Some thoughts on video game design

[brasswatchman]

So the very day that I returned a book considering this very subject to the Tri-C library, I came across this article at the Escapist: String Theory: The Illusion of Videogame Interactivity. It poses a question about video game design that I've actually been thinking a lot about recently (and yes, I have been thinking about video game design a lot

Comments

[oogby]

I could babble here about a variety of topics, but I'll just stick to the environmental storytelling question you ask. :)

I have this big book about the making of Riven (the sequel to Myst), and in it, they make it abundantly clear that what they wanted to do was to tell a story through this fairly static environment.

In my opinion, they completely failed; playing the game, I had no idea that they were trying to do this.

However, I think they failed because of another, different design goal they had: they wanted the environment to be very open, so that players who could not solve the puzzles still got to enjoy this fantastic world.

For a variety of reasons, I think that this second goal is not nearly as noble as it sounds, but the most frustrating thing, thinking about it, is how that hampers the storytelling.

You basically got the whole story dumped on you all at once, and it was pretty overwhelming. So overwhelming, in fact, that you might not even realize it was there.

In spite of this, and though I have yet to see it done, I am absolutely confident that telling a story through setting is a perfectly valid and reachable goal. However, what you need to do is feed the audience the story a little bit at a time -- and since this is interactive after all -- make absolutely certain the audience understands the material before moving on.

The standard point & click adventure game cycle of wandering through beautiful scenes so you can solve puzzles that unlock new, more beautiful scenes with more puzzles fits perfectly here. The puzzle shouldn't be mind-bendingly hard. It just has to be the sort of thing that you can't solve if you don't understand the story fragment present in the one level of the game you're currently on.

So I believe the solution here is to have a clear separation between two things:

-The narrative, which is completely linear and controlled through restricting access to the various area in the game;
-The individual areas, each of which is fairly open, and each of which presents a number of inanimate things in a clearly defined emotional context. By itself, you cannot tell a story like this, any more than a single scene from a movie can tell a story. But string these areas together in a deliberate, meaningful way, and you will get a meaningful story.