Storytelling and Narrative - Fundamentals of Game Design - page 182

If you require the player to succeed at challenges in order to advance the plot, the
storytelling will be jerky, with sudden stops and starts. The player will sense that
the story stalls every time he's stymied by a challenge, then starts up again when
he meets the challenge. That doesn't matter much in coarse-grained stories—the
player only expects storytelling at long intervals anyway—but in fine-grained ones
it feels rather mechanical.
Adventure games and role-playing games use this approach, but they combine it
with avatar travel as a means of triggering plot advances, somewhat reducing the
mechanistic feel of the plot advancement. They treat the story as a journey, which
is the next topic.
The Story as a Journey
If your game involves an avatar on a journey, that is, a game in which much of the
activity involves moving the avatar from place to place in the game world, you may
choose to have the avatar's movements trigger the storytelling engine to advance
the plot. Games that use this approach almost always set up obstacles to travel so
the avatar cannot move through the game world freely but must overcome the
obstacles to reach new areas. In effect, then, the story as a journey consists of a
series of challenges and sometimes choices—as we've discussed—but adds a travel
element: The avatar's arrival in an area can trigger a plot advancement all by itself,
without any challenge or choice being involved.
Presenting a story as a journey offers the following benefits:
It automatically provides novelty. Because the player continually sees new
things as he moves through the world, the experience remains fresh and interest-
ing. The game gets the novelty that it needs to keep the player's interest from the
visual appearance of the world, so you don't have to write as much novel dramatic
material.
It allows the player to control the pace. Most games allow the player freedom
to decide when to move and when to stand still. Unless the gameplay imposes a
time limit, the player remains free to control the pace of the story—to stop and
think about the characters and the game world and to explore without time pres-
sure. The story progresses only when the player triggers that progress by moving.
Many games use not merely a journey but specifically the Hero's Journey story
structure identified by folklorist Joseph Campbell. Some designers find the Hero's
Journey's mix of challenges and travel particularly well suited to single-player, ava-
tar-based game designs. For more information on the Hero's Journey, read
Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Campbell, 1972) and Christopher
Vogler's disc ussion specifically for w riters, The Writer's Journey (Vogler, 1998).
If you treat the story as a journey and you make it a linear story, although the
player might be able to move her avatar backward through the game world, no
more dramatic events can occur in areas she's already visited. For this reason, many