Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
storytellinG: When proGress as a Journey
still makes sense
We have made a number of arguments for representing progress in your games as
a function of the state of the game, and perhaps even as an independent, abstract
resource. it offers you more power and flexibility as a designer and enables you to give
the player more varied, less predictable experiences and, sometimes, more freedom to
choose her own goals. There is one game design situation, however, in which charac-
terizing progress as a journey is still useful: when the game tells a story and the player
really cares about the quality of that story.
Good storylike experiences possess certain qualities that games do not always offer:
• The events of a story must hang together as a coherent whole; they must not feel
arbitrary, mechanistic, or random. The protagonist may experience reversals of fortune,
but they must be dramatic reversals; they should not feel as if they were caused by a
purely mechanical process. in contrast, game events are often produced by simple luck or
chaotic factors.
• A story must not be repetitious. Every event in a good story should be unique and
created by the author for a specific purpose. even in stories that are about repetitive ac-
tivities, authors describe the activity only once or twice and then jump ahead to a point
at which something new happens. Games, however, and especially simulations, often
include many repetitive events in the game world and repetitive actions by the player.
• Stories must not move backward in time (except for rare, author-planned flash-
backs). They must maintain novelty and momentum. a story's world should never simply
return to a state it was in before; even if the protagonist has failed to achieve a goal, he
has learned something by his failure. While a game obviously cannot go backward in
real-world time, it can return to a state identical to one it was in earlier, which effectively
feels like going back to an earlier moment in game-world time.
• Stories are about characters, and characters in good stories must behave in psy-
chologically credible ways. The nonplayer characters in most games are simple automata
whose behavior is not believable.
This serves to illustrate an important point: dramatic tension (“what will happen next?”)
and gameplay tension (“am i going to succeed?”) are not the same thing, even if they ap-
pear superficially similar. dramatic tension dies if a story exhibits any of the weaknesses
mentioned earlier.
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