On Game Design - Game Design Theory - page 21

Story Game

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Figure 7 . A rough representation of the shape of a story versus that of a game.

various events. I need to make clear that I'm by no means saying that
stories are simpler than games. Both stories and games are complex
“machines� that actually have to function, each in their own way. Good
stories have many threads that interweave with each other in a grace-
ful and beautiful way. In terms of what the user experiences, they are
linear lists of events ( Figure 7 , left).
Games, however, do not consist of linear lists of events ( Figure 7 ,
right). The experience is more like a constantly evolving and emerging
web, since as players go through them, the nodes and connections (the
possibilities and choices) are changing. It's not always clear to players
how nodes are connected—in fact, getting better at a game is a process
of getting better at predicting the future structure of the web. When we
can completely map out the entire web of a game (as we can do with any
story we've seen before), the game actually is “solved� and becomes use-
less to us (think tic-tac-toe, in which most adults know with certainty the
optimal move in any situation). So those who are interested in making a
story-based game essentially are left with the three options below.
Cutscenes. he most common way to create story-based games
is to use cutscenes. With this method the application essentially
bounces back and forth between a movie and allowing the user to
play the game parts. It has become more clear to most develop-
ers that this method is a somewhat sloppy solution and players
will probably grow more and more irritated by it as time goes on,
since having a play experience interrupted is frustrating. Metal