Players enjoy video games for a variety of reasons. Some players enjoy cooperative or competitive multiplayer experiences with their friends, while others enjoy single-player story-driven adventures. While not all games contain cutscenes with dialogue, there are numerous ways to provide a narrative to players, and the director of God of War (2018) believes that all games are capable of doing this.
Recently the nominees for The Game Awards were revealed. In the category of Best Narrative, fans noticed that Elden Ring had been nominated alongside games such as the recent God of War Ragnarok. This led to plenty of discourse online about what constitutes a narrative within a game. Elden Ring is light on cutscenes, but it contains plenty of lore and story details that are provided through item descriptions and environmental clues. The depth of that content has provided talented YouTubers with plenty of material to cover, but some players believed that this should not count as a narrative when compared to the cutscene-heavy likes of God of War Ragnarok.
Cory Barlog, director of God of War (2018) and producer of God of War Ragnarok, went to Twitter to share his opinion on the matter. In his Tweet, he said that “narrative/story mean so many things in games,” and that “their delivery method and frequency differ in all games.” He goes on to say that “there is narrative/story in ALL games,” and believes that all games have the ability to take players on journeys, even if they are non-traditional definitions of narrative.
It seems clear that the director and producer at Santa Monica Studio wanted to provide his opinion on the Elden Ring discourse without mentioning it by name. There is certainly merit to Barlog’s take on the matter, which should hopefully ease the discussion surrounding Elden Ring being nominated for Best Narrative at The Game Awards.
In some follow-up Tweets, Barlog discusses how storytelling in video games is still finding its footing as a relatively new medium. He discusses how books, movies, and TV shows have provided “blueprints” for how stories can be executed, but that it doesn’t have to be this way for games. Finally, he ends his thoughts by saying that “all games should be nominated for story and narrative in some way because they all have them in some way that is solely and completely unique to the world of games.”
God of War Ragnarok and Elden Ring are both nominated for numerous awards at The Game Awards, including Game of the Year. The Game Awards will be streamed live on December 8, 2022.
