Games and stories
Lately I've been putting a lot of thought into the relationship between games and stories. I was once heard to remark that "The plot is the single most important thing in a [...] game." I ardently believed this at the time, but in my defense I was like 12 and that ellipsis was filled with the letters Z, Z, and T.
This post, entitled "Ze Story Snobs" from Lost Garden does a good job of obviating any explanation on my part of what my current stance is on the issue. "Don’t," says Danc, "be a story snob and assume blindly that your game needs a story."
It's a fine blog post, highly recommended. It delves into the commercial reasons that story has come to dominate mainstream game design and why it persists (movie tie-ins, essentially). It gives a list of concrete effects that story can have in a game and reasons to include story elements in a game design.
This post from particleblog focuses more on the "interactive storytelling" side of game design. It's a bit more abstract but still worth a read. The money quote is this: "Chess would simply be irritating if after every five moves a neutral judge read out lines of poetry."
A similar metaphor (I would replace "poetry" with "dinner theater") occurred to me recently while playing Golden Sun for the GBA. Here's the game that coaxed me into loving random encounters, owing to its engaging battle system. It's a true visual pleasure and boasts clever, balanced puzzles. Unfortunately, it makes you sit through screens and screens of puerile storytelling with no option to skip or suspend. (I suppose that mashing the A button fast enough to get through the story sequences to the save screen before I reach my stop on the subway is a kind of game, but it's not the one I signed up for.)
Interactive fiction is a wholly distinct beast, of course, and all of this comes in the middle of an e-mail conversation I've been having with Leonard Richardson (see his post here) concerning First-Timer Foibles And Additional Alliterations by noted IF author Michael Coyne. This little article is also worth a read, if only for the examples of bad IF writing ("East and west do jack-all for you."). My main complaint is that Coyne comes down too much on the "IF is fiction" side of the fence (rather than the "IF is interactive" side), and so offers advice that will probably make your game superficially more playable, but doesn't make it any more interesting.
(Sorry I haven't gotten back to you, Leonard. Rest assured I've been working, though: I'm about half-way through Planetfall.)
This post, entitled "Ze Story Snobs" from Lost Garden does a good job of obviating any explanation on my part of what my current stance is on the issue. "Don’t," says Danc, "be a story snob and assume blindly that your game needs a story."
It's a fine blog post, highly recommended. It delves into the commercial reasons that story has come to dominate mainstream game design and why it persists (movie tie-ins, essentially). It gives a list of concrete effects that story can have in a game and reasons to include story elements in a game design.
This post from particleblog focuses more on the "interactive storytelling" side of game design. It's a bit more abstract but still worth a read. The money quote is this: "Chess would simply be irritating if after every five moves a neutral judge read out lines of poetry."
A similar metaphor (I would replace "poetry" with "dinner theater") occurred to me recently while playing Golden Sun for the GBA. Here's the game that coaxed me into loving random encounters, owing to its engaging battle system. It's a true visual pleasure and boasts clever, balanced puzzles. Unfortunately, it makes you sit through screens and screens of puerile storytelling with no option to skip or suspend. (I suppose that mashing the A button fast enough to get through the story sequences to the save screen before I reach my stop on the subway is a kind of game, but it's not the one I signed up for.)
Interactive fiction is a wholly distinct beast, of course, and all of this comes in the middle of an e-mail conversation I've been having with Leonard Richardson (see his post here) concerning First-Timer Foibles And Additional Alliterations by noted IF author Michael Coyne. This little article is also worth a read, if only for the examples of bad IF writing ("East and west do jack-all for you."). My main complaint is that Coyne comes down too much on the "IF is fiction" side of the fence (rather than the "IF is interactive" side), and so offers advice that will probably make your game superficially more playable, but doesn't make it any more interesting.
(Sorry I haven't gotten back to you, Leonard. Rest assured I've been working, though: I'm about half-way through Planetfall.)