STORYTELLING - A Game Design Vocabulary - page 187

Review
■ Games and stories have both been vital parts of human culture and expression
throughout history. As game creators have begun to explore ways of combining the
two in recent decades, we've found that games can help us tell stories in unique ways,
although the intersection between the two can be tricky to master.
■ Games can carry authored stories , much like other more traditional ways of telling
stories through words and images. If you want to tell an authored story, there's much
to learn from techniques used by storytellers who've expressed themselves through
forms like novels, comic books, and films.
■ Games can also produce emergent stories . These are the stories about the playing of
a game, often unique to a particular player or a particular time a game was played.
They're the stories that happen when players push into the shape of a game system's
resistance, make decisions, and understand the system through learning to use its
verbs and engage with other elements of a game's vocabulary.
■ Neither type of story is necessarily better, and both can lead to interesting conversa-
tions that involve the creator of a game and its player. Leaning toward authorship,
emergence, or a combination of the two depends on what you hope to accomplish
with a game as its creator: do you have your own story to tell, that players can listen to?
Do you want to open up a space for players to experience and tell their own stories?
■ There are many ways to weave an authored story into a game: you can tell a story
alongside a game, in noninteractive cutscenes that can take the form of animations,
characters speaking dialogue, or even wordless images. To create a story that feels
more integrated with the game, it's possible to frame the story in such a way that the
player feels driven to push the story forward and work to reach the next section of
story as a reward. This has its pitfalls, however: the lure of the reward could become
more compelling than the journey to get there through your game, especially if your
game involves a lot of rote grinding!
■ Exploratory elements of story can be spread throughout the space of a game in ways
that let players choose whether to look for them, experience them, and find out more
about a game's setting, backstory, or characters. Because exploratory story elements
are optional, they're usually used to add flavor to the game world rather than to
advance the story's plot.
■ Branching stories in game topics and story-games give players choices that take them
down one of many available paths in the story, perhaps leading to multiple different
outcomes. Although it's hard to make every branch feel like a compelling story and
it can take a lot of work to create widely divergent branches, this kind of storytelling
can give players a way to find and pick a story that suits them best or explore all the
possible branches. Although a branching story is still an authored story, it involves the
player in a deeper way by asking her which version she likes the best.