CONCEPT ART AND MODEL SHEETS
12. How do the character’s grammar, vocabulary, tone of voice, and speech patterns contribute to the player’s understanding of the character?
ptg7947181
C H A P T E R 7
155
Storytelling and Narrative
Storytelling is a feature of daily experience. We do it without thinking about it when we recount some experience we have had, whether it is the story of how the golf match went with our friends, or a fiction made up for story time with our chil- dren. We also consume stories continually—fictional ones through novels, movies, plays, and television; nonfictional ones through books, documentaries, and the news media.
Video games often include fictional stories that go beyond the events of the games themselves. Game designers add stories to enhance a game’s entertainment value, to keep the player interested in a long game, and to help sell the game to prospec- tive customers.
This chapter looks at how to weave a story into a game. It focuses mostly on games that rely heavily on stories, though the chapter covers stories within all genres.
We’ll examine what makes a good story and how to keep the stories from over- whelming the gameplay of a video game. The terms interactive story and narrative are defined, followed by a discussion of linear and nonlinear storytelling and mechanisms you can use to advance the plot. Then we’ll address scripted conversa- tions, which allow the player to participate in dialog with nonplayer characters (NPCs). The chapter concludes with the topic of episodic storytelling in games, which the Internet has helped to make possible.
Why Put Stories in Games?
Game designers, game theorists, and players have debated the subject of stories in games for many years, disputing issues such as whether stories belong in games at all and, if so, what these stories should be like and how they should work (see “The Great Debate” sidebar). Many players want a story along with their gameplay, and some game genres—role-playing games, action-adventures, and above all adventure games—definitely require one. Whether a story will improve a game depends on the genre and how rich a story you want to tell. Although a story won’t help in all cases, here are four good reasons for including a story in your game:
■ Stories can add significantly to the entertainment that a game offers.
Without a story, a game is a competition: exciting, but artificial. A story gives the competition a context, and it facilitates the essential act of pretending that all games require. A story provides greater emotional satisfaction by providing a sense of progress toward a dramatically meaningful, rather than an abstract, goal.
CHAPTER 7
ptg7947181
■ Stories attract a wider audience. The added entertainment value of a story will, in turn, attract more people to a game. Many players need a story to motivate them to play; if the game offers only challenges and no story, they won’t buy it. Although adding a story makes development of the game cost more, it also makes the game appeal to more people. On the other hand, players who don’t need a story are free to ignore it—provided that the story is not intrusive.
■ Stories help keep players interested in long games. Simple, quick games such as Bejeweled don’t need a story and would probably feel a bit odd if one were tacked on; that would be like adding a story onto a game of checkers or tic-tac-toe. In a short game, getting a high score provides all the reward the player needs. But in a long game—one that lasts for many hours or even days—simply racking up points isn’t enough reason for most players to carry on. Furthermore, stories offer novelty.
A long game needs variety, or it begins to feel repetitive and boring; a compelling story provides that variety.
■ Stories help to sell the game. It’s difficult to show gameplay via printed posters, magazine ads, and the box the game comes in. Gameplay, as an active process, isn’t always easy to explain in words or static pictures. But your publisher’s marketing department can depict characters and situations from your game’s story and even print part of the story itself in their advertising materials.
This book can’t teach you the fundamentals of good storytelling; you can choose from many hundreds of books and classes on creative writing for that. Instead, we’ll look at the ways that stories may be incorporated into video games and how interactive stories differ from traditional ones. Designing characters, an important part of any kind of storytelling, is covered in depth in Chapter 6, “Character Development.”
There isn’t one right way to include a story in a game; how you do it depends on what kind of entertainment experience you want to deliver and what kind of player you want to serve.
The type of game you choose to build will determine whether it needs a story and, if so, how long and how rich that story should be. A simple game such as Space Invaders requires only a one-line backstory and nothing else: “Aliens are invading Earth, and only you can stop them.” Indeed, such a game should not include any more story than that; a story only distracts the player from the frenetic gameplay.
At the other end of the spectrum, adventure games such as Dreamfall and Discworld Noir offer stories as involved as any novel. These games cannot exist without their stories; storytelling offers up to half the entertainment in the game.
A few games allow the storytelling to overshadow the gameplay and give the player little to do. This was a common mistake when the industry first began to make video games based on movie or book franchises. Critics and players uniformly con- sidered them poor games because they violated the design rule that Gameplay Comes First. A designer must always keep that design rule in mind, no matter where the original franchise idea came from.
ptg7947181 STORY TELLING AND NARRAT IVE 157