Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
of dialogue, but when these “hero” characters die, they can be brought back to life with an
expenditure of resources and go on to speak their assigned lines during the rest of the story.
In other games, the emergent role of characters who can fight or die becomes a little more
complex. In
X-Com: Enemy Unknown
(2012), the soldiers start off with random names, ethnici-
ties, and genders. If they die during one of the game's battles against Earth-invading aliens,
they're gone forever but can be replaced by hiring a new soldier. Unlike generic grunts, how-
ever,
X-Com
's soldiers become more individualized over time. As they gain combat experience,
they specialize in certain roles and are granted nicknames based on their actions. Before long,
a player's squad has unique characters who might have names like Alex “Boom Boom” Cheng,
who uses heavy weapons, or Michelle “Banzai” Rodriguez, who's known for running right up to
her enemies.
These soldiers aren't the same characters as those commanded by other players of the same
game, and they don't need to speak lines of dialogue to feel like personalities. Their charac-
ter emerges from a combination of purely contextual (and randomized) elements like name,
appearance, and events that happen due to the game's mechanics: remember that time when
Banzai ran right up to that Berserker alien, and Boom Boom finished it off with a grenade that
nearly killed her? Because these soldiers are individuals who can't simply be brought back to
life, players have described feeling scared when they're in danger, sad when they die—even
refusing to accept a favorite character's death and reloading the game to avoid it. Far more than
generic grunts,
X-Com
soldiers and their personalities become part of the stories that gamers
tell about what happened when they played: the emergent story of the game.
The experiences and feelings of soldiers in
X-Com
, impatient customers in
Diner Dash
, and Sims
in
The Sims
don't need to be conveyed by an authored script. Players will react creatively to
fill in the blanks, to imagine that Michelle “Banzai” Rodriguez has a hotheaded personality, or
even a backstory that explains her recklessness. Players will project their own experiences of
relationships and living situations onto events that arise from the system of
The Sims
; although
each Sim is in some sense a stack of numbers running in the code of the game, associated with
an arrangement of pixels and polygons on a screen, the human-like quality of how it all comes
together is enough for human minds to connect the dots. Just as we can perceive a smiling face
out of an arrangement of dots and lines (:-)) or an emotional scene out of Kuleshov's juxtaposi-
tion of images, we can perceive a story with someone we can relate to in the situations that
arise from games.
When we discuss interpretation of stories and the activation of imagination to perceive a story
in a system's arrangement, we're discussing a particular kind of emergent story. It arises out of
the combination of authored elements (a character's smiling face, or a nickname that's assigned
