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Writer-Driven
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From the course by California Institute of the Arts
Introduction to Game Design
1371 ratings
California Institute of the Arts
1371 ratings
Course 1 of 5 in the Specialization Game Design: Art and Concepts
From the lesson
Week 3: Tell a Story
How does narrative drive a player to start playing your game? Or to finish it? This week we'll look at some of the ways you can make your game more compelling with story, and discuss some of the ways story can drive gameplay forward, or enable a player to make their own way through it.
Meet the Instructors
Fran KrauseFaculty, Character Animation
School of Film/Video
Writer-Driven.
Now this is the easiest way as a writer to communicate your story to the audience.
In effect, you take the player out of the equation.
This can be achieved by taking all the decision-making power out
of the hands of the player.
Now one of the most common ways to do this is with a cutscene.
It happens in other ways as well.
Sometimes a writer gives a player such limited decisions
that they essentially have no options.
For example, if you put a character in a tunnel and their only choice is to walk
down the tunnel with no other paths, they have no choices.
Also a character might be given many options of what to do, but
all of them have the same result.
If the writer needs to explain that a player has been
kidnapped by a fancy octopus and taken to an underwater kingdom, the writer can
insert a cutscene that shows the fancy octopus grabbing the hero and
shows their arrival to the undersea city.
As a player, I'm sure you're aware of some of the disadvantages of this style.
First, it removes your player's sense of control and connection to their character.
They have been controlling this character for hours.
They have developed that great sense of empathy that we talked about earlier.
It's one of the main things we're hoping to create in our audience.
If you take away the player's control,
they feel like they suddenly aren't inside their character anymore.
Worse still, they have to watch somebody else play their character.
And that's the second disadvantage with this narrative style.
The writer controls the main character and makes choices for
the player and not the other way around.
This can be very frustrating for the player.
Especially if they've been playing an athletic character for
the past few hours, a character that can
easily outmaneuver that fancy octopus who should have no chance of kidnapping them.
>> Oh, calm down, friend, that was a long time ago.
>> I know, it's just very frustrating when I'm playing a character and
then I feel like someone else takes over and they're doing a bad job at playing my
character and they're messing up the story for me.
>> Uh-huh.
>> Anyways, those are the disadvantages of using a writer-driven way to communicate
and drive your story.
However, even with these obvious disadvantages,
this style gets used all the time, so you're probably wondering why.
Well, there are actually a lot of advantages to this method.
First, it helps keep your game simple.
By reducing the number of choices for your player,
you're also reducing the number of choices you have to program, write, and animate.
It's hard to make a game where a character is able to do anything, and
limiting the choices available helps to keep your game as simple as possible.
And remember how important it is to keep things simple.
Second, it allows a writer to make choices that are more appropriate for
a game character, but that a player might not make.
For example, the main character of a game might be a brilliant rocket scientist.
If the person playing the game is not a brilliant rocket scientist and
they run into a problem that requires rocket repair and complex trajectories,
it might make sense for the player to temporarily lose control as
the game character fixes up a rocket and does their complicated science thing.
Third, it lets the writer tell a lot of story without being interrupted.
Sometimes a story can grow too big to tell
into little chunks spread sporadically throughout the game.
Letting the writer take over for
a while is a way to do a lot of explanation in one big chunk.
Fourth and probably one of the most narratively useful reasons
to take control from your players is to force players to make mistakes.
Think of every other form of storytelling we have.
Movies, books, songs, comics.
How many movies have you seen where the main character never makes a mistake?
How many songs are about regret of past decisions?
Mistakes are one of the most useful things a main character can do.
A big mistake can change the mood of your story and serve as the turning point for
your whole game.
A mistake can create problems that can be solved by the player, and
players love solving problems.
However, players also have the ability to save and restore their games.
You could put a pile of donuts in a middle of a clearing and
when a character goes to grab those donuts,
they might fall through a trap door where your story turns the corner and they spend
the next five levels finding their way out of the caverns of the mole creatures.
However, the character can always restore their game and play the scenario again.
They'll have fallen for that trap before.
They won't wanna fall for it again.
They will try all sorts of methods to get those donuts without setting off the trap,
but in the end, they'll feel silly when they have to go step knowingly into a trap
just to keep the game going.
Players wanna make good decisions.
They don't wanna be forced to make bad decisions,
even if it helps you move your story along.
As an aside,
I think this is why many games use main characters with troubled pasts.
The character can have a history of past mistakes that are catching up on them,
and these can affect the game without making the character feel
like they're messing up.
Also, this probably is why games have sidekicks with
questionable decision-making powers.
How many times has a sidekick run into a room before you've have
a chance to check it for danger and you've had to
run in after them in order to rescue them from the trouble they're causing?
These methods and many others help to put some of those wonderful mistakes
into the game without forcing a player to make decisions and
taking away their collaborative power in the story.
I do have to say, if it's not already clear, that I feel
that style of writer-driven stories should be avoided whenever possible.
Maybe by simplifying your story or
reworking the way that you're choosing to tell a certain part.
Remember to accept your player as a collaborator in your game.
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