STORYTELLING - A Game Design Vocabulary - page 170

its culture, history, and the current situation. Although it's not a huge world, there are many
significant yet optional story elements that can be discovered through exploration and puzzle-
solving—or avoided, leaving the player with less understanding and a simpler set of options in
the final choice. The striking thing about Floatpoint is that Short constructed the plot around a
single turning point—a moment in history where one decision, flowing from limited snatches
of cross-cultural understanding—makes a huge difference to the course of the future. As a
result, the various outcomes of the diplomat's choice (which can be experienced by replaying
the pivotal scene) all feel like they flow naturally from the events of the story.
Story as System
So far, we've talked mostly about games that tell stories constructed out of the same materials
used to tell stories in other cultural forms. We can make stories out of words, cartoon characters
with speech bubbles, moving pictures. We can even use human actors for some kinds of non-
digital games experienced at live events! As discussed at the beginning of this chapter, games
have something unique to offer beyond traditional storytelling materials: a system of verbs,
scenes, and rules that the player can push into and learn. Beyond the straightforward offer of a
choice of which path to pursue next, the vocabulary of a game's system can help convey a story
through its very structure.
Many of the oldest games in history express something about the world and how it works
through systems and mechanics. They often contain stories about overcoming conflict, solving
problems, and pushing through difficulty to overcome a challenge. Chess can be seen as a story
about two equal and opposing forces, each trying to defend a crucially important figure (the
king). Mancala, an early board game from Africa, represents the cycle of planting seeds and har-
vesting. It's crucial to decide what plot of land to take seeds from to start the next cycle. Games
not only describe how certain scenarios work in our world—by creating a system that players
can push into through the use of certain verbs—they also say something about what kinds of
actions are important in those scenarios and what kinds of decisions make a critical difference.
As discussed in Chapters 1 and 5, Anna's game dys4ia (2012) tells a story based on her own
experiences as a transgender woman who decides to take hormones and shows how her own
feelings, relationships, and ways of moving through the world are affected. dys4ia conveys this
story in part through words and pictures that explain what's going on in various scenes and
facets from Anna's life. At the same time, much of Anna's experience—what it felt like to be
her, in those situations—is also expressed through game mechanics (see Figure 7.8). These
systems convey something that words wouldn't on their own. In one scene, the player moves
a pixelated character toward home while the text explains that medication has made her
exhausted. The system shows this as well, creating more and more resistance to the player's
movement across the screen, slowing it to a crawl, and making the experience of exhaustion
tangible.