Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
quest structures that give players a series of tasks and a snippet of conversation with characters
between each task (see Figure 7.3).
Figure 7.3
Beginning an early quest in
Cityville
.
Like the intermissions of
Pac-Man
, these pieces of story alternate with periods where the
player pushes into the systems of the game and focuses on playing rather than experiencing a
story. There's a crucial difference: the core gameplay of
Pac-Man
doesn't present the story as a
rationale for why it's necessary for Pac-Man to elude and devour ghosts while collecting every
yellow pellet in the level. The intermissions appear as a break in the action rather than as its
culmination and fulfillment. In games with elaborate series of quests, on the other hand, story is
the driving reason why the player
needs to push against the challenges of the game.
Although this creates a tighter integration between story and game systems, there's a risk. As
we discussed in Chapter
, “Resistance,” the lure of rewards can come to eclipse the pleasure
of the processes of play that lead to those rewards. If the player is more concerned with simply
seeing the next part of the story, and if the act of playing and dealing with the challenges along
the way isn't an interesting enough conversation in its own right, then playing can become
a chore. When playing involves repetition of low-skill, already-mastered activities (grinding),
the problem becomes worse. It's no
6
wonder that some players who get bored with grinding,
or frustrated by difficult puzzles and challenges, end up looking online for videos of the story,
preferring to go directly to the reward.
