Believability - Video Game: Storytelling - page 93

▪ Comes with little or no warning; is not properly set up.
▪ Seems noticeably coincidental to the audience at the time it hap-
pens, or very shortly thereafter.
▪ Is doubted, questioned, second-guessed, or even mocked by the
audience.
We've all had the experience. Something unlikely happens in a
story—something with at least two of the attributes listed above—and we
just don't “buy” it. We roll our eyes. We mutter to ourselves, “Oh, come
on.” Or, “Gee, that was lucky.” We are “bounced out” of the experience,
and we may never fully get back into it. We feel our intelligence is being
insulted. We lose respect for the story and the storyteller.
If your story contains a coincidence with most or all of the traits listed
above, you very likely have a problem.
The Fatal Coincidence
The king of all story-damaging coincidences is called a deus ex machina .
Translated from the original Latin, it means “god from the machine.” And it
comes from a time when audiences had very different expectations of
their Heroes and stories.
In Greek tragedies of over 2,000 years ago, it was commonplace for
characters to get themselves into such a mess that only an Olympian god
from on high, magically appearing in Act III, could sort things out. “God
from the machine” refers to the physical mechanism used at the time of
these plays: a crane-like device that would allow an actor (playing a god)
to be lowered onto the stage as if from the heavens.
Audiences at the time were much more predisposed to accepting su-
pernatural interference in the outcome of a story. But even back then,
Greek intellectuals studying the craft of storytelling warned against use of
the technique, advocating that Heroes should figure out their own solu-
tions to conflicts.
As Horace advised in his Ars Poetica : “That a god not intervene, unless a
knot show up that be worthy of such an untangler.” To which Aristotle ad-
ded in his Poetics : “It is obvious that the solutions of plots should come
about as a result of the plot itself, and not from a contrivance.”
These days, we almost never see gods—literal gods—dropping into a
story near the end to right all wrongs. But there are modern equivalents