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formulation. For example, if a particular tactic is interesting and fun to
the designer, but does not serve any strategy, then it is extraneous and
should be eliminated or rethought, “for that which makes no perceptible
difference by its presence or absence is no real part of the whole” (
Poetics
1451a, 34-35).
DESIGN HEURISTIC
Focus on designing the action. The design of objects,
environments, and characters must all serve this grand
strategic goal.
In the section on constraints, we spoke about designing what people
think
of doing as a way to help create dramatic action. Interventions by the de-
signer in the form of discovery, surprise, and reversal are also effective. Re-
sponsive non-player characters (NPCs) that can adapt to players' choices in
games can also be designed to push the slope and speed of dramatic action
under specifi c conditions.
Game designers still puzzle over the question of dramatic shape. The
greatest successes that I know of in this regard lay out a story arc “in the
large” through the selection and arrangement of challenges, venues, NPC
behaviors, and elements of action like quests and levels. In Aristotle's view,
the authoring of plot consisted of the selection and arrangement of inci-
dents. A designer of interactive media has the same power; it is in what
way and how much that power is used that infl uences an interactor's expe-
rience of agency.
Game designer and scriptwriter Clint Hocking (
Splinter Cell
,
Splinter
Cell: Chaos Theory
,
Far Cry 2
) proposes a generative view of the shape of
an interactive plot (2013). He describes the “region of story” as “low fre-
quency, high amplitude” shifts or curves. The “region of choice” he sees as
“high frequency, low amplitude” curves. Combining these curves can give
us the shape of a game, but that is only possible if the two regions of the
game are aligned with one another. Part of Hocking's proposed solution is
to “align verbs”—that is, to express interactive choices with verbs that cor-
respond to those in the overarching narrative.
As I listened to Hocking speak, I wondered if one might simply nudge
the shape of the region of story into one that looks more like the shape of
