Storytelling and Narrative - Fundamentals of Game Design - page 169

for detecting the avatar's position and for triggering both the cut-scene and the
transfer of the avatar's property. At the moment, a development company cannot
license a storytelling engine from a middleware company the way it can license a
graphics engine or a physics engine, but that may change. Still, at a conceptual
level it will help you to design the story and its interaction with the gameplay if
you think of these events in terms of triggers sent between the two separate com-
ponents, the core mechanics and the storytelling engine.
As you can see, the storytelling engine plays a critical role in weaving the gameplay
and narrative together to create the whole experience. The rest of this chapter refers
to the storytelling engine frequently.
Linear Stories
From the earliest days of computer gaming, designers have been intrigued by the
idea of agency: letting the player influence the plot and change the outcome.
Game developers refer to stories that the player cannot change as linear stories and
those that the player can change as nonlinear stories . The next section addresses
nonlinear stories.
A linear story in a video game looks similar to a linear story in any other medium,
in that the player cannot change the plot or the ending of the story. In a game,
however, the player still faces challenges as she goes through the story, and in fact
the challenges form part of the story itself. Thus, a linear story in a game is still an
interactive story, but the player's interactions are limited to contributing actions.
Still, many games use this format. Consider Half-Life and StarCraft : Both tell linear
stories, the outcome of which the player cannot change, but the player performs
many actions as part of the story along the way.
Creating linear stories offers many advantages, which explains why, after a flurry of
experimentation with nonlinear ones in the 1990s, the game industry largely
returned to this practice. Linear stories do have disadvantages as well, however.
Here are some of the pros and cons to consider when designing your own story.
■ Linear stories require less content than nonlinear ones. If a player can only
ever experience one fixed sequence of events, you only need to create material for
those events. Developing the game using a linear story requires less time and money.
■ The storytelling engine is simpler. The storytelling engine managing a linear
story has to keep track of only a single sequence of plot events. Because the player
cannot change the course of events, the storytelling engine doesn't need to record
critical decisions that the player makes: There aren't any. The storytelling engine
will be easier to implement in software if you use a linear story.
■ Linear stories are less prone to bugs and absurdities. If the sequence of events
remains the same regardless of players' actions, you can guarantee that the story
makes sense. On the other hand, if you allow the sequence of events to vary—that