C it’ll make sense, if they see C-A-B their little brains will still put things together, and if they see B-A those brains will work slightly harder to fill in that gap but they’ll still make sense of it. If the story is set up properly, we don’t actually need that much to get the point of the main story. It just depends on how important the entire story is to you.
There are a lot of ways of handling nonlinear story. Like, a lot. Again, it really depends on how story-driven you want your game to be. If you have a game where story is extremely important, then it probably matters a lot more that players hit certain plot points in roughly the same order at roughly the same times. In a more open-ended game, players can take their sweet time and might never even reach many of the plot points.
For stories that have a main plot that they expect the player to follow to the end (aka the appeal of the game is the story and not the world or mechanics), probably the most common method of handling nonlinear story is gating.
Gating mechanisms are some sort of device, whether physical or otherwise, that prevent the player from continuing until certain conditions are met.
Sometimes this is more literal than others. Sometimes there may be a literal gate at the edge of town guarded by a brutish guard who won’t let you pass until you earn the favor of some nobleperson by completing a series of quests within the city limits - part of story. Or the enemies in an area might just be so tough that you can’t get past until you’ve leveled up to a certain point, which often requires participating in quests and seeing cut scenes and talking to NPCs, all part of story.
A lot of times with nonlinear story, it doesn’t actually matter which quests you complete, nor the order in which you complete them. Just gotta do the time. And that’s where nonlinear story starts to lose the emotional punch of interactive story. With more interactive stories where the writer controls the pacing more tightly, it’s relatively easy to ensure that the player experiences the story fully and to evoke the emotions you want from them. Once you step away into nonlinear wonderland, it gets harder and harder, and the more nonlinear you get, the less you can count on the player seeing the story at all. That’s when you begin to rely on other types of story like worldbuilding, item descriptions, found journal entries, lore, histories, etc. The types of things that build a broad story not limited to three acts.
What’s What?
Okay, so we’ve got the interactive end, we’ve got some gating mechanisms that kinda get broader, and we’ve got some nonlinear story in there somewhere, but what exactly is all of this? I’m sure you’ve got ideas for a game, and you need a place to start, so here are some basics. With some definitions, because I’m determined to have more definitions than Vivian!
When does the story end? When does the game end?
Okay: first distinction, possibly the biggest distinction when determining what kind of game you’re making. Think these are the same? Think again. Remember story. That’s the sequence of events tying everything together. There’s usually a main story, and that’s what we’re talking about here. There will be a beginning, middle, and end to your main story (the story that drives the overall conflict of the game). It doesn’t matter if the story is the reason you’re playing the game, and it doesn’t matter if you can keep playing afterwards (see next point). There will be an ending. There are almost always smaller stories along the way: little quests, dungeons, etc. We’re not talking about those.
Next, figure out when the game ends. This is that game over screen, when it fades to black, when, if you want to keep playing, you have to start again or go back to a previous save file. There is often a cutscene of some sort at the end, so more often than not this shows up as the end to interactivity as opposed to a literal black screen, for a while at least. Once you can no longer influence the story in any way, it’s over.
Please note that these two things are not the same. And the difference between them is the easiest way to differentiate between story types. Also… WE ARE TALKING ABOUT STORY. So let’s go!
Interactive Stories
We’ve covered this to some degree, but not in this way.
In a primarily interactive story, the game ends when the story ends.
My favorite example of this? Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom. Open-world? Yes. Can you explore to your heart’s content for as long as you possibly want? Yup. Nonlinear? Yes! Well, there are some good gating mechanisms with the temples. But mostly yes! However, there’s also a clear main story guiding the game, and once you beat that final baddie? It’s game over, fade to black, bye-bye. Wanna keep taming horses? Reload. And this time, don’t make the mistake of ending the story. It’s a great example of a non-traditional interactive game that clearly shows how the game ends when the story ends.
Let’s take a traditional yet non-traditional example: Tetris! As I mentioned earlier, our definition allows for story to include a sequence of gameplay/mechanics that form the core of the game, and progression of little blocks raining down with increasing difficulty does indeed fit that category. And while the exact combination of blocks is randomized, things like pacing (and thus difficulty) are relatively set, meaning the player’s emotional engagement is fairly set, and certain plot points are experienced at roughly the same points. Gating mechanisms of levels even occur! And when those little blocks no longer fall because you couldn’t handle the heat? Game over. Hopefully you at least got a high score! Honestly, it’s a good, straightforward story as long as you broaden your perspective of what makes a story a story.
Multiple-ending Stories
People confuse this and branching games all the time. I’ll cover branching in a second, but the big difference is, surprise, when story and game end.
In a multiple-ending game, the game ends after the final choice of the story.
Okay, so maybe that is a little more complicated, but basically, in the story, it will come down to a choice between two or more endings, and the story - and game - ends immediately after that choice (well, probably after a cutscene or two, but you know, the whole loss of interactivity thing).
Take one of my favorite games, ChronoTrigger. A classic multiple-ending game. Lots of multiple endings. Thirteen, to be precise. But it’s just the endings. There are not thirteen different stories. There is a single story with thirteen moments where you can choose to end the game. Basically, at various points in the game under various conditions, you can fight the boss fight, and if you win, it’s go to cutscene, see ending, occasionally walk around talking to people in cutscene, visit locations, see sights, play with cats, etc. Of course, if you lose, you get an ending too.
But the key is, the game essentially ends after that choice. There’s no immediate game-over screen, but there’s no more interactivity (no, talking to people doesn't count because it doesn’t change anything whatsoever - don’t you remember the definition?). So you make the choice to fight the boss, triggering one of two endings (win/lose), and then the game is over, you just get a little more story to wrap things up.
See? Game ends after final choice. Story continues a bit, but game ends.
Oh, one other thing here: the endings tend to be gating mechanisms. You generally have to progress a certain amount in some way (there are lots of types of progression) in order to trigger end conditions, so it’s a natural gate.
Branching Stories
Okay, we’re getting very nonlinear now, but there’s still a main story that drives the conflict.
In a branching story, at least one permanent split to the story results in two or more separate stories and endings; each individual game ends when the corresponding individual story ends.
Yeah sorry, that’s a mouthful; I want to be as precise as possible.
There are three basic types of branches; you can probably guess them since I referred to them loosely earlier (though with one significant difference - you’ll see). Minor branches are short-term divergences from another version of the story and might be as simple as a choice in a conversation that gets a different half-response from the NPC, then immediately returns to the response everyone gets. Or they can last a little longer, but it doesn’t take too long before everything meets back up in the main plot.
Moderate branches are medium- or long-term divergences from at least one other version of the story. Now, please note here that these are the story. Minor branches are sometimes just surface level, but moderate ones are story level. The sequence is significantly different. Maybe you choose to fight for one side in a war over another. Maybe an ally dies, and you lose out on an entire subplot with them. Maybe you don’t make it to a location in time, and it’s destroyed. However, at some point, everything will converge into a single story again.
This one can get a little controversial in terms of separating it from multiple ending games, because every single story type up until now can have minor and moderate branching. So, for example, I used to give Halo as an example of a branching game. I have not played Halo (still!).
HALO SPOILER
My students pointed out that, actually, it was a multiple-choice ending, because nothing - literally nothing - that you do in the game actually matters except the single last choice you make. Sure, you have lots and lots of significantly moderate branching, but that’s it. Everything converges into that final moment where you make a single decision that determines the ending. So thank you to my students who corrected me there!
SPOILER OVER
Basically, you can have stories with huge variations in playing experience and individual stories, but if they converge again at any point, boom, not branching.
Which leads us to the final type of branching, and the required type to be a branching story: Major branches. This is, as you can no doubt guess, where the story diverges from at least one other variation and never again converges. This not only creates at least two endings, but those endings are determined long before the story and game end. Major branches can be conscious or unconscious on the part of the player: sometimes the player can choose to do things that will send them off onto the path of no return; sometimes they’ll be pushed down that path based on actions in the game, skill level, number of NPCs killed or saved, so many possible factors!
Each has its pros and cons, but players like agency, so at least letting them know why they ended up on their path is important, even if you don’t tell them until the end. Give them a chance to go back and try again, because players love doing that.
Oh yeah, and importantly, in all of these, there is an end to the story, and once that story is done, the game is over. You’ll probably get a cutscene, but interactivity is over, thus game is over and it’s just finishing up the story. When those major branches finally meet their separate endings, they do in fact end, and the games end too.
Open-Ended Stories
Yup, we’re in really nonlinear territory now. So, okay, there is a main story. Every game has one. It’s just not why you’re playing, and really, a lot of players won’t bother with it.
In an open-ended story, the game continues after the story ends.
My favorite example here is Skyrim. You’re sort of… uh… forced into the main plot in an opening that really prevents too many replays. For me, at least. After that, when I played the first time, I obediently went where I was supposed to go, then on my way to the next location, I saw a cool place and went to explore that, then, in true Anne fashion, got completely lost, and that was the end of the main quest for me. Well, I mean, I did actually do quite a bit eventually, but it was very sporadic and more by chance than design. I had no intention of finishing.
But let’s say you did finish. Does that affect anything? I mean, a little, I guess? Would you even notice that you finished? I doubt it. The main plot is not why you’re playing the game for the vast majority of players. It’s just a cool thing for completionists.
Now, that’s an open-ended, open-world example. Let’s look at an open-ended, smaller world game: Animal Crossing! Any of them, really, although the latest ones have expanded quite a bit. But it’s still a limited location. Is there a main plot? Yes! To pay off your debt! Somehow your debt keeps growing, very strange… but you can eventually pay it off. Then it’s game over. Right? No. But it is story over. Or at least main story over. There are still tons of side quests and exploring, and all sorts of things to do in the world that make it well worth playing long after the main story has ended. Main story gone, game still going strong.
Player-Driver Stories
But Anne!
I hear you say,
What about the Sims?! There’s no main story in that!
To which I say,
Yes, you have an excellent point there… to a certain degree. Remember how I started out talking about immediate story and imposed story? This is where those terms come in again.
Immediate story is the story that players tell themselves about what they’re playing to put events in a logical order in their head.
Imposed story is the story that writers and designers put into the game to create a sequence for players to better experience the game.
You see, everything we’ve talked about so far is imposed story. The writers/designers want players to experience a story, so they design a plot and characters and a world to create that story, from the strong story-driven interactive to the more story-imbued open-ended. As we progress along that spectrum, the importance of immediate narrative increases, but when we get to fully player-driven stories, yeah, it’s the big show.
The same works with player-driven games. Writers and designers don’t need to provide the story, just the playground where stories are possible (these are commonly called sandbox games, by the way). I frequently spend days building houses in the Sims and never actually get to the part where I play with characters. That’s the game I’m playing, and it is fun. Other times, I’ll empty a town and create characters from my books and fill up the town just to see how my characters from a variety of books and worlds would interact, just hopping between households. Huh, I’m realizing it’s been years since I actually played the “normal” way. But that’s the point. The game is designed so that I, the player, can do whatever I want and create my own game using their world. My immediate story is the only story that exists.
Okay, I’m going with “Sim” here, so let’s go with SimCity! I debated SimAnt and SimEarth, but worried that those would show my age, plus those actually aren’t player-driven, since surprisingly they do have main stories of a sort. But SimCity, beloved game of my childhood. I’m just going to refer to the older versions because, as they progressed and got things like advisors, there started to be more story. So let’s go truly old school: original SimCity.
All you really need to know is that there are three types of zones: residential, industrial, and commercial, and you can do powerlines and roads. I don’t remember pipes. Powerplants yes. Uh, maybe other buildings? Whatever, good enough.
So all you do is try to get a big city. Right? Or maybe a pretty city. Maybe make it fit the natural landscape. Maybe flatten everything. Maybe lots of trees! Or maybe the biggest population? Is there a right way to play this?!
Answer: No. No there is not. Play the way you want, and make up the story you want in your mind. Put those logical pieces together. Find those patterns. Your story is the best story!
SimCity didn’t build an imposed story. They built a world where infinite immediate stories are possible. And that’s the beauty of player-driven games.
Summa Summarum
And that’s where I’ll end things. Interactivity and nonlinear stories are the key differences between video game stories and every other medium, and they’re the reason people love games so much. I hope that if you’re interested in writing games, this lets you better pinpoint where you are on the spectrum of structure, and if you’re looking to analyze a story, you find this useful in placing existing games into the large sprawling mass of terms and examples I’ve dumped on you!
Whoops, that didn’t go well! Have fun gaming, everyone!
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Copyright ©️ 2026 Anne Winchell. Original ideas belong to the respective authors. Generic concepts such as narrative and interactive structures are copyrighted under Creative Commons with attribution, and any derivatives must also be Creative Commons. However, specific ideas such as individual video games and all language or exact phrasing are individually copyrighted by the respective authors. Contact them for information on usage and questions if uncertain what falls under Creative Commons. We’re almost always happy to give permission. Please contact the authors through this website’s contact page.
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