What every game developer needs to know about story: John Sutherland

Week 10 reading was a Gamasutra article describing to game designers the basics of story, and what is consists of. Throughout the whole article a line was being constantly drummed into the readers heads; story is conflict. As with the constant advancement of technology, the quality of the games designed are also following suit. The game standards bar is rising and this is increasing the amount of interaction us as players want with our games. Stories are one of the features within games that are being influenced, story and storytelling is a human experience and is part of our ancestry, an item i mention in my most recent post on 'funativity' by Noah Falstein.

This article stresses that Games aren't movies!

Movies were the first of their time, as are game currently. Movies have had their time of experimentation and have had their time to refine what they do best, storytelling in the medium of picture and sound. However games have their own tools and features that make them stand out from movies, and that is player interaction. This conflict in these stories used have to be planned out from the start, many of the classical stories use a basic layout which if kept too can makes your story passable, but not exceedingly good. The structure goes like this:

First, there's a protagonist, a hero.
His or her world is thrown out of order by an inciting incident. (Look at the sabotaged dope deal in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City for a good example of this.)
A gap opens up between the hero and an orderly life.
The hero tries the normal, conservative action to overcome the gap. It fails.
The world pushes back too hard.
The hero then has to take a risk to overcome the obstacles that are pushing back.
Then there is a reversal. Something new happens, or the hero learns something she didn't know before, and the world is out of whack again. A second gap has opened up.
The hero has to take a greater risk to overcome the second gap.
After overcoming the second gap, there is another reversal, opening a third gap.
The hero has to take the greatest risk of all to overcome this gap and get to that object of desire, which is usually an orderly life.

So now we move onto characters and why characterisation is important within a game. Character is not what the person looks like but it is how the hero/villain acts towards situations and scenarios. This character should be revolved around by the other characters in the storyline. The article suggest that the game world should always be antagonistic towards the character to increase the amount of struggle the player has to endure.

Reversals:

John Sutherland suggested the use of reversals are paramount to creating conflict. He says that each act within the story are driven by reversals. These reversals Can lead to 3 different types of conflict:

Internal conflict (typically novels) - Inside your head

Interpersonal conflict (typically plays) - Between different people

External conflict (typically movies/games) - Society in general/outside world.

Plays are 80% Audio 20% Visual

Movies are 80% Visual 20% Audio

Sutherland goes on to say that within games, if you are able to make the player do something the see the story, then that is the up most priority, however showing the player is second priority, and then telling them in last.

DO - SHOW - TELL