STORYTELLING - A Game Design Vocabulary - page 188

■ Games can tell stories in a unique way through their mechanics. As a player pushes
into the resistance of a game, she comes to understand how a system works and where
she can use verbs to affect it. By shaping a game's system, its creator can express some-
thing about how the world works—even how it feels to be in a particular situation.

■ Interpretation is a vital part of how stories are conveyed and how meaning is produced
out of stories—not only by the author of a story, but by the way a reader, viewer, or
player understands the story. Ambiguity in storytelling leaves some aspects of the
story open, so that the potential meanings of the story, even the nature of what hap-
pened, is left partly up to the audience's imagination.

■ Emotional hooks in storytelling, even expressed in simple ways such as the names and
facial expressions of characters, give players the chance to engage their own empathy
and connect the dots into a story that has meaning for them.

■ Reflective choices show that decisions in a game don't need to change the game's state
or outcome to affect the experience and make it meaningful. Reflection can pose
deeply important questions to the player. What kind of person are you in this story?
How will you react in this situation? What's important, and what are your goals? Even if
the answers don't alter the outcome, the process of asking and answering changes the
player's relationship to what happens in the story.

■ There are many ways to open up a game so that it can produce a variety of emergent
stories, in addition to or instead of an authored story. Most obviously, games and tools
that accompany games can help players become creators in their own right, extending
an existing authored story-world or coming up with their own.

■ Games can produce many different emergent stories through the workings of complex
systems as well. When verbs and other vocabulary elements of games can intersect in
many different ways, the space of possible experiences in the game, and the number of
stories that emerge from those experiences grows larger.

■ Some of the richest complexity and uncertainty available to us through games can
come from the interaction of human players. When multiple minds engage in and have
a conversation through a game system, whether it involves conflict or cooperation, the
experience becomes social and can produce many compelling, emergent stories that
are worth telling.

Discussion Activities

Think of and retell some memorable stories that you've experienced in a game—ones
that really stick with you. Are these authored or emergent stories? Think of both kinds,
and discuss what makes each kind of story memorable and distinct.

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