Through the Lens: Video Games - Game Design Theory - page 108

largely left the scene, JRPGs (and games inspired by them) are still ex-
tremely successful.
Games Hurt Stories, Stories Hurt Games
If you are tying your gameplay to a linear story, you are causing huge
damage to your game. If you are allowing the player to change the course
of the story through gameplay, you are causing huge damage to your
story. There is simply no way around this, so if you absolutely must com-
bine the two, you should probably choose the one that is more important
to you. There is simply no way to combine the two without damaging one
or the other.
If your primary goal is to tell a story, you should consider another
medium, such as a short story, a comic, or a screenplay. The idea that
pressing a button to see the next page means you're more immersed is
pure myth. We become immersed in any activity that flows well, and this
can happen in any medium. Contrary to popular opinion, video games
are not better at immersion just because you're holding a joystick. An au-
dience will become immersed just as much in a great film, album, or play.
Quicksave the Destroyer
he whole thesis of this topic is that games are great when they force
players to make difficult, interesting, and ambiguous decisions. If you
allow players to save a game-state right before they make decisions, then
you're pulling the rug out from under that. A decision has no weight—
and worse, no ambiguity—when all possible routes can be tried out in a
matter of minutes.
Of course, people are going to say, well, what's the alternative—we
can't make people play through our boring game again ! The implications
of these kinds of motivations should be obvious. Moreover, I'm not say-
ing that you can't have any kind of game-saving feature. An inoffensive
alternative for saving games is a save-and-exit style mechanism, which
could also be called suspending the game . This type of mechanism simply
lets players save their games when they want to stop playing—loading is
only possible from the title screen.
Randomize
As I said at the beginning of this chapter, randomizing your game is the
only way to create any replay value in a single-player game. If you ran-
domize the gameplay, you can actually allow players to lose games when
they make bad decisions. It might seem impossible to randomize an RPG
and have it still make sense, but it's definitely possible. Look at games like