I want a world I can believe in, that subtle sense that these places are real, and you could go there if only you could charter a plane, or a time machine… Sci-fi is always so neat and tidy. I just don’t buy that anyone would live there.

Fantasy has this problem, but not as much because it tends to have one foot firmly in modern or medieval times which gives it something to work with. Though you can tell the difference between your average high-fantasy and The Lord of the Rings. There’s a depth and truth to Middle Earth that most don’t bother with… but it’s not about volume. People mistake Tolkien’s achievement for being one of sheer effort, but you don’t create an interesting world just by throwing pages of backstory and concept art at it.

It’s in the little things. The worlds that get away with it are the ones that put in those carefully observed details that make them human.

It’s the petty politics of Vampire Bloodlines, it’s the space marines in Starcraft bringing beer to a demolition (“Thank god for cold fusion!”), it’s the way the X-Wings in Star Wars look like they could use another paint-job…

The universes that transcend their fictional origins are the ones that feel ‘lived in’, their inhabitants just getting by in a place that is entirely real to them.

The psychology of avatar customization,

Patrick Redding on co-op narrative and NPC interaction,

intriguing insight into Valve’s design process,

and a cool new animation blog and podcast.

Enjoy responsibly.

This is old, but I was re-reading it recently and there’s some great points about game writing in there… Bloodlines is one my favourite games, a real diamond in the rough; unfinished in places, but community patches have solved most issues and at its best it rivals classics like Deus Ex for character interaction and atmosphere.

Again, SPOILERS…

The heart of a good story are its characters. They don’t have to be likeable, but they have to be interesting and above all believable. Sometimes a character will say or do something that just seems wrong… People change, certainly, but you know that character would not make that choice at that point in their life…

For example, when Anakin turns to the dark side in Star Wars Episode 3 it seems hard to believe that despite all his fear and anger he would suddenly murder innocent children in cold blood. Darth Vader? Sure. But Anakin’s not there yet.

Maybe a cheap shot picking on Star Wars prequels, but there you go…

It hurts the believability of the character and makes it harder to buy into the story as a whole. If you want people to care about your story you can’t betray your characters.

But enough about movies… What of the troubled relationship between story and interaction? Staying true to character in games is a tricky one:

PLAYER/STORY-CONFLICT

Often referred to as “ludo-narrative dissonance“, it’s a fancy way of saying: the actions the player is encouraged to take do not mesh with the fiction of the game world. You play a likeable hero, but the gameplay is based around murdering hundreds of people. You’re out to save the universe, but you do it by stealing everything that isn’t nailed down… that kind of thing.

Not a new problem, but it has become more noticable as game stories develop a certain degree of subtlety. Nathan Drake may be a lovable rogue during cutscenes, but in the hands of the player he’s a ruthless killer. GTAIV may let you have a pretend social life, but on the way to your date you probably ran over twenty pedestrians.

It’s a difficult problem. The games that get it right – where what the player is thinking and doing matches the character – are all the more powerful for it.

Deleted scenes are deleted for a reason.

Maybe this is controversial, but I felt Peter Jackson got a little carried away with the extended editions of The Lord of the Rings.

Now, I *love* Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, but with the exception of The Two Towers I find the cinema version vastly superior to the extended cut.

For all the ‘missing’ scenes they add, they don’t make the story any better and pacing goes out the window… All they end up doing is pander to the die-hard Tolkien fans that were never going to be satisfied anyway with anything less than a word-for-word adaptation.

It’s telling that writing this I can’t actually remember any scene from the extended Fellowship or Return except for the Bilbo-narrated intro which replaced the much more interesting scene between Gandalf and Frodo. And I only remember it because it annoyed me so much.

Towers I liked, because here was a scene – the capture of Osgiliath – that was not only entertaining in itself, but significantly added to three of the major characters in the story, exploring the relationship between brothers Boromir and Faramir, and their father Denethor. A few other scenes stood out (the burial song, the exchange between Sam and Gollum in the sewers), but this one sequence really showed the difference between adding and padding…

If you’ve got a scene that doesn’t help the narrative or develop the main characters, or worse, states the blindingly obvious… it probably shouldn’t be in there.

Stories are fragile things. One false note can easily pull apart that carefully constructed illusion and your audience, once you’ve lost them, are lost forever.

Sometimes you can’t help but wonder what possessed someone to make such baffling story-choices. I’m going to use movies as examples here, but mostly these are issues cinema shares with narrative games, though they have problems of their own (see a previous post, or two).

It goes without saying this will be a trip to SPOILER-town… You have been warned.

INTERNAL CONSISTENCY

No matter how fantastical, every universe has rules. When you tell a story you make a deal with your audience to accept that these are the things that can happen in this place. If you break those rules, they tune out.

For example, if someone is dead, they should probably stay dead.

At the end of Pirates of the Caribbean, Captain Barbossa dies holding that apple he so would have liked to taste. This was a good death for an interesting character.

At the end of Pirates 2 he is suddenly resurrected with zero explanation, rendering his previous demise utterly meaningless. In the third film there is some vague attempt at explaining why he could be (and needed to be) brought back, while Jack (who at this point is also sort of dead) cannot be brought back the same way for entirely arbitrary reasons (but can be brought back another, more complicated way)…

You lost me.

Given that the first film featured undead skeletons, there is a certain amount of leeway granted here, but when characters that are not understood to be immortal are brought back to life with little to no justification, it rather destroys all credibility and any sense that our heroes are ever in danger…

Cause hey… they can just be resurrected, right?

Splinedoctors walk three ways…

Jordan Mechner has an epiphany about player motivation

… and expands on the development of Sands of Time.

Hans Bacher makes an interesting point about restraint

and 10 things are learned in making a short film.

Enjoy.

Good storytelling is underrated. “Player-generated stories” aren’t usually all that good. They offer good moments, but not good narrative. I agree that games should give the player an interesting place to visit, but that’s not enough. If it doesn’t go anywhere it becomes a toy that feels ultimately pointless.

Progressing narrative and player freedom are not mutually exclusive. What story does is provide a context.

Freedom without purpose is boring. I don’t like games telling me what I should be doing, but a well-designed game will make it clear what I *could* be doing, explicitly or otherwise. There’s a difference between exploring and wandering around aimlessly.

I don’t get this need to divorce low-level mechanics from high-level direction, as if the alternative is absolute linearity… like the only two games that can exist are The Marriage and Metal Gear Solid.

A good story will make a free world more interesting to interact with and give meaning to the choices you make in it. Portal was a clever puzzle game that was made genius by the introduction of Glados and the Companion Cube. Admittedly a linear example, but certainly a mechanic that greatly benefited from story. Gothic (the first) is an interesting RPG because it has a great setup and then throws you into a wide open world with that context colouring your every interaction and those of the people around you.

A story will keep a world from becoming static. If all that changes in your sandbox are numbers, the same nameless NPC giving you the same generic task there’s only so much you can get out of that. If your core mechanics are really good, they can only benefit from being given story to relate to.

Starcraft is a pretty fun game, but I would have never finished it if it wasn’t for Sarah Kerrigan and Jim Raynor. Does that mean it should have been a movie?

Of course not.