Storytelling and Narrative - Fundamentals of Game Design - page 180

WHEN TO USE MULTIPLE ENDINGS
Devise multiple endings for your story if—and only if—each one will wrap up the
story in a way both dramatically meaningful and emotionally consistent with the
player's choices and play. If you didn't give the player a lot of dramatic freedom,
then there's no point in giving her different endings. On the other hand, if you
have told the player that her actions and especially her choices are crucial to the
ending, then you should live up to that promise and give her whatever ending her
actions earn. You may have to create several endings, depending on how many crit-
ical choices you gave the player.
For a more detailed discussion, see the Designer's Notebook column, “How Many
Endings Does a Game Need?” (Adams, 2004).
Granularity
Granularity , in the context of games that tell a story, refers to the frequency with
which the game presents elements of the narrative to the player. Consider StarCraft ,
which tells a long story that runs throughout all 30 missions available in the game
but generally presents narrative (in the form of conversations among the major
characters of the story) only between the missions. Because the missions take any-
where from 20 minutes to over an hour to complete, the game presents narrative
blocks rather infrequently, so we can say that the storytelling in StarCraft exhibits
coarse granularity . The Wing Commander series of games also tells a story between
missions and so also illustrates coarse granularity.
LucasArts' famous adventure games— The Secret of Monkey Island and the Indiana
Jones series—offer the player a small amount of narrative every time she solves a
puzzle. This can happen as frequently as every four or five minutes, so the storytell-
ing in these games shows fine granularity . LucasArts' games also use shorter narrative
blocks, generally in the form of cut-scenes or spoken exposition.
There's no fixed standard for what constitutes coarse or fine granularity; you will find
the terms mostly useful for comparing the relative granularity of one game to another.
In theory, the storytelling in a game may have infinitesimal granularity —that is, an
interweaving of story and gameplay with such fine granularity that the player,
unaware of narrative events as separate from the rest of the game, sees the game as
one seamless interactive experience. Game developers have long attempted to
achieve this quality for interactive storytelling with varying degrees of success.
Generally, games come closest to reaching this goal if all story events pertain to the
avatar and his actions (as in Half-Life , for instance) rather than if the story includes
other events that the player must simply sit and watch.
Note that different authors use granularity to refer to a variety of different game
design concepts: how frequently the player may take action; the degree to which