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TECHNIQUE 3: Player Action Pieces Together a Story

You don't see this technique as much anymore, but it's a completely engrossing way of merging player action and story. Adventure games made great use of this. But, how to diagram it?


What you're looking at is a world where the player freely moves around, finding clues and piecing together some sort of narrative in whatever order he/she discovers. Turn on your way-back machine and look at MYST. A compelling tale of a father's betrayal and his two feuding sons isn't told through cutscenes, it's discovered -- one piece at a time -- by the investigations of the player. Sometimes the player is stuck until he/she solves a puzzle, which reveals a little more of the story and allows the player to advance to a new area to discover more of the plot. This gives you a sense of narrative and allows the designers to build the action up to a big revelation or climax.

Most of the greatest adventure games ever programmed fall into this technique, or a hybrid of this technique and cutscenes. It's funny we don't see more developers playing with this technique these days. Here's an interesting side-note: Alternate Reality Games like I Love Bees fall into this category, but with millions of players trying to piece together the story. I love it!

TECHNIQUE 4: The Gameplay IS the Story

The greatest game designers on the planet -- folks like Sid Meier or Will Wright -- stumbled on this technique early on. Here, the idea is not to create a story at all, but to allow the player to create his or her own tale using the game as a medium. If I were to graph it out, it might look something like this:


Let's pick a relatively shallow example: Sid Meier's Pirates. The player creates a story of a swashbuckler. The swashbuckler's goals? Morals? Allegiance? Loyalty? That's up to the player to figure out. The game allows the player to create his or her own story arc, starting with a young pirate, fighting to the top, then retiring. Let's say your pirate suffers a crippling defeat at the hands of another named pirate. Do you retire with what you have left, creating the story of a pirate who went down in a blaze of glory? Or do you fight your way back up from nothing, creating a tale of survival or vengeance? The player creates the tale, with the game providing the setting.

You'll get a similar experience from Civilization, creating your own story of the rise (or fall) of an empire whose 'character' and subsequent challenges are defined by your own playstyle. You can legitimately argue that Civilization doesn't have a story, but how often have you told stories to your friends about what your civilization did to survive? When you keep playing for "Just one more turn," aren't you really playing to find out what happens to your character next? How is that so different from a book you can't put down? I agree it's no Casablanca, but sometimes we fail to give games credit for the unique types of stories they do create.

The king of story-creating games is Will Wright. The Sims IS a story-creator. You and your PC team up to tell the story of an individual or a family. Sims 2 caught on to this and ratcheted it up in a major way, focusing on family moments and even giving characters memories of trauma or happiness. Have you ever gone online and flipped through all the stories people have created using the built-in photo album? The Sims taps into our instincts and allows players to create their own moments of tenderness, joy, anger, comedy, etc. Players can have as much or as little control over the story as they want.

Now you can rightly argue that none of the games I mentioned in this category are creating deep, meaningful stories. I'll give you that. But I think this area represents a frontier with plenty of potential for exploration as computer processing power continues to get more powerful and the attention moves away from graphics.

Will Wright has said that Spore, for example, will actually react to the types of story the player is creating. If you create a race who soars out into the cosmos to kill and crush and maim, you'll meet other races with similar goals, dynamically creating a universe defined by brutality and war. Similarly, if you negotiate trade and diplomacy across star system after star system, you're going to run across interesting diplomatic races and puzzles.

As technology improves, and as more developers experiment in this area, I think we'll see the potential for games and players to work together to create much deeper experiences. The potential is there!

NEXT PAGE: Storytelling in Sandbox Environments...