Believability - Video Game: Storytelling - page 92

story may now continue. Whew! Audience relief probably clouds the per-
ception of a very fortunate coincidence here.
After all, have you ever given much thought to what would have
happened in the story if that R5 unit hadn't blown up? Think about it …
C-3PO and R5-D4 accompany Owen and Luke back to their moisture
farm. Poor, rejected R2-D2 is loaded back onto the Jawa sandcrawler, and
he's either sold to someone else down the line, or possibly even disas-
sembled for parts. His urgent message from Princess Leia never reaches
Luke, and thus is never seen by Obi-Wan Kenobi. Princess Leia is never
rescued from the Death Star; she's tortured, possibly to death, or maybe to
the point that she reveals the location of the Rebel base. Without the plans
contained on R2, the Rebels have no way to defeat the Death Star, and
they are either destroyed by it or forced to retreat. In other words, the en-
tire story falls apart, unless this little R5 unit happens to break down while
rolling across the Tatooine desert!
But even all these years later, with so many millions of people having
watched this movie multiple times, very few have noticed this little coin-
cidence that makes such a big difference in the story. So, it's a “way-
homer,” 2 the kind of coincidence that an audience only thinks about on
the way home from the theater (if even then). It's the kind a storyteller gets
away with.
Ironically, if Owen had initially chosen C-3PO and R2-D2, that would
also have been a coincidence, and probably a more noticeable one!
So yes, there are coincidences that do little to no harm. Now we'll cover
the ones that can damage or even utterly destroy an otherwise well-con-
structed story.
2 With apologies to Joel and Ethan Coen, I've co-opted this term from their brilliant Rais-
ing Arizona .
The Bad Coincidence
A “bad” coincidence in a story tends to have many or all of the following
traits:
▪ Benefits the Hero and/or his allies.
▪ Is the result of the Hero's dumb luck vs. effective planning or action.
▪ Is unlikely, based on what the audience knows at the time.