Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Believability
A storyteller and an audience enter into an unspoken pact at the beginning
of each story experience. The audience agrees to put aside their disbelief:
to temporarily pretend to not know they are experiencing something fab-
ricated, something false. They allow themselves to travel into the
storyteller's artificial world, to imagine that what they're observing is real,
and to emotionally connect with it as such.
The storyteller, for her part, commits to doing everything possible to
make this
suspension of disbelief
as easy for the audience as possible—in
fact, to almost force the issue. To draw the audience in, to
make
them for-
get they're sitting on their couch or in a movie theater, the storyteller
agrees to avoid pushing or “bouncing” the audience out of that artificial,
constructed world at any point during the story.
To suspend one's disbelief is, by definition, to
believe
. That's a huge part
of what an audience wants:
Make me believe it
. If they believe it, they can
engage with it emotionally—really
feel
in reaction to what they're reading,
seeing, hearing, and/or playing. The core goal of every storyteller is to in-
tentionally evoke specific emotional reactions in her audience. And it's why
maintaining believability in your story is so important—because if they don't
believe
it, they won't
feel
it.
