Book’s Author: Richard Rouse III
Summarized by Samuel Coelho
8. Storytelling
Games certainly do not need stories, but it seems that when employed properly, stories can make games much stronger. Games such as A Mind Forever Voyaging, Myst, Ico, and Ultima series, have made the story such an integral part of the game that one can hardly imagine them otherwise.
8.1 Designer’s Story Versus Player’s Story
The designer’s story can be seen in the game through full-motion videos. Its main purpose is to add meaning and relevance to the actions the player performs in the game.
Each level makes-up a mini-story of how players won or lost that level. This is the player’s story.
The player’s story is the most important one to be found in the game, since it is the story the player will be most involved with. This is the story players will most likely share with their friends when they talk about the game.
God of War II
The ideal interactive storytelling is to merge the designer’s story and the player’s story into one, so that players can have a real impact on a story while the story retains its dramatic qualities. The overall story arc doesn’t necessarily need to change, but the player must have a real role in determining what exactly happens in the story.
ICOA good example of a truly interactive storytelling experience can be found in many pen-and-paper role-playing games, such as Dungeons & Dragons. In it, the good Dungeon Master will be able to keep players on track with the overall story she wants to tell. While allowing the players a considerable amount of freedom in how that story unfolds and perhaps even in how it resolves
The best a game designer can do currently is try to recreate such an interactive storytelling experience, but, in lieu of dynamically generating the story, anticipate most of the questions players might ask, places they might go, and lines of dialog they might want to say.
8.2 Places for Storytelling
The type of story you hope to tell, what technology you will be using, and the gameplay of your game will determine what storytelling will work best for your project.
Storytelling takes place out-of-game, in-game, and by the use of external materials.
8.2.1 Out-of-Game Storytelling
Very often like a film and uses established cinematic techniques similar to storytelling in other media.
Non-interactive storytelling may have its place in games, but designers need to be aware that it must supplement and not detract from an exciting gaming experience. Most players want to be playing instead of sitting through long cinematics.
We can use cut-scenes, text, images, and audio to tell a story.
One of the most important goals to have when working with cut-scenes is to establish a consistent visual appearance between the game cut-scenes and the gameplay. If at all possible, the same engine should be used for the cut-scenes as for the rest of the game. Use cut-scenes that looks nothing like the game-world only exacerbates matters.
The prevalence of only-skippable scenes leads to a distressing confusion among users from game to game, as they wonder, “If I hit the Start button, will it pause the scene or skip it?” It seems that the out-of-game sections of computer games are less user-friendly than almost any other solo experience medium.
Forcing players to watch cut-scenes is a totally unnecessary limitation no game should attempt to enforce. The players must be able to decide if he wants to see the cut-scene or not.
8.2.2 In-Game Storytelling
There are numerous powerful techniques for telling a story during gameplay. Most of them involves text, level settings, dialog with NPCs during gameplay, and NPC behaviors.
A lot can be communicated to players through text placed around the game-world. There can be signs explaining directions to locations, pinned-up notes left by previous inhabitants of a given area, graffiti on the wall, or books left lying around for players to read.
Setting can be key to telling more complex game stories. The player’s exploration of the game-world can lead to discoveries about the type of people that inhabit a given area, or inhabited it in years past.
The Suffering: ties that bind
The NPCs should not just talk to the player; they should perform actions that back up the story line.
One of the big concerns some people have with in-game storytelling is that players may miss some of the story. But we need to remember that games are an interactive form, and the fact that players do not experience every last element of the story is part of the nature of the interactivity. If players are interested in getting the entire story, it is their responsibility to seek it out. If players would prefer to just charge through the game focusing solely on the gameplay, that is their choice to make. Indeed, having different layers of the story that can be discovered on playing the game a second time can be a significant incentive for replaying the game.
In addition to maintaining the players’ immersion in the game-world, in-game storytelling makes the players active participants in the game’s story instead of just flashing it in front of their eyes.
8.2.3 External Materials
Some games have used external materials extremely effectively. In particular, the Infocom games always included materials in the boxes that added to the player’s gameplay experience in meaningful ways.
We are certainly no longer presented with the technological limitations that necessitated storytelling through external materials. Furthermore, often the stories told in the manuals were not written by the game’s designers or even with their consultation.
8.3 Linear Writing Pitfalls
In a way, the mistakes game developers make putting story into their games are forgivable due to the youth of the medium. For example, when technology that enabled filmmaking was introduced, many of the first films that were made were documents of stage plays. A camera was placed in a fixed position on a tripod and the actors considered its frame to be their stage, just as if they were working with a live audience. There were no cuts, pans, or camera movement of any kind, because the language of film had yet to be invented. As time went on, however, filmmakers learned that their films could be more than straight transcriptions of stage plays, and they could instead take advantage of the strengths of their new medium. In some ways, games still suffer from the same problem, where established mediums, film particular, are taken and just thrown into games without considering how a story might be best told in a language suited to interactivity.
Until technology advances to the point where games are able to simulate conversations significantly better than they do currently, game stories need to center around actions that games do well.
Games are about letting the player letting players find their own path through the game-world, even if the story suffers a little as a result. It’s the player’s story instead of the designer’s story.
8.3.1 Player Character Personality
When players want to play games, often they want to play themselves. If the character they are controlling has a very strong personality, there is a distancing effect, reminding players that the game is largely predetermined and making them feel like they are not truly in control of what happens in the game. Of course that there are games that became quite popular while having extremely well-defined main characters. In these games, players feel more like they are playing the game to unlock a predetermined story, and that they are just uncovering them by playing the game.
You can tell a rich conventional story if you have the player control a very distinct character, but you can suck the player into the game much more if you keep the main character iconic and allow players to feel like they are in charge of determining that character’s personality and fate.
Instead of trying to imbue the main character with a lot of personality, make the NPCs players encounter in the game memorable and interesting.
8.4 Game Stories
The game’s scriptwriter should worry less about the overall plot and more about the situation in which players find themselves and characters with which they interact.
8.4.1 Non-Linearity
In a way, in-game storytelling is non-linear. In-game storytelling allows players to talk to some characters and not to others, to choose which signs to read and which to ignore, and to explore the game-world in order to reveal its relevance to the story line, exploration over which players have control.
Indigo Prophecy
One popular way to add non-linearity to the storytelling experience is through a branching story. With a branching story, at various points the decisions players make will have a significant effect on how the story progresses. Of course branching stories increase the amount of content that will need to be created for a game, at least in terms of game design and dialog, if not also in art assets.
Another technique that can be used to inject some non-linearity into the game’s story is to allow players to determine the order in which different story components occur.
Though the first and final chapters of the game should happen at the beginning and end of the game respectively, the other chapters in the game can happen in any order. Therefore, the writer must keep those plots discrete so that they can be experienced in any order and still make sense. This may have the side-effect that you cannot have each of these interchangeable story chapters build on each other in the same way as you could in a completely linear story.
8.4.2 Working with the Gameplay
One of the most important parts of creating a story for a computer game is to match the story with the gameplay as much as possible.
Your job as a game designer is to find a story and a telling of that story that will work with the gameplay and technology that you will be using.
8.5 The Dream
One could say that the goal of gameplay is to allow for different player strategies to lead to variable types of success, to reward players experimentation and exploration, and to empower players to make their own choices. All of these factors allow players to craft their unique stories when playing your game.
Players should feel ownership over the actions in their game, and thereby ownership in the story that is being told.
2 comments:
oyun resimleri
hehehe...I didn't quite understand but...thanks anyway! :)
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