Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
to soldiers who charge in) with the player's perceptions and actions. The magic of this kind of
emergent story is that it results from the conversation between what we've provided as game
creators and the individual experience of play. If we travel even further down our game-story
spectrum toward emergence, we find
open stories
, a different kind of storytelling in games with
fewer controlled and authored elements, where players create their own stories.
The emergent story of a game is exactly what most of this topic discusses: it's the story of a
particular conversation that happens as a particular player figures out how to use verbs, when
to use them with various objects in the context of a scene, and how to push into a game's resis-
tance toward goals and rewards, whether established by the game or their own motivations.
The emergent story is the tale of what happened when that player jumped into the game and
started doing things. Some emergent stories are boring and short, even hilariously so: I started
playing, ran to the right, and tried to jump over a pit, but I fell in and died, so I quit playing.
(Fortunately, most players don't quit quite as easily.) Other stories may emerge from play but
are nearly the same every time, regardless of who's playing or how many times they play. These
stories emerge from relatively predictable systems.
If you want to tell a particular authored story with a game—or convey a message of your
choosing, which may be an important one—a predictable system may serve you well, even if
the message it carries is ambiguous and open to interpretation. If, on the other hand, you want
the emergent story to be more unique to the player, it's worth considering ways of creating
even more openness and unpredictability. Stories that are wide open to player involvement or
imagination are inherently difficult to control as a creator. Making a system that can produce
them means letting go of the traditional idea of authorship, of the creative goal of creating and
delivering a message. Instead, as the game's creator, you become the facilitator of new conver-
sations—ones that you never might have expected.
By their nature, emergent stories are open and unpredictable. They move beyond the limits
of what you've created and into the space around a game, where players become creators
themselves. That doesn't necessarily mean that emergent stories are better, more moving,
meaningful stories than authored stories; in fact, they're often not what anyone would call a
“good story” if measuring by the yardstick of traditional storytelling. But why measure that way?
What emergent stories are is a different kind of thing entirely: still stories, still part of our human
tradition of having experiences and telling tales about it, but as many and varied as there are
people who play.
Sharing Authorship
There are many ways to create an open space that a game's stories can grow into. The most
straightforward is always available, even to stories told in other media. If you tell a good story,
it grows in the telling, is retold and changed by those who tell it. By focusing your creativity
and efforts on creating a rich, interesting world with memorable characters and events, you're
