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General
An introduction to Game Design 
Violence in Video Games
Rules of the Game: Rule Design

Single Player Games
Suspense
Hiding Secrets in Platform Games
Nonlinear Exploration
Pacing
Rethinking Story Games
World/Player Interaction
Difficulty Tuning in Games new!

Multiplayer Games
Slippery Slope
Rock, Paper, Scissors
Yomi Layer 3
Game Balance, Part 1
Game Balance, Part 2

Playing Competitive Games
Play to Win, Part 0: Why Bother?
Play to Win, Part 1
Play to Win, Part 2
Play to Win, Part 3
Play to Win, Example (Survivor)
Art of War 1: Sheathed Sword
Art of War 3: Deception
Art of War 4: Divide & Conquer

Business of Games
Episodic Games
Art of War 2: Sheathed Sword 2

Features

Rethinking Story Games

“Adventure game with no puzzles like train with no wheels…very soon get nowhere fast.” –Ancient Chinese Proverb

The “adventure game” has died. Don’t kid yourself into thinking otherwise. Sure LucasArts, the company that owned the genre, can get away with releasing the occasional adventure game, but that’s the exception, not the rule. This fact makes a great many people sad, myself included, because much more than any other genre, the adventure game was about story. The digital, interactive medium offers amazing potential to tell stories in ways never before possible, so when the genre explicitly about storytelling died…authors either mourned the passing or denied it completely.

The message the market is telling us is certainly not that they don’t want story games, it’s just that they don’t want “adventure games” and all the rules that go along with them. So, what is an adventure game? It’s a story through which the player navigates, taking on the role of one character (or occasionally multiple characters). The story is a gated one, and the puzzles are the gates. In order to progress to new sections of the story, the player must complete tasks and solve puzzles. Since solving puzzles (by their very nature) require the player to think and explore possibilities, adventure games also allow (or force?) the player to wander around the world, talking to characters, picking up objects, amusing themselves until the moment of “aha!” that allows them to progress. In the vast majority of these games, time does not actually pass in any meaningful way. That concept is at odds with solving puzzles, unless events repeat or the player is allowed to travel through time. The result is often a rather empty experience. A large percentage of the game is spent wandering around in a static world, often paused in time, while the player figures out what to do. His reward is the advancement of the story.

The Secret of Monkey Island, though formulaic, inspired me to join the game industry. Excellent comedy writing, and great characters.

Now, I used to love this type of game. I love puzzles. To me, the process of solving puzzles was where much of the fun was. But the genre soon became rather puzzle-stale. Ingenious puzzles are difficult to craft, and the concept of walking around, talking to people, collecting inventory, and using items on each other only goes so far. These games were often forced, in search of variety, to present “puzzles” which went way beyond the realm of lateral thinking and into the realm of the arbitrary. In short, the basic construct of this type of game needs to change for puzzle writing’s sake, if nothing else.

That’s not the worst of it, though. Even with well crafted puzzles, adventure games have an awful lot of emptiness to them. Exploring a static world frozen in time is just not up to snuff these days. There are only so many lines of dialogue characters can have. Heck, Myst didn’t have any dialogue or even any characters to entertain the wandering, stuck player That was fun back when 3D rendered images on a CD were innovative. Games like the Curse of Monkey Island try to minimize this emptiness writing damn funny dialogue to entertain you while you’re stuck. But again, that only goes so far. I was willing to put up with the excruciatingly slow pace of adventure games as a kid, when then genre was fresh, but nowadays, it just doesn’t seem like something I should have deal with. After all, stories are not, by nature, always slow paced.

Myst was fun back then. These days, it takes more than an empty world of still images and zero characters.

And remember, the story advancement is the reward in the adventure game formula. But if the genre is really about stories, then shouldn’t the story be the meat of the game, not the reward for solving puzzles? Why do we need puzzles at all? The answer is that no one has really been able to figure how to make a game out of a story. (Yes, the role-playing game (RPG) is a different take on this, but it too is trapped in formula. And yes, Metal Gear Solid manages to have a story gated by action rather than actual puzzles…but work with me here, people.)

Let’s look at how long it takes to play an adventure game. Well, it depends greatly on how able you are to succeed at the game elements along the way. It could take only 2 hours if you know exactly how to do everything (meaning you have a detailed walkthru from the net), or it could take 60 hours. In fact, it could take an expert gamer 60 hours, even though the actual length of real story might be as short as an hour or two. Would my mom want to play this type of game? Absolutely not. She might enjoy the story, but she’d never survive the huge time commitment. If it takes me 60 hours, how long would it take her? She also wouldn’t appreciate the duration being directly tied to her skill at the game. She, as a non-gamer, is familiar with the concept of a tv show being a half hour long, a movie being two hours, a book being 300 pages, and so on. It’s easy to understand where these types of entertainment fit in your real life schedule since they have predetermined, relatively short lengths.

What’s the point of all this? The point is to figure out a way to create a story game that is much more about story than we’ve been able to pull of so far. I think the point is to also think a great deal about the mass market. The concept of storytelling is so fundamental to all cultures that it just seems a shame that our most story based genre of games are not accessible to non-gamers.

A "Forced Advance" Game

Here’s my idea: the game plays itself. If the player does nothing—touches no game controls—then the characters will go about their business, time will progress, and a predefined story with a beginning, middle, and end will be told. This will take some predictable amount of time. (Perhaps 10 minutes, or 30, or 2 hours, or whatever the designer chooses.) Sounds like a movie, doesn’t it? Well, the player doesn’t have to sit and watch. He can intervene at any time and change the course of events. I certainly don’t mean there’s x minutes of full motion video, then a canned decision point, then more fmv. I’m talking about something much more fluid. More of a simulation.

While the player will see a story without intervening, he won’t necessarily see the most interesting one. If the player’s character had stuck around and talked to crazy Aunt Hilda a little longer, he might have realized why she had that magical locket in her attic that her daughter stumbled across. That Hilda actually put the locket there on purpose. That Hilda isn’t that crazy after all. Puts a new light on the story, doesn’t it? So one facet of this type of game is being able to explore different threads of the story as you desire.

There’s also the concept of changing the course of the story. I can imagine one type of “game” in which the player is completely unable to change the storyline. The “game” is the (disembodied?) navigation through the physical game world, through time, and through the entangled web of the plot. Every object and character in every scene might have it’s own story to explore, all related, all hyperlinked together in a sense. This is, I believe, what “interactive fiction” in games would be like. There really is no game element, but interaction with the story is so extreme that it at least has something in common with games.

Another route is to allow the player to affect the course of events, or at least to try. This might mean trying to convince characters to behave in a certain way through conversation. It might mean taking specific action in the world to try to change things, such as firing a weapon or moving objects around. Perhaps it’s even possible to create traps (Spy vs. Spy comes to mind). The player might be in a position of power (police chief, ship captain, etc.) and easily influence events. Such a game world would probably have to be very resistant to change, though. It’s probably not technically feasible to allow different outcomes to branch into a huge tree of totally different stories, nor is it even desirable. The opponents of interactive fiction state that any story is really 1,000 possible stories where the author intelligently chose the one, single best story to tell. It would still be possible, though, to create a game world whose major story arc was resistant to change, while allowing  change on the smaller scale. It might even be fun.

Let’s look at two specific types of stories that work well with this concept: the mystery story and the horror story.

The great thing about a mystery is that it’s kind of like a game to begin with. It’s a story that’s one big puzzle. It’s also not a zero-sum game. It’s not author vs. reader. The author wants the reader to “win” in the end by figuring out the puzzle just before the answer is revealed. He does this by hiding clues through out the story, which is the other great feature of a mystery. Trying to find the clues in a mystery is a game-like activity, and a rather forgiving one. The reader doesn’t have to find all the clues. He’s able to progress through the story and follow it at every step whether he finds every clue, or no clues at all.

A mystery is really two stories in one. One is the story right in the forefront. The story we travel through as we would any other. But characters of this story are trying to uncover the second story—the secret story—of what actually happened. Who was the real killer? How was the diamond stolen? In the timeline, this second story usually finishes before the first story begins. The key feature here, though, is that progressing through the first story is not dependant on uncovering the clues which clarify the secret story. The secret story will be explained in the end, and hopefully the reader can look back and see where the clues were at that time.

So back to our game. The game plays itself and the events of the mystery (the investigation) unfold. Witnesses are questioned, the main character’s safety is threatened, the zany next door neighbor is exposed to be an adulterer, but not a murder, and so on and so on. It’s a story. Through the story are hidden clues, cleverly hidden off the beaten path. Maybe the player should talk to the pharmacist a little bit longer before giving up so easily. Maybe he should make young Miss Weatherby stay the night at the police station rather than risk her being kidnapped. Maybe allowing the main character’s default action of going to investigate the crime scene isn’t the best thing to do. If he chases after that suspicious character on the street he might end up learning something.

These clues are basically just like the DK coins in the action platform game Donkey Kong Country 2 (see my article on that game). They don’t have to be found, but they are there to challenge the player. No matter how good or bad a player you are, you’ll get to the end of the story (in a fairly known amount of time) and the mystery will be solved, though perhaps not by your character. But if you’re able to find enough clues (DK coins), then you have the satisfying ending of solving the mystery yourself. Notice that this is an example of a larger story arc that is unchangeable by the player. No matter what the player does, Jimmy the Locksmith will still be the murderer. Minor events along the way (do you lose the game of 3-card monte to the street thugs?) and the ending (do you unmask the killer or did your sidekick) are flexible.

One problem with this type of game is the pacing. Being forced to advance through the story, never having a break might not be the most fun experience. As I talked about in my article on pacing, having a rising and falling sine wave of action is nice thing. Juxtaposing the highs with the lows give each a little more punch. So what if…parts of a game are in this “forced advance” mode we’ve been talking about, and parts are more like the traditional type of adventure game? The regular parts would have a feeling of safety, really, since the time pressure would be gone, allowing you to explore at your leisure, and perhaps even give you enough time to solve some actual thought puzzles.

And here we have the classic formula for the horror story. Parts of the story (the non-forced advance parts) are safe zones, and slow-paced. Interspersed are the tense parts—the parts where you are forced to act—forced to go forward—forced into the unknown. Furthermore, during these parts, you have a feeling of lack of control, just as you should in horror. If done well, the universe might even seem to be an entity, bending you to its will. In fact, I even created a design for such a game where the villain is a demon who has the power to beckon to the main character, forcing her to act, to progress. She has enough control to choose how she progresses (does she jump or crawl or draw her weapon?) but not enough control to resist. And boy, does that demon show up at inopportune times!

This horror game I’ve described, though based on the same forced-advance mechanic as the mystery game, is really of very different character. In the horror game I worked on, a great deal of the gameplay comes from the action elements caused by the forced advance. The character is forced across dangerous and scary territory. She must jump and shoot and swim and so forth to survive. During the regular parts of the game, she can carefully explore territory or story threads, find secrets at he leisure, stock up on weaponry, etc. These are the calm parts, and the forced-advance sections are the tense parts. Really, it’s more of a “game” in the sense gamers are used to than the mystery I described.

The mystery allowed the player to be swept through a story while simultaneously exploring the story itself, trying to find the hidden parts of it, rather than concentrating at all on jumping or shooting or any other traditional “gamer” activities. The horror game spices up the pacing of more traditional game forms with an interesting mechanic.

Through these examples I hope I have scratched the surface of new ways to tell stories in video games. I truly look forward someday to turning such theory into practice, and to others advancing this still-infant art form.

This screenshot of The Curse of Monkey Island is purely gratuitous. Ever notice how Guybrush goes to a beach with a rowboat in every game?

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