STORYTELLING - A Game Design Vocabulary - page 158

qualities of their own to offer the world. On the other hand, “decades” is not a long time in
the history of storytelling! There's a lot left to figure out, and many awkward hybrids between
traditional storytelling and notions of what games are or could be. Some game designers prefer
to avoid overtly trying to tell their own stories through games at all, seeing the mixture of the
two as oil and water.
As we continue to investigate the challenges and pitfalls of storytelling in games, we'll use two
primary ways to think about the intersection of story and games:
■ Authored story —First, games can carry stories. The experience of playing a game
can involve many different elements that help convey a story: images, animations,
words, sounds, and even the rules and processes of playing a game. By shaping these
elements, the creator can tell a story. This kind of story, deliberately told through the
experience of a game, is sometimes called an authored story . Let's take a game we've
already discussed as an example. The authored story of Janet Jumpjet is described
in Chapter 2, “Verbs and Objects.” Mysterious, long-dormant robots left behind by an
ancient civilization have awakened in the mines of Venus and taken human workers
hostage. It's up to Janet to explore the mines, rescue the hostages, and incapacitate
the robots. Janet is clearly the main character of the story: it's about what happens to
her and what she does, even if she never says a word (much like some other well-
known video game protagonists, such as Mario and Half-Life 's Gordon Freeman).
■ Emergent story —Second, games can generate stories. The experience of playing a
game, the push and pull of the player and the system, can generate a story that's worth
telling, just like a good conversation can. You can think of this as a story about the
playing of a game. These stories are often unique to each player; sometimes this kind
of story is called an emergent story . The emergent story of a game is what we've spent a
lot of this topic talking about: it's the experience that the player has while learning the
game, exploring and understanding its system and spaces, and perhaps mastering or
completing the game. The player's story involves learning how to use verbs, which in
Chapter 2 were described as the main characters of the emergent story. An emergent
story is about exploring and figuring out systems with goals and rewards, deciding
what to do, and often repeating one aspect of the game to understand it better and
develop skills. The experience of flow and resistance is part of the player's story, and
it may be different for each player. In this chapter we'll look at some different takes on
emergence in game stories: interpreted story , a kind that hovers between authorship
and player experience, and open story , which is more purely player-driven.
Which kind of story is better? Once again, there's no right answer to that question—it all
depends on your goals as the creator of a game and what drives you to create and experiment.
Do you have a story of your own that you want to tell? Or do you want players to be able to dis-
cover their own stories through the act of playing? Are you interested in blending the ways we
have to tell our own stories with the unique qualities of games—the ways that playing games
lets players push into, interpret, act on, and perhaps even change the story they experience?