STORYTELLING - A Game Design Vocabulary - page 185

Now imagine that the Uberknight has another verb, “deathwail,” which can kill a Bandersnatch
in just one hit. Deathwail has a restriction, however. It can only be used if the Uberknight is
close to death, with less than 30% of her Health remaining. All of a sudden, there are a couple
ways to play the game—different strategies that players can pursue and, in doing so, create
slightly different emergent stories of their time playing the game. The player can “hit” the Band-
ersnatches she encounters until they're dead, or she can wait until a Bandersnatch has reduced
her Health enough to “deathwail”—a more powerful and quicker way to eliminate her enemies,
but one that's more risky as well. The differences between these verbs arises from their interac-
tion with other rules of the game (like the one that says you're eliminated if your Health reaches
zero) as well as objects in the game and their properties. (Bandersnatches take two “hits” to kill,
but Uberknights take five.)
Of course, the exact details of how the emergent story will play out, and what strategies are
interesting to pursue, depend on even more rules, some of which you might already be won-
dering about if you enjoy playing this kind of game. For example, who “hits” first? Is it random?
Are there verbs that affect this? How about regaining lost Health: does it return over time, or are
there even more verbs? Even in a simple system, it's easy to see how adding “deathwail” makes
for a more complex system than one which just included “hit,” and we can imagine how adding
more rules would open up the space of possibilities even further.
We've already mentioned some examples of very open games in Chapter 6: games like The Sims
or Animal Crossing (2001), which let the players pick their own goals to pursue amidst a system
of many verbs and choices, and games like Minecraft or Dwarf Fortress (2006), which have com-
plex systems for players to explore, and even come up with their own goals.
It's worth noting that complexity isn't the same as simple unpredictability of the kind that's
produced by randomness, as in the toss of a die. Roulette is a highly unpredictable, random
game; as the ball bounces around, there are dozens of pockets on the spinning wheel where it
might land. As a system, it's not complex at all: you pick a pocket or a category of pockets (like
red, black, or under 15), and if the ball lands there, you win. Betting and odds are what make
roulette minimally interesting, but the system is simple: there aren't that many elements of
vocabulary that can interact to create something new.
Multiplayer Complexity
There's one more element that helps a game become highly unpredictable and lends itself well
to the emergence of stories that can be told and retold: other players. Multiplayer games have
been the rule rather than the exception for most of history. Games have a tradition of social
interaction, both in and around play. If you want unique, complex circumstances to arise, it's
hard to create something more consistently unpredictable than what happens when you throw
two or more people together.