Storytelling and Narrative - Fundamentals of Game Design - page 157

■ Stories attract a wider audience. The added entertainment value of a story will,
in turn, attract more people to a game. Many players need a story to motivate them
to play; if the game offers only challenges and no story, they won't buy it. Although
adding a story makes development of the game cost more, it also makes the game
appeal to more people. On the other hand, players who don't need a story are free
to ignore it—provided that the story is not intrusive.
■ Stories help keep players interested in long games. Simple, quick games such
as Bejeweled don't need a story and would probably feel a bit odd if one were tacked
on; that would be like adding a story onto a game of checkers or tic-tac-toe. In a
short game, getting a high score provides all the reward the player needs. But in a
long game—one that lasts for many hours or even days—simply racking up points
isn't enough reason for most players to carry on. Furthermore, stories offer novelty.
A long game needs variety, or it begins to feel repetitive and boring; a compelling
story provides that variety.
■ Stories help to sell the game. It's difficult to show gameplay via printed posters,
magazine ads, and the box the game comes in. Gameplay, as an active process, isn't
always easy to explain in words or static pictures. But your publisher's marketing
department can depict characters and situations from your game's story and even
print part of the story itself in their advertising materials.
This topic can't teach you the fundamentals of good storytelling; you can choose
from many hundreds of topics and classes on creative writing for that. Instead,
we'll look at the ways that stories may be incorporated into video games and how
interactive stories differ from traditional ones. Designing characters, an important
part of any kind of storytelling, is covered in depth in Chapter 6, “Character
Development.”
There isn't one right way to include a story in a game; how you do it depends on
what kind of entertainment experience you want to deliver and what kind of player
you want to serve.
The type of game you choose to build will determine whether it needs a story and,
if so, how long and how rich that story should be. A simple game such as Space
Invaders requires only a one-line backstory and nothing else: “Aliens are invading
Earth, and only you can stop them.” Indeed, such a game should not include any
more story than that; a story only distracts the player from the frenetic gameplay.
At the other end of the spectrum, adventure games such as Dreamfall and Discworld
Noir offer stories as involved as any novel. These games cannot exist without their
stories; storytelling offers up to half the entertainment in the game.
A few games allow the storytelling to overshadow the gameplay and give the player
little to do. This was a common mistake when the industry first began to make
video games based on movie or book franchises. Critics and players uniformly con-
sidered them poor games because they violated the design rule that Gameplay
Comes First. A designer must always keep that design rule in mind, no matter where
the original franchise idea came from.