Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
dramatic actions in a game may be divided into those taken to surmount a
challenge
and those in which the player makes a
choice
.
PREMATURE ENDINGS DON'T COUNT!
By
ending
we mean a true conclusion to the story, not a premature ending caused by the
player failing to meet a challenge. Although dying in the middle of a long role-playing
game does amount to losing the game, it's not really the end of the story, simply an
interruption in the player's experience of that story. The player will undoubtedly restart
the game and continue if she finds playing the game a compelling experience. Premature
endings should be quick because they're only temporary, so don't squander resources
creating a lot of narrative material to accompany premature avatar death. Nor should you
make the player wait a long time to get started again. Many modern games don't even
require the player to reload the game after a premature ending; they reload automati-
cally for her, restarting near where she left off. Other games simply don't let the avatar
die at all, to avoid the whole issue.
CHALLENGES AND CHOICES
Ordinary competitive games, those without stories at all, still offer more than one
ending: The player wins or she loses, depending on how well she played. So if the
player meets your game's challenges well, you might want the story to end well,
and if she meets them badly, you might let the story end badly. Just as the final
score of an ordinary competitive game reflects the player's skill in a numeric way,
so the outcome of the story can reflect the player's skill in a dramatic way. In gen-
eral, players expect that if they meet all the game's challenges and make it to the
end, the story will end in some reasonably positive way, reflecting the skill that got
the player successfully to the end. If bad play produces a
premature
ending, you
don't have to create a full-fledged conclusion for it. When a game's dramatic
actions consist mostly of those taken to overcome challenges, players usually toler-
ate stories that offer only one ending.
If, on the other hand, the different possible endings reflect the player's
dramatic
choices
—critical decisions the player made in the course of the interactive story—
rather than her ability to overcome challenges, then the player will definitely
expect her choices to affect the outcome of the story. If the game tells her that a
choice is important, and she finds out that it really wasn't, it will be distinctly dis-
appointing. You may wish to create a number of endings to show the consequences
of the player's dramatic choices. Games that include a lot of decision-making—
especially moral choices, which feel dramatically important—should be nonlinear
and offer multiple endings.
