STORYTELLING - A Game Design Vocabulary - page 161

The year after the original game came out, Ms. Pac-Man (1981) was released as a sequel. Now
the intermissions were called acts . They told the story of how Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man met,
fell in love, and had a child. Since then, cutscenes have grown more and more elaborate. In
big-budget games, they sometimes add up to hours of video footage with dozens of charac-
ters, and they are often written by screenwriters with experience writing film scripts. Ironically,
in some cases it's not even necessary to play a game to experience these stories: enterprising
players have stitched together all the cutscenes for story-heavy games like Uncharted (2007)
and its sequels so that they can be watched on sites like YouTube as if they were films. The only
sections of the authored story that a viewer ends up missing are the “action sequences” that
comprise the system of the game. In the case of Uncharted , the action sequences are moments
where the protagonist is shooting at enemies, climbing up walls, or solving puzzles to open
gates.
The ability and desire to watch the entire story of a game without actually playing it raises a
question: is a game the best way to experience an authored story like this? When the story car-
ried by a game is mostly or entirely told through cutscenes, it's almost as if they exist alongside
each other; the player takes a break from one to experience the other, bouncing back and forth
between playing the game and watching cutscenes. Is there a benefit to letting a game system
and a story work in parallel, taking turns in the spotlight?
Some game creators prefer keeping story and game relatively separate, letting each part stand
on its own merits precisely because of the difficulty of intermingling the two, as we'll see in the
rest of this chapter. There's definitely something that's left untouched with this method, how-
ever: the interesting, complicated possibilities that arise if you mix story and game.
Still, a game can benefit from the presence of a story alongside it, if only to provide breaks
in resistance. Story can show what kind of imagined world the game exists in and help make
sense of what's happening—or even help create a feeling of nonsense or humor, for some
games. In one of the first games I designed, Egg vs. Chicken (2006), I told a story through a series
of comic-book pages that appear before and after each major section of the game. The game
itself involves defending a series of fortresses against an oncoming army of chickens, who the
player can defeat by flinging groups of eggs at them. The context of this challenge—eggs
being used to defend against chickens—was clearly and deliberately surreal and nonsensical,
so we decided to tell an equally ridiculous story to help explain it.
The comic-book pages star a group of four revolutionary eggs who refuse to hatch into
chickens. Menaced by a chicken police force, they escape in a time machine to try to uncover
the answer to the age-old question: which came first, the chicken or the egg? Like the ghost's
uncovered leg in Pac-Man , the four revolutionaries never appear in the game, but they help
explain—in a manner just as wacky as the basic concept—why the enemy chickens the player
encounters look like greedy nineteenth century industrialists, then medieval knights and