Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Audiences expect and deserve a certain amount of internal logic and
uniformity within any story. This generally breaks down into two main
areas: consistency of world and character .
World Consistency
Everyone who experiences your story exists in the real world, and they're
all experts on many things about it, such as the world's physics. They
aren't physicists, mind you—well, a few might be—but each and every
audience member inherently knows just by observation and from personal
experience whether something looks or feels right when it's, say, falling off
a cliff. Or when a person is jumping across a dojo with a flying kick.
So if you present a story that's supposed to take place in the real world
and something happens in it that seems physically impossible to the audi-
ence—with no explanation provided—the audience will likely lose their
suspension of disbelief, at least momentarily.
Defy it regularly, and they will eventually make an unconscious determ-
ination that this story—despite your efforts to convince them of the con-
trary—does not take place in the real world. Or, that the storytellers don't
know the real world very well. Or, worst of all, that the storytellers think
that the audience doesn't know the real world very well.
From that point on, the audience's suspension of disbelief may or may
not hold together enough for them to emotionally engage to the extent
you were hoping—because your world is not consistent.
A good example of world consistency gone wrong in the service of
cheap spectacle can be found in the 1996 sci-fi action movie Independen-
ce Day . Apart from the conceit of hostile aliens in flying saucers attacking
Earth, everything else in the film is presented as if it takes place in our
world—the real world. In fact the entire point of the movie, I would say, is
to dramatize what would happen if aggressive aliens attacked the world
that you and I know.
Just shy of the movie's halfway point, during the aliens' initial, devastat-
ing attacks, young mother and part-time stripper Jasmine Dubrow (played
by Vivica A. Fox) finds herself running through an arched automobile tun-
nel, a fireball filling it behind her. She and many other terrified motorists
run for their lives, away from the engulfing fireball. Then she spots a main-
tenance door in the side of the tunnel and makes a dash for it, kicking in
the door and pulling her young son through it.
Very important: she doesn't close the door .
Search WWH ::




Custom Search