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 player experimentation and exploration, and to empower players to make their own choices. All of these factors allow players to craft their own unique stories when playing your game. If in addition you want to tell a more predetermined story through your game, it is important to do everything possible to make players feel that it is their own unique story. Players should feel ownership over the actions in their game, and thereby ownership in the story that is being told.

Marketing people and game reviewers in part like storytelling in games because stories are much more easily understood and discussed than game design concepts. Writing about game mechanics and how much fun a game is to play is really hard to do. A story makes easy copy for either the back of the box or the text of a review and is much easier to describe than gameplay. These days, game reviewers will be frustrated if your game does not have much of a story, regardless of whether it needs one or not. Games without stories are considered pass and archaic. But reviewers are generally wise enough to recognize that gameplay is essential as well, and games that focus on story at the expense of gameplay will tend to get panned, and rightly so. Unfortunately, the marketing people truly will not care if your story is non-linear or allows for the players to make the story their own. Indeed, the business types will love a main character with a strong personality since it will be more likely to lead to licensing opportunities for action figures and Saturday morning cartoon shows. Never mind that the character s strong personality may alienate players from the game.

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Titles like SimCity allow players to truly tell their own story, with barely any guidance from the designer.

But as a game designer your ambitions must be higher than creating entertaining box copy or simplifying the job of game reviewers. Many great games dispense with traditional storytelling entirely. Civilization and SimCity immediately spring to mind as indisputably great games that allow players to tell their own story, with the designer providing only a starting place from which the tale can unfold. Although games do not require pre-scripted stories, a compelling story can give the players actions meaning and make players feel like their decisions are important. Furthermore, a truly interactive story, where the narrative can change radically depending on the players choices, while retaining the emotional resonance and power of a story told in a novel , is a very compelling idea. It is so compelling that it is hard to imagine any truly ambitious game designer who would not hope for it to someday become a reality.




Game Design Theory and Practice
Game Design: Theory and Practice (2nd Edition) (Wordware Game Developers Library)
ISBN: 1556229127
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2005
Pages: 189

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