The Three-Act Structure - Video Game: Storytelling - page 22

Life , the player's narrative goal is to re-establish some semblance of the
positive world glimpsed in the game's first few minutes; in the sequel, the
player's purpose is to shatter the negative world that oppresses and pro-
vokes us right off the bat.
Both Half-Life games are very successful, highly rated and held up as
prime examples of strong, effective writing in games. So, it does seem that
gamers are willing and able to handle a low- or even no-conflict begin-
ning to their games.
A Marvel-ously Long Act I
When I was lead writer on Marvel: Ultimate Alliance 2 ( MUA2 ), Game Dir-
ector Dan Tanguay, Narrative Designer Jonathan Mintz, and I all commit-
ted to including a true, substantial Act I in the game's structure. With a
storyline based on Marvel Comics' hugely popular “Civil War” crossover
event from 2006, it was clear that we had a lot of ground to cover in order
to transition from the normal status quo of the Marvel Universe to a point
where the super heroes have split into two camps and are fighting a war
against each other.
We knew we needed to start with gameplay-contextualizing conflict,
but we couldn't just jump into the main conflict. Fortunately, we under-
stood that the conflict introduced to kick off the game does not need to
be the main conflict of the entire story .
This is an important and potentially liberating concept for a video game
storyteller.
In MUA2 , we were actually able to have three full playable missions
firmly ensconced in Act I—establishing the status quo, introducing an In-
citing Incident, and ultimately allowing the player to choose from one of
two options for Plot Point 1. Our Act I breakdown looked like this:
▪ Act I: Super heroes embark on a secret mission to Latveria, led by
Nick Fury, then spend another mission dealing with a Latverian re-
venge strike on New York City. We learn that since the original mis-
sion wasn't sanctioned by the U.S. government, super heroes are
now seen by the public as having overstepped their bounds.
▪ Inciting Incident: Congress passes the Superhuman Registration
Act, requiring all super-powered beings to register and reveal
their identities.