Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
BALANCING NARRATIVE AND GAMEPLAY
Because playing games is an active process and watching a narrative is a passive
one, the player notices the difference between them. A simple arcade game such as
Te mpest
presents no narrative—it is entirely gameplay. A novel or a movie offers no
gameplay—it is entirely narrative. The more narrative you include, the more the
player sits doing nothing, simply observing your story.
But players don't play games in order to watch movies; they play in order to act.
Any game that includes narrative elements must find an appropriate balance
between the player's desire to act and the designer's need to narrate. If you offer too
much narrative and too little gameplay, players will feel that your game gives bad
value for the money they paid. Players pay for the opportunity to act out a fantasy.
If most of your game's content is noninteractive, they'll feel cheated—they won't
get the experience that they paid for.
Too much narrative also tends to make the game feel as if it's on rails, the player's
actions serving only to move the game toward a predestined conclusion. Unless
you've written a game with multiple endings, the conclusion
is
predestined, but
you want to make the player feel as if he actively participates in the story. When
the designer takes over too much of the telling, the player feels as if he's being led
by the nose. He doesn't have the freedom to play the game in his own way, to cre-
ate his own experience for himself.
The
raison d'être
of all computer gaming is
interactivity
: giving the player something
to do. The trick, then, is to provide enough narrative to enrich the game world and
motivate the player but not so much as to inhibit his freedom to meet the game's
challenges in whatever way he chooses. Consider this paraphrase of the words of
the wizard Gandalf in
The Lord of the Rings
: “We cannot choose the times in which
we live. All we can decide is what to do with the time that is given us.” The player
cannot decide the world in which he plays; that is for you to determine. But he
must have the freedom to act within that world, or there is no point in playing.
DESIGN RULE
Do Not Seize Control of the Avatar
When you create your game's narrative segments, try to avoid seizing control of the play-
er's avatar, and above all, do not make the avatar do something that the player might not
choose to do. In too many games, the narrative suddenly takes over and makes the avatar
get into a fight, walk into danger unnecessarily, or say something stupid that the player
would never choose to say. It is fair to change the world around the avatar in response to
the player's actions; it is less fair to take control of the avatar away from the player.
