Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
THE GREAT DEBATE
Among theoreticians, interactive storytelling is the single most hotly debated issue in
all of game design. What does
interactive storytelling
actually mean? Is such a thing
possible? Should we do it?
How
should we do it? What are we trying to achieve by doing
it? How can we determine if we're doing it well? And the problem gets worse: The game
industry doesn't even know what to
call
it.
Interactive storytelling, interactive narrative,
interactive drama, interactive fiction
, and
storyplaying
have all been proposed. In the
1990s, the academic community began to consider the issue and drew its own battle
lines. The narratologists (people who study narrative) conducted fierce and often impen-
etrable arguments with the ludologists (people who study games and play) in the learned
pages of scholarly journals. Search the Internet for “interactive narrative” and you will
be overwhelmed by a confusing tide of conflicting verbiage.
NOTE
There is no
single “right” way to
design an interactive
story. Each approach
has strengths and
weaknesses. Choose
the one that best
serves the player's
entertainment.
These interesting and sometimes important arguments may eventually change the industry,
but in the meantime you need to build a game. Use the principle of player-centric design,
and don't worry about the theoretical arguments. Build a story into your game if you
believe it will help to entertain the player, and don't build one in if it won't.
The following factors affect how much of a story a game should include, and you
should take them into account when you make your decision:
Length.
As the previous section said, the longer a game, the more it benefits
from a story. A story can tie the disparate events of a longer game into a single con-
tinuous experience and keep the player's interest.
Characters.
If the game focuses on individual people (or at least, characters the
player can identify with, whether human or not) then it can benefit from a story. If
the game revolves around large numbers of fairly anonymous people—such as the
visitors in
Theme Park
—then adding a story won't be easy.
Degree of realism.
Abstract games don't lend themselves to storytelling; repre-
sentational ones often do. You may find it difficult to write a compelling story
about a purely artificial set of relationships and problems, while a realistic game
can often benefit from a story. This rule does not hold in all cases: Highly realistic
vehicle simulators and sports games usually don't include stories because the prem-
ise of the game doesn't require one; on the other hand,
Ms. Pac-Man
, an abstract
game, did tell a cute little story because the game included characters.
Emotional richness.
Ordinary single-player gameplay seldom inspires any but a
few emotions: pleasure in success; frustration at failure; determination, perhaps;
and occasionally an aha! moment when the player figures out a puzzle. Deeper
emotions can come only when the player identifies with characters and their prob-
lems, which happens within a well-written story. If you want to inspire a greater
variety of emotions, you need to write a story to do it.