STORYTELLING - A Game Design Vocabulary - page 173

dys4ia is likely to be relatively similar for most players, and intentionally so: dys4ia aims to
convey the lived experiences of a real person—events and situations that actually happened. It
wouldn't make sense for players to insert their own stories into dys4ia any more than it would
be polite to interrupt an oral storyteller's recounting of events in her life. Like spoken conversa-
tions, games can offer players moments to listen and moments to participate more actively;
both are valuable in their own way.
Not all games aim to convey personal experiences, of course; some games create open spaces
for players to define their own style of play or agenda, and these games can result in a huge
variety of experiences as players interact with them in different ways. Open games we dis-
cussed in the previous chapter, such as The Sims (2000) and Minecraft (2009), produce different
emergent stories for each player, depending on what those players seek to do in the game
system and how they push against and into the rules. Because those rules create a structure
that's the same for every player, there are many commonalities. Each player's emergent story is
composed of some consistent building blocks that can be arranged in many different patterns.
Interpretation
Even at the authored end of our story spectrum, there are many ways to open a game's story to
the creativity and ingenuity of players. Traditional notions of an authored story describe a story
as if it's an object that's simply delivered from the author to the audience, but those notions
aren't the only way to think about how a story comes into being. The Kuleshov Effect shows
how powerful interpretation is. Depending on how elements are arranged, an audience may
have wildly different interpretations of the same expression on an actor's face.
Of course, interpretations of a story can vary even if two people experience the same story.
That's why we can argue about exactly what happened in a play like Shakespeare's Hamlet after
seeing it with our friends. Was the ghost of Hamlet's father really a supernatural manifesta-
tion or some kind of hallucination or trick? Was Hamlet justified in his plot to murder his uncle,
and was he pretending to be mad as his dialogue states, or did he truly become unhinged?
Shakespeare may have had his own interpretation of what happened, but the author's views
don't need to be the last word on the meaning of the play. Rather than thinking about a story
as something produced entirely by an author and handed over to the audience, what if we
thought of a story as coming into being at the moment of interpretation?
Games lend themselves well to ambiguity, in part because players can become conscious of
the way their actions in the game create a different experience, even slightly so, from those
of another player. Using the same techniques and tools as stories told in other cultural forms,
game creators can leave elements of the story untold—mysterious and open to interpretation.
Home is a great example that we've already discussed. The story is a mystery that can be seen in
many different ways, and although the authored content stays the same, each player may find