Secondary English Network

Yesterday saw the launch of Penguin’s new website “We Tell Stories”, produced in conjunction with Six to Start ARG developers. Each week a new story will be released on the website, told in a new and innovative format. Today’s first offering, “The 21 Steps” by Charles Cumming, uses Google Maps to tell a story of suspense and mystery, in the vein of John Buchan’s “The 39 Steps”.

To celebrate the lauch, Six to Start’s creative director, Adrian Hon, delivered a lecture on the relationship between games and storytelling that raises some interesting points for using games in the English classroom (in a similar way to Myst and Samorost below). Wouldn’t it be great to use some of this theory to help our pupils create better more engaging stories?

According to his analysis, there are only six ways games tell stories.

Story as Reward
This is the catch all - the story is the carrot that dangles in front of the player, compelling him or her to get throught he puzzles to the cut-scenes. Generally, the gameplay is largely unrelated to the story because it’s the last thing that was done in the development process. Games with this story-driven format are stories on rails.

Story as Experience
In this approach, the story is told through gameplay. There aren’t any cut scenes, or cut scenes are integrated into the game. This means the story has to be written into the design right from the start, and the ‘rails’ of the game have to be hidden well to create a gameplay experience that doesn’t feel controlled.
Typical Game: Half Life/Deus Ex

Branching Narrative
This is the quintessential ‘interactive story’ : player can make choices (like in choose your own adventure stories), but this only gives the illusion of choice. It also involves creating a lot of ‘wasted content’ because people never see all of it. Adrian thinks this approach works best if the path is right at the end, but more often than not, players find they can’t progress unless story tasks are completed in a certain order.
Typical Game: Legend of Zelda series

Pseudo AI
Apparently, the buzz on the game-writer’s street is that this approach ‘is the future’. Writers can completely influence story within certain parameters. However, it’s very developer-heavy: natural language processing and AI require a huge amount of scripting - thousands of pre-written lines, to be exact. And effectively, the player is still in a maze, but a slightly more complex one.
Typical Game: Facade

Sandbox Games
There’s no set narrative in this category, but there may be a setting. The pro of this approach is that user-generated stories can be better than anything that’s pre-written, but it does require great game design, and isn’t a gaming experience for everyone. Often parameters make a better game experience.
Typical Game: Black and White

Dungeon Master Games
This is a very ‘live’ approach to game design: developers set the narrative to an extent, but are able to react to player actions. However, this requires real-time response, and so it doesn’t scale well, or offer many replay options. After all, how much human interaction can you actually have with each player when there are 100K people playing the game?
Typical Game: Alternate Reality Games, table-top games

More notes from the lecture can be found here.