Storytelling and Narrative - Fundamentals of Game Design - page 185

Emotional Limits of Avatar-Based Games
An avatar-based game is analogous to a story written in the first person. Reading a
first-person story, the audience knows that regardless of what happens in the story,
the narrator must have survived to write the story afterward. This isn't absolutely
always the case—the narrator in the novel Allan Quatermain , for instance, dies near
the end and another character finishes telling the story—but it does mean that
whatever peril the narrator got into earlier in the topic, you knew he would get out
of it. As a result, first-person stories can't create quite as much concern for the life
of the narrator as third-person stories can. A first-person story can have a depress-
ing ending, but the narrating character cannot die prematurely.

A similar limitation applies to avatar-based games. Players know that an avatar
should survive to the end of the game. Over the years, the avatar's premature death
has come to signify the player's failure to meet a challenge rather than being an
actual element of the story, so the death of the avatar carries almost no emotional
impact. The player simply reloads the game and tries again.

If you really want to affect the player's feelings with the death of a character, your
game should kill not the avatar, but one of the avatar's friends. Two famous exam-
ples occur in the games Planetfall and Final Fantasy VII . In Planetfall , the player's
sidekick, a wisecracking robot, sacrificed himself at a critical moment to allow the
player to go on. Players often cite this as the first really emotionally meaningful
moment in a computer game. In Final Fantasy VII , the villain kills Aeris
Gainsborough, the player's ally. Nothing the player does can prevent this, and play-
ers often mention this death, too, as a particularly emotional moment in a game.

TIP Many of the
traditional rules for
writing good stories
in noninteractive
media don't apply to
interactive media.
A new medium requires
new rules. Be wary
of slavishly applying
principles from
other forms (such as
Aristotle's principles
for drama or Robert
McKee's observations
about screenwriting)
to interactive stories.
If it doesn't work for
you, throw it out!

Party-based interaction models offer you more freedom to kill off members of the
cast than avatar-based ones because the other members of the party remain to
carry the story along. Two different television shows serve as good examples. The
Fugitive could not have tolerated the death of Dr. Kimble, the hero of the show—
equivalent to the avatar in an avatar-based game. On the other hand, the long-
running Law and Order series about New York detectives and prosecutors has an
ensemble cast with no single hero. Over the many years that it has aired, the entire
cast has changed as one character or another has come and gone. The show contin-
ues to run because its central premise doesn't depend on any single individual.

Scripted Conversations and Dialog Trees
Natural language refers to ordinary language as spoken or written by human beings.
Computer scientists devised the term to contrast ordinary human language with
computer (or programming ) languages . The extremely difficult problem of making
computers understand and react appropriately to natural language—whether the
language occurs as conversation or instruction—has puzzled artificial intelligence
researchers for decades. Recent research efforts have been fruitful, but the state of
natural language comprehension is still not good enough for most video games.