Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
storytellinG: When proGress as a Journey
still makes sense
continued
To make a video game feel storylike, the vast majority of storytelling games map the
game's progress and the story onto a space. The space is deliberately constructed to
provide novelty, and the player seldom spends very long in one location, which keeps
the story moving forward. such games often lock doors
behind
the player too, to prevent
her from returning to an earlier point in the story. Finally, the tasks in storytelling games
often consist of unique puzzles to avoid repetitiveness. adventure games typically have
no internal economy at all, only simple lock-and-key mechanics.
however, this does not mean that our suggestion about progress as a resource can
never be used in games with a story. some game stories are merely framing narratives
between levels and so cannot be harmed by the mechanics. Other games integrate their
plots more tightly with the gameplay but don't expect the players to take them too seri-
ously. action-adventure games such as our oft-cited
Legend of Zelda
series usually tell
a story to provide motivation and context for the player's actions, but the players are
mostly interested in gameplay tension, not dramatic tension. even if they appreciate the
context that the story provides for the gameplay, literary quality is not the point.
emergent storytelling, which we mentioned briefly in chapter 10, is a research field
that seeks to resolve the inconsistency between traditional gameplay experiences and
traditional story experiences. a hypothetical emergent storytelling game would use
gamelike emergent mechanics to create gameplay and an emergent progression system
to generate dramatically interesting plot events without an author's involvement. at the
same time, it would somehow guarantee that the experience feels properly storylike,
without repetition, randomness, reversals in time, or noncredible characters. some ef-
forts to create such a system have used artificial intelligence to search through possible
future events in a plot the way a chess program searches for possible future moves in a
chess game. instead of trying to checkmate the king, the search algorithm tries to find
an enjoyable plot. To date, no one has succeeded in building a full-game-sized emergent
storytelling system. all the efforts thus far have produced only small prototypes.
Producing Progress Indirectly
We can take the idea of progress as a resource one step further by having the play-
ers produce progress indirectly and measure progress over multiple resources. In this
case, there isn't one particular action that produces progress. Instead, the process to
produce progress involves multiple steps and multiple resources.
