Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Gear Solid , Gears of War , and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of
Time all rely on cutscenes.
Allowing the story to trump interactivity. When the story trumps
interactivity it's sometimes referred to as “being on rails.� Apps
that exhibit this model of story typically give players very little
choice over how the game goes. Often they're required to simply
move down a linear corridor for the entire length of the game,
sometimes with small bits of “gaming� thrown in to keep it inter-
esting. Dragon's Lair , Final Fantasy XIII , and Half-Life 2 all use
this model.
Allowing interactivity to trump story. Games that allow interac-
tivity to trump story are usually the best ones, but the roles and
quality of the stories are greatly diminished. Most games in this
category would be just as good without any story at all, and it's of-
ten fair to say that the story is somewhat tacked on. Super Mario
Brothers , Katamari Damacy , and 100 Rogues all put interactivity
above story.
The High-Tech Solution that Will Never Be
Some people think that one way to integrate stories and games better
would be to have the game system regenerate the rest of the story in re-
sponse to the decisions a player makes. That is, all of the character arcs
would respond to each decision, in real time, regenerating themselves
into a new complete story that would be satisfying and say something
powerful and resonant about life. To me, this idea is ridiculous at best
and impossible at worst. If you're one of these people, allow me to ex-
plain why this idea will not be useful within our lifetimes, and why it
will probably never be useful: writing good stories is very difficult . Experi-
enced writers spend weeks or even months on a single scene. Changing
one decision in an otherwise great story can turn it into an incoherent
soup of nonsense. Each time a character makes a decision in a story is a
chance to break the story—stories are fragile machines.
So if a computer is making real-time decisions about how a story
should continue in response to a player's decision, it has to be far more
intelligent than the greatest human writer who has ever lived! That alone
puts this idea well into the future. But even if we did have that fantasti-
cally smart computer, we still have another problem—there's bound to
be some decision combinations that simply will not add up to a coherent
story (let alone a good one).
Another solution, of course, is just to accept that most stories in
games will be bad or mediocre. I'd like to believe that none of us want to
shoot for mediocre, though.
Search WWH ::




Custom Search