Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Storytelling
Chapter 7 discusses storytelling at length. This section reiterates a few of the key
points and talks about their significance in adventure games, because adventure
games rely on storytelling more than any other genre.
DRAMATIC TENSION
Dramatic tension, which arises from an unresolved situation or problem, is what
holds the reader's attention and keeps her around to see how the story comes out.
To create dramatic tension, start by presenting the problem. In advent ure games,
this often happens in a cut-scene right at the beginning of the game. The meaning
of the scene doesn't have to be immediately clear; mystery and uncertainty may
help set the mood for your story. For example,
The Longest Journey
begins when
April Ryan, the player's avatar and heroine of the game, has been having increas-
ingly vivid nightmares whose meaning she does not understand. At the beginning
of the game, she has no goal other than to find out why she's having nightmares.
Later, dramatic tension increases as the player learns the source of those night-
mares and new problems emerge.
The resolution of dramatic tension occurs at a moment called the dramatic climax,
usually near the end of the story. Shorter stories frequently have only one source of
dramatic tension and one dramatic climax; longer stories can have several, of pro-
gressively increasing importance. An extremely long story can have several major
dramatic climaxes at intervals, tied together by a common theme, setting, or char-
acters. Richard Wagner's cycle of four operas,
The Ring of the Nibelungs
, is one such
extended work. Each opera is a self-contained story with its own dramatic climax,
although some characters carry over from one opera to the next, and all of the
operas concern the fate of the same magic ring.
TIP
Remember the
adage from creative
writing: show, don't
tell. Set the mood and
amplify the tension in
your story using music,
well-chosen color pal-
ettes, camera angles,
lighting, and architec-
ture. Never say that
something is scary,
make
it scary.
Because adventure games are usually much longer than movies or short stories, you
will probably want to create several different dramatic climaxes as well—each one
resolving a current or immediate problem until the last climax, which should
resolve the overall problem of the whole story. In the adventure game, dramatic
tension is created through the combination of dramatic storytelling and interactive
puzzles. Impending doom that can only be stopped by the player's intervention
can provide a dramatic point to the story, as long as the player doesn't feel as
though the tension is contrived.
As an adventure game designer, you can use puzzles to create a minor form of dra-
matic tension. However, puzzles of the types designers usually employ (as the later
section “Challenges” describes) alone are not enough to keep the player actively
interested in the story for the length of the game. Puzzles present small, individual
problems. Your story needs a larger problem that underpins the whole story, some-
thing that, even if it isn't revealed to the player at the beginning of the game, is the
reason that there is a story.
