Creative Toolbox or Wellspring of Psychosis?

Most games have combinations of some of these basic structures linear, nonlinear, multi-mode, multi-path, multi-role, multi-endgame, modular, and emergent. Add to this all the ways of creating fun (see Chapter 5.2, "Techniques for Creating Fun"), and then factor in the innovative genius of today's and tomorrow's game designers, and it's easy to see that there is an infinite number of ways to create a game.

This is one of the reasons why writers coming from traditional, linear story telling occasionally are plunged into psychotic breaks when they begin working in the field of games. However, evolving effective psycho therapies to help linear writers who've crashed and burned against some of these game structures isn't our focus here.

We're here to talk about making game plots interesting while we redefine "plot" to mean all the structures mentioned earlier. How can you make a game plot interesting?

One way, of course, is to assess all these different structures, and then do a mix-and-match to arrive at the combination that best serves your game. It's very possible that parts of the game will use a few of these structures, while other parts of the game use wholly different structures.

Here are few plot twists that could work in some of the preceding structures.