Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Stories told through films and comic topics have always relied on the human ability to stitch
together meaning out of a sequence of images. In film, many images flicker by every second;
in comics, they're laid out on a page, where our eyes can move from one to the next. In the
1920s, a Soviet filmmaker named Lev Kuleshov conducted an experiment that demonstrated
the ability of film viewers to construct stories: he created three short, wordless sequences, each
starting with a different image and then cutting to a shot of a famous actor looking into the
camera with a neutral expression (see Figure 7.1). The first sequence started with a bowl of food,
the second with a small girl in a coffin, and the third with a woman smiling as she sat on a divan.
Each sequence ended with the same shot of the actor looking into the camera, his expression
unchanged. The audience, however, interpreted the actor's emotions differently for each shot:
they praised his ability to express hunger, grief, or lust, depending on which clip they were
shown. They constructed a story in their minds about what was happening.
Words are one of the oldest and most familiar means that we have for telling stories. Whether
through spoken dialogue or exposition and narration, words can be used to tell stories in film,
comic topics, or games, but part of the beauty of these forms of communication is that they
can also tell stories
without
words, as in Kuleshov's experiments, or in comic books like Chris
Ware's
Acme Novelty Library,
which features many scenes and pages without words. Comics and
films can convey elements of stories and allow the audience to construct stories through the
juxtaposition of images.
Stories have been part of human culture since the origin of our species. Games are a little bit
newer but have been around since the dawn of civilization, for many thousands of years, and
add something else into the mix: a system of moving parts, made up of all the elements of
vocabulary you've learned about in this topic. When a player acts in a game, she pushes into
the game's shape of resistance, and the game responds by pushing back or opening more
possibilities and spaces for her to push into. In this process, a potential fragment of a story
emerges, much as it does when a viewer sees juxtaposed images in a comic book or film. Once
again, it's up to the audience—in this case, the player—to interpret what the emerging story
might mean. For example, what does it mean that a pawn becomes a queen if it reaches the
other side of a chess board? What does it mean that Mario can jump on enemies to squash
them? These elements may not sound like the typical building blocks of a story, but they're
parts of what the creators of chess and
Super Mario Bros.
(1985) have put into those games for
players to find, explore, and interpret.
As we've discussed in previous chapters, this process is a conversation between the player and
the game. On one side, the ideas and vocabulary elements built into a game by its creator, and
on the other, the experiences and choices the player creates by interacting with it. In some
cases, the possible stories that emerge from a game depend largely on what the creator chose
to put into the game. These stories often resemble the kinds of stories that are told through
