The Prophecy Brought by Butterfly Wings

Video games are a form of narrative that are severely underutilized. Books are cemented as the vehicle of stories and narratives, and movies are now being considered serious vehicles of narrative in film studies. While game studies exists, however, it is not given the same credibility as a field of narrative. That frivolous stereotype leads to a lack of credit given to the fantastic narratives in some games.

Two of my favorite video games are narrative games with a clear message and themes. They are stories in their own right; they are simply told via an interactive form. One of these games is Celeste.

Celeste is a narrative about anxiety and perfectionism told through a platformer game. The other game is In Stars and Time.

In Stars and Time is a narrative about hope, hopelessness, and friendship told through a turn-based RPG game. Both of these games are stories in their own right, and to discount them as narratives because they use form as a narrative device is saddening.

These games, as well as others, have made me want to use the vehicle of video games and interactive content to create my own story. I have been developing the story of this game for about a year and a half, and this design is what the start screen may look like.

My game is going to be a turn-based RPG game, and I want to look at destiny, choices, and the expectations we put on children in media through this game. A unique feature of gameplay that I want to use to tell this story, a feature that makes it impossible to make this story not as an interactive story, is the ability to restart the game. I want to take inspiration from games like Undertale which use the form of the media to shape the narrative. There are only bad endings in my story unless you break out of the expectations of the game, and do not let yourself choose either a purely “good” or “bad” path.

There are five main characters within my game: one initiates the plot, one is the antagonist, and there are three protagonists that you can choose from. These five characters are central to the plot and each have a symbol that represents them. The antagonist is represented by the woods, each of the three protagonists are represented by a weapon, and the initiator is represented by the viceroy butterfly.

Images are incredibly important to stories, and images are even more important to stories made through video games. Video games are a multimedia approach to art, which means that each part of them play a role in creating the story whether consciously or not. Images like symbols for characters are obvious ways of creating stories using multimedia approaches, but I want my game to be one where each aspect of it, from gameplay to art to sound design, are important to creating it.

This game is still just plans and a dream, but it will be real one day. It will be a story not just for me, but for all, and this start screen may be part of it.

This story was based on Your Story as a Game.