Prescripted history
Posted on February 28, 2002 @ 11:27 in Research
The problem of integrating a storyline with the actual actitivity of playing a game is a very thorny one indeed. There basically are two types of games. Games focused on action that employ a story as a background setting and theming for the action, and games where a player in one way or another goes through a storyline to reach a (hopefully) satisfying resolution of the storyline. These two types are of course not organised in a mutually exclusive dichotomy, but they are the extremes on a continuum.
If we get closer to the end of the continuum where the player follows an overarching storyline in the game, the problem of how to unobtrusively make the story progress become bigger. This type of game draws from the ancient art of storytelling and recent incarnations such as books and movies don't allow for the user to interfere with the progression of the storyline like games do. One of the solutions has been to use "cut-scenes" in games, where the player watches a video clip that progresses the story to the next level, but that prevents the player from interfering with that progression. It always reminds me a little of the silent movies, where they'd have these explanatory texts intercut with the actual scenes, as if games are still in their infancy. The problem of storyline also becomes much more complex when moving to (massively) multi-player games. How do you get thousands of (sometimes infrequently) participating players to take part in an ongoing storyline?
It seems to me that storyline or narrative in games suffers from an inherent weakness: a storyline in a game is prescripted history antedating the events of the game and consequently the player's actions are meaningless because he or she can never change the course of history. The only two options for the player are to prematurely fail to complete the tasks the game has set up or to run through a history/storyline like a dress-rehearsal. Storyline in games is classic (religious) predestination. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Much fun can be had in overcoming the complex obstructions that games tosses at the player and especially the knowledge that there must be a way to solve the riddles and the knowledge that there is a meaningful end to the quest might be prime motivators for the player to continue on playing, but as games grow into massive multi-player environments that grant the player ever more freedom of action, the essential problem of predestination by storyline becomes more pressing.
Just an observation... no answers yet :-)
Comments and Trackbacks
No comments or trackbacks for this entry yet.
Post a comment
Comments and trackbacks have been closed on this site. My apologies.
Since MT-Blacklist inexplicably stopped working I had no other recourse than close comments and trackbacks to stop the spam. I've been meaning to correct this for quite a while, but life got in the way... in a good way I should add.