Overall Game Design - Video Game: Storytelling - page 142

Finally, there are games that feature characters and take place in a fic-
tional world, but in which stories only emerge in a systemic fashion. They
generally fall into three genres: simulation games, fighting games, and
multiplayer-only battle arenas (MOBAs).
In all three types, only a touch of game story is applied at the outset—to
establish the context of a fictional world, a starting situation, and possibly
characters in that world—and then the player is essentially turned loose in
the play space, free to take whatever actions are allowed by the rules and
systems.
Simulation games , such as the aptly named SimCity or The Sims , feature
dizzyingly complex and interdependent systems that create massive pos-
sibility spaces, allowing for maximum player expression. The player doesn't
directly control any characters, but instead controls situations, setups, and
organizational elements to influence characters and cause events to move
in one direction or another. Complex interactions between the various in-
game systems produce interesting and highly unpredictable results that,
with the benefit of hindsight, should mesh with what the player knows of
the world and the choices he's made. With no specific victory condition,
the player's story can go on indefinitely.
The main strength of this setup is getting out of the player's way and
freeing him to start creating her own stories within the space. However,
with virtually no game story or direct control of player characters, this
genre of game is aimed at a very specific type of player. Only the very best
of these games can hope to capture a large audience.
Fighting games , their origins generally traced back to the venerable 1991
arcade hit Street Fighter II , have rarely incorporated much of a pre-crafted
narrative structure to their proceedings. Their players come for one thing:
to fight! And designers of these games generally focus on giving those
players what they want, allowing the stories to emerge from the endless
interactions the play space allows. A recent exception to this rule was the
surprising hit Injustice: Gods Among Us (NetherRealm, 2013), a traditional
fighting game featuring the DC Comics super heroes and villains, and in-
corporating an epic, extended story experience.
Multiplayer-only games set up a general context and then rely heavily
on players to generate emergent stories for each other. It can be an ef-
fective strategy. After all, there is nothing less predictable or controllable
than other human beings, and en masse they will come up with all kinds of
behaviors and tactics within the rulesets that a designer (or small group of