The Unreliable Narrator: When a Game Plays You

The unreliable Showrunner & Narrator has been used as a fantastic device to mislead people in books and films. Creating dramatic story endings and plot twists but why does this plot device have such trouble traversing into gaming media? Is creating an unreliable Showrunner & Narrator in gaming impossible?

*Thanks for participating in this week's discussion!*

♪ Outro Music: "Flow State by Tiffany Roman
Artist: David Hueso I Writer: James Portnow I Showrunner & Narrator: Matthew Krol

#ExtraCredits #Gaming #GameDesign

[TierZoo]

I think my favorite example of this sort of recontextualization comes from Star Wars: KOTOR2. It is revealed that over the course of the game, what the player character assumed were just innocent level-ups gained from battle experience were actually the result of something far more sinister. FIrst time I've ever been lied to by a game mechanic.

[deadbushinc.]

Here's a term from Ancient Greek literature: anagnorisis! It's when a character in a play comes to a sudden realisation, often that they themselves are the cause of the horrible things that happen in the play.

[bmckelvy]

Disco Elysium does a great job of creating a sort of ‘unreliable Protagonist’ where all of your narrated thoughts and actions are very clearly being filtered through the protagonist’s preexisting biases and conditions before they reach you the player

[dquinnster]

The first playthrough and seeing "Would You Kindly?" painted in blood on the wall is a gaming experience I will always cherish. I probably still have whiplash.

[austinsmith]

The Stanley parable is an interesting example of video games being able to uniquely have a narrator that's only as unreliable as you chose to make them.

[ryansmith]

I'm honestly shocked Spec Ops: The Line wasn't mentioned here. It's a shame because I feel like We Happy Few could've been done like this and been a way better game. I'm actually a huge fan of media that turns everything on its head, going back and realizing new contexts for previously innocuous moments is really effective at getting me to enjoy the story of a game/movie. One thing that immediately pops into my head was how the Collectors went from being a sort of mindless insect drone enemy in the beginning of Mass Effect 2 to being almost tragic objects of pity midway through the game, and then the 3rd act reveal of Harbinger "releasing control" of the Collector General made me feel empathy for what were, essentially, eugenics zombies.

[packman]

I think 'Frame shift' from literary analysis might cover this. It's when a twist in the narrative forces you to reconsider your framing of previous actions in the work. For example there's a Roald Dahl short story wherein two characters make a bet for a high amount of money, only for the final lines to reveal that one of them has been cheating. The narrator isn't unreliable, but they're misinformed and so the frame shifts and we suddenly see small actions, like where the maid was in previous scenes, as much more significant.

Also I was thinking that games sometimes use unreliable narrators in form of framing that makes them appear to be one genre, before revealing a twist. Little Inferno for example makes you believe that the fire in front of you is an abstraction before revealing near the end that you're actually in 1st person perspective from a character who can, but refuses to, turn away from the fire.

[SirSaladhead]

My favorite example is Rucks, from Bastion. Not only does he literally narrate while you play and reacts to whatever you are doing, but his perspective on the City significantly shifts from the truth. If you peel back his nostalgia and admiration, you can see literally all important named characters have been screwed over by the City in one way or another. The Kid had to do two shifts on the Wall because the money he was sending home never arrived, Zulf's trust and diplomatic efforts are horribly betrayed when the City decides to wipe his people out and Zia's father is forced to create the Calamity for the City (even though that proves their own undoing).
But you have to take a real critical look at how Rucks perceives things, and only then will you notice the City was not all it's cracked up to be. Brillant piece of writing, that game.

[MacThornbody]

Something to consider: as the primary interpreter of the game, the player is more like a narrator, since you (generally) control the action. But you're not just the narrator to yourself, you're the narrator to the game itself. The game doesn't tell you "Mario runs to the right and jumps over the turtle, " you're trying to tell the game what happens. You do it through button-presses rather than words. In a way, the genius of The Stanley Parable is not that you play against an unreliable narrator that subverts your expectations, it's that you're two narrators competing over what the story gets to be. You're not Stanley, you and the narrator are God and the Devil torturing poor Job to prove a point to each other.

[Pyrian]

"Unreliable Exposition" covers most cases. It's not strictly speaking the narrator, but games don't necessarily have narrators. But most games have exposition dumped by in-game characters, and it's not even all that uncommon for one or more of those characters to be less than totally forthcoming. One good example not mentioned in the video is Mark of the Ninja, which has both unreliable exposition and has the main character you're playing being rather unreliable in their own way.

[redjaypictures]

One of the best uses of unreliable narrators in games is in “call of Juarez: Gunslinger” where the main character is telling stories about his life as a bounty hunter, some of which are super grandiose and conflict with events widely accepted as historical fact, it does a really good job of demonstrating how its hard to discern actual history from dime-novel fantasy when it comes to the era of the wild west

[mitchellwhitmer]

This is the whole reason I watched the original Twilight Zone series, to pick up some of that show's amazing skill at writing plot twists involving unreliable protagonists.

[caligulacorday]

i`m fond of the term „agency subversion“ — in that it is revealed that you/your character have not been exerting agency over the game`s systems/world in the way that you were lead to believe

[Ava_luvsu]

I love how they use Don Quixote as one of the images for this episode, makes this video alot more funnier aswell as informative!

[healthtrooper]

I instantly have to think of NieR and how the player character has this kind of typical fantasy adventure story but when it is revealed what's really going on, you're in for another emotional Rollercoaster with a blown brain on the side.

[jedaksears]

"Paradigm shift" would be a decent descriptor in my opinion.

[EfrainMan]

I feel like games that come really close to being unreliable narrator status are some horror (and not horror) games that make you see a different world than what is the real world, but your actions in the other world are being translated to the real world somehow. Games like Among the Sleep, Hellblade, and American McGee's Alice series come to mind, to greater and lesser degrees.

[UrdnotChuckles]

There was a lot of unreliable narration going on in Dragon Age 2, thanks to Varric. That fun little man was always embellishing his stories more than a little. :)

[sxeptomaniac]

I feel like the Psychonauts games could be seen as built on the idea of going into different minds in order to follow their narratives, which often would turn out to be unreliable in some ways. It's not exactly the same as an unreliable narrator, but we get a lot of cases where we find that even the stories Raz tells himself aren't necessarily true from everyone else's perspective.

[jaredwallace]

Nier Replicant is another perfect example of re-contextualizing players' actions to evoke emotion and thought about the game's narrative themes.
For me, these kind of experiences separate games that I move on from (and sometimes mostly forget) from the ones that I engage with on a deeper emotional and/or intellectual level, and stick with me forever.