Game Development Reference
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a single, inevitable event before branching again and folding back
again to another inevitable event. (These are also sometimes
called multilinear stories.) This may happen several times before
the end of the story. See Figure 7.3 for a simplified example. The
Secret of Monkey Island follows this format, as do many of the
traditional graphic adventure games.
Most foldback stories have one ending, as shown in the figure, but
this isn't a requirement. You can construct a foldback story that
branches outward to multiple endings from its last inevitable event.
Foldback stories offer players agency but in more limited amounts.
The player believes that her decisions control the course of
events, and they do at times, but she cannot avoid certain events
no matter what she does. She may not notice this the first time
that she plays and may think that the story reflects her own
choices at all times. If she plays the game more than once, how-
ever, she will suspect that some events are inevitable and that the
apparent control she enjoyed on the first play-through was an
illusion. This is not necessarily a bad thing and can be useful to
you as a storyteller. There's no reason why an interactive story
must offer the player a way to avoid any event that she doesn't
want to experience. After all, stories have always included the
occasional event that the protagonist can do nothing about. If
Scarlett O'Hara could have prevented Atlanta from being burned
in Gone with the Wind , the story would have had a very different
outcome and lost much of its emotional power. It's reasonable to
use inevitable events to establish plot-critical situations that the
player cannot reasonably expect to prevent or change.
The foldback story is the standard structure used by modern
games to allow the player some agency without the cost and
complexity of a branching story. Developers routinely construct
the interactive stories in adventure games and role-playing games
as foldback stories. Of all forms of nonlinear interactive storytelling,
it is the easiest to devise and the most commercially successful.
If you want to create a foldback story, you should choose critical
turning points in the plot to be the inevitable events. They need not
always be large-scale events like the burning of Atlanta. They simply
should be events that change things forever and from which there is
no turning back. The hero facing his final challenge, for instance,
or the death of an important character, both work well as inevitable
FIGURE 7.3
Simplified structure
of a foldback story
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