Storytelling and Narrative - Fundamentals of Game Design - page 166

Dramatic tension, and reader interest in the dramatic subject, fades in the presence
of both randomness and repetition. If the events in a story seem random—accidental
and unrelated to one another—the reader wonders why he is bothering to read it.
Likewise, no story should include identical events that repeat themselves more than
once or twice. If a police officer knocks on a potential witness's door and there's
nobody home, he shouldn't have to do it more than once or twice before he gets an
answer. Having this happen again and again in a story would make it boring. In
some circumstances repetition can be played for laughs, if not overdone—in The
Secret of Monkey Island , every time the hero escapes from a hut in which he is con-
fined, the natives put a bigger lock on the door until the door looks like a bank
vault. But even this is not completely repetitive, because each lock the natives add
looks different.
Gameplay tension, on the other hand, easily tolerates both randomness and repeti-
tion for much longer. Poker and Tet r is include a lot of randomness and repetition,
yet they retain their gameplay tension.
Consider the following dialog from the British television science fiction comedy
Red Dwarf . Arnold Rimmer, sitting around one evening with his roommate, Dave
Lister, recounts every detail of a game of Risk , die-roll by die-roll, that he played 10
years earlier. Lister asks him repeatedly to shut up, and Rimmer can't understand
why.
RIMMER: But I thought that was because I hadn't got to the really interesting bit.
LISTER: What really interesting bit?
RIMMER: Ah well, that was about two hours later, after he'd thrown a three and a two
and I'd thrown a four and a one. I picked up the dice…
LISTER: Hang on Rimmer, hang on… the really interesting bit is exactly the same as the
dull bit.
RIMMER: You don't know what I did with the dice though, do you? For all you know, I
could have jammed them up his nostrils, head-butted him on the nose and they could have
blasted out of his ears. That would've been quite interesting.
LISTER: OK, Rimmer. What did you do with the dice?
RIMMER: I threw a five and a two.
LISTER: And that's the really interesting bit?
RIMMER: Well, it was interesting to me, it got me into Irkutsk.
— R ED D WA R F SERIES 4, EPISODE 6, “M ELTDOWN ”
Two lines in this exchange illustrate the point quite clearly. Lister says, “T he really
interesting bit is exactly the same as the dull bit,” and later Rimmer says, “Well, it
was interesting to me, it got me into Irkutsk.” Like Tet r is , Risk is full of repetition
and randomness. Rimmer believes that it's interesting because he confuses the
gameplay tension that he felt—will I conquer Irkutsk?—with dramatic tension.