Storytelling and Narrative - Fundamentals of Game Design - page 160

A story about the Apollo space program that included events from the first-century
Roman invasion of Judea would be incoherent because the Roman invasion of Judea
had no connection at all with the Apollo program. On the other hand, if the story
of the Apollo program included a scene of Galileo building his telescope, that could
be harmonious because Galileo's use of the telescope to study the heavens represents
an important milestone in astronomy that ultimately led to the moon landings.

To be dramatically meaningful , the story's events have to involve something, or pref-
erably someone, the listener cares about. The story must be constructed in such a
way as to encourage the listener to take an interest in, and preferably identify with,
one or more of the story's characters. When a game tells a story, the dramatically
meaningful events may be explicitly planned by the writer, or they may arise natu-
rally out of the process of playing. Either way, all events must contribute to the
player's involvement in the story through identification with characters and inter-
est in what happens to those characters. See the “Dramatic Tension and Gameplay
Tension” section later in this chapter.

NOTE A good story
must, at minimum,
be a credible and
coherent account of
dramatically meaning-
ful events.

INTERACTIVE STORIES
In English, stories—even those set in the future—are normally written using the
past tense. An interactive story, on the other hand, takes place now , with the
player in the middle of the series of events, moving forward through those events.
Furthermore, the player's actions form part of the story itself, which makes an
interactive story very different from a story presented to a passive audience. In
fact, an interactive story includes three kinds of events:

Player events are actions performed directly by the player. In addition to giving
the player actions to perform as part of gameplay—actions intended to overcome
challenges—you can give the player additional actions to perform as part of the
story. Role-playing by talking to other characters, for example, might serve the
needs of the story even if overcoming the game's challenges does not require talk-
ing. If the player's actions can affect the plot of the story and change its future,
they're called dramatic actions. Some player actions are not dramatic, however:
Some player events aimed at overcoming challenges may not affect the plot.

In-game events are events initiated by the core mechanics of the game. These
events may be responses to the player's actions (such as a trap that snaps when the
player steps on a particular stone) or independent of the player's actions (such as a
simulated guard character checking to see that the castle doors are locked). The
player might be able to intentionally cause these events to occur, to change the way
they occur, or to prevent them entirely—which is part of what makes the story
interactive.

Narrative events are events whose content the player cannot change, although
he may be able to change whether they occur or not. A narrative event narrates
some action to the player; he does not interact with it. Narrative events are described
in the “Narrative” section following this one.