Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
The Believability Challenge
A storyteller's success or failure with believability hinges on his ability to
present:
▪
An artificial, incomplete world …
▪
featuring custom-designed characters …
▪
who experience carefully crafted events, actions, and reactions …
but that nevertheless
appears to the audience
to be:
▪
a real, complete world …
▪
featuring genuine people …
▪
who experience spontaneously unfolding events, actions, and reac-
tions.
As you no doubt noticed, the storyteller is essentially trying to convince
an audience of the exact opposite of the truth. Balancing the needs of
story structure, pacing, characterization, and so forth with the requirement
for the story to always feel like “what would really happen” is one of the
primary challenges of creating successful story experiences.
There are a number of missteps that can impact believability during
storytelling, and they nearly all stem from the writer either failing to prop-
erly set up a
surprise
(which we will cover in the next chapter), or forcing a
specific action or scene to happen—often in the service of
spec-
tacle
—despite other factors, such as
consistency
or
coincidence
.
These four elements—
consistency, coincidence, spectacle
, and
sur-
prise
—are the primary factors that can affect believability in a fictional
work.
Consistency
Ralph Waldo Emerson may have declared “foolish consistency” to be the
“hobgoblin of little minds,” but when it comes to storytelling it's the care-
less disregard of consistency that can be foolish.
