Storytelling and Narrative - Fundamentals of Game Design - page 161

With this in mind, consider the following formal definition of an interactive story .
INTERACTIVE STORY An interactive story is a story that the player interacts with by
contributing actions to it. A story may be interactive even if the player's actions cannot
change the direction of the plot.
This definition of an interactive story differs from those of many other designers,
who often assert that if the player's actions do not change the direction of the plot
(that is, the plot is linear ) the story is not interactive. The power to change the
direction of the plot—the story's future events—is called agency. Some designers
feel that if a game with a story does not offer the player agency, it can't be said to
be a truly interactive story. This is a misconception, because it ignores the role of
the player's own actions in forming his experience of the game. A player still feels
as if he is interacting with a story even if his actions do not change future events.
The player contributes to the sequence of events, and that is what matters.
Consider a situation in which a player must find a way to get past a security guard
to enter a building. You can give the player several ways to accomplish this:
through violence, or trickery, or patience—waiting until the security guard goes off
shift. No matter which approach the player chooses, he still enters the building
through the same door and encounters the same things on the other side. If his
decision does not actually affect the future events of the story, he has no agency.
But his decision about how to get through the door contributes to the plot; his own
actions are part of his experience of the game. This is how a story can be linear and
still be interactive.
We discuss the distinction between stories that cannot be changed and those that
can be changed in the sections “Linear Stories” and “Nonlinear Stories” later in
this chapter.
Notice that the definition does not say anything about quality. Remember that to
be a good story, a story's events must be credible, coherent, and dramatically mean-
ingful. The player's actions constitute events in the story, so the more that those
actions are credible, coherent, and dramatically meaningful events, the better the
story will be. (Even an action that is not a dramatic action —one that changes the
plot, as explained earlier—can still be dramatically meaningful ; that is, it can be
about something the player cares about.) When designing an interactive story, you
shouldn't give the player things to do that don't credibly belong in the story; the
result will be incoherent. In the Grand Theft Auto series, the player can't set up a
charity for the homeless, and in the Police Quest series he can't steal cars.
In most games with an interactive story, the player's actions move the plot along.
When the player overcomes a challenge, the game responds with the next event in
the story. If the player doesn't overcome a challenge, either the story comes to a
premature end (as it would when, say, the avatar dies in the attempt) or the story
simply fails to advance—the player doesn't see future story events until he manages
to get past the specific obstacle. However, there are exceptions to this arrangement;
in some games the story progresses whether or not the player meets the game's