Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Players see the second symptom of frustrated author syndrome as they sit through
large quantities of narrative when they would really rather be playing. Although an
excellent game in other respects,
The Longest Journey
included one scene that con-
sisted of 20 minutes of nonstop monolog by a nonplayer character. That would be a
long soliloquy even for Shakespeare! The game's designer, Ragnar Tørnquist, who
originally trained as a screenwriter, admitted afterward that this was an error. Never
forget that players come to play—to
do
something. Almost any sophisticated story
requires some narrative, but you must parcel out narrative in reasonably sized blocks.
Players won't want to sit through much more than three or four minutes of narra-
tion at a time, and many will get frustrated long before the three-minute mark.
DESIGN RULE
Be a Game Designer, Not a Filmmaker
Don't design a game to show off your skills as a film director or an author. Design a game
to entertain by giving the player things to do. Always give the player more gameplay than
narration. The player, not the story, is the star of the show.
Episodic Delivery
Most of our discussion so far has concentrated on individual stories that come to a
definite end. However, a publisher will hope to exploit the popularity of a hit game
by producing one or more sequels, a situation now so commonplace that this sec-
tion addresses designing for it intentionally. The game industry has expressed
much interest in the business opportunities that episodic delivery might offer, sell-
ing players entertainment a few hours at a time instead of in a single large chunk,
as games sold at retail do now.
There are three main formats for delivering multipart stories, as the following sec-
tions reveal. The television industry has more experience at delivering multipart
stories than the game industry does, so we use familiar TV terms to help illustrate
these three formats.
UNLIMITED SERIES
An
unlimited series
comprises a set of episodes, each consisting of a self-contained
story in which the plot is both introduced and resolved. A single theme or context
runs through the entire series but not a single plot; in fact, the stories exist so inde-
pendently of each other that you can view episodes in any order and the story still
makes sense. American evening TV dramas used this format almost exclusively up
through the early 1980s: In each episode of
Columbo
, Columbo solved exactly one
crime. Viewers can watch each episode individually with little disadvantage. A con-
sistent world and an overarching theme tie the series together. Because each episode
offers a self-contained story, the producers can create as many episodes as they
want (see
Figure 7.6
).
