Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
the resulting narrative will almost surely be less than compelling to an out-
sider.
You had to be there
.
But for the player herself, it will be memorable.
Which is more exciting, more heart-pumping, and memorable—a movie
about a baseball team making an incredible comeback to win the World
Series, or watching it actually happen to your favorite team, in real time,
right in front of your eyes?
Even though the movie version might be better crafted—with well-
defined characters, compelling cinematography, perfectly tuned dialogue,
and a rousing score backing it all up—it will probably fail to evoke the
same degree of raw emotion that watching a less-polished but emergent
version would. Why? Because the audience
knows
it's pre-crafted,
knows
it's not actually happening. Suspension of disbelief only goes so far when
compared to something that's for real. Thus, the objective quality bar for
an emergent story is much lower than for a pre-crafted game story.
This isn't to say that every emergent story is superior to every pre-craf-
ted one. Game stories, being crafted and refined, are more likely to hit at
least a certain bar of emotional impact, while player stories, by their very
nature, can and will be all over the map—from incoherent and eminently
forgettable to transcendent and indescribably thrilling.
The potential for the latter scenario to occur is among the reasons
League of Legends
is one of the most popular games on the planet at the
time of this writing, with over 27 million people playing it on any given day.
That said, the more your design relies on emergent versus predefined
stories, the more pressure it puts on your game designers—and possibly
the rest of the team—to create play spaces with almost endless potential
for unplanned but emotionally compelling interactions. Game stories are
powerful tools to enhance the entire experience. If you decide to eschew
them in favor of the player's story, your game design and its systems had
better be pretty fantastic!
Final Thoughts on Overall Game Design
During the long slog of a game's dev cycle, it is frighteningly easy for
“Game Design plus Narrative” to become “Game Design vs. Narrative.”
In the previous chapter (
“Team Leadership”
)
much time was spent dis-
cussing the pushing and pulling that can and does occur during develop-
