"Movies and plays get much of their power from the resonances between the structural layers. The congruence between the theme, plot, setting and character layouts generates emotional power. Computer games will never have a significant theme level because the outcome is variable. The lack of theme alone will limit the storytelling power of computer games."
Mr. Sterling goes on to recommend not worrying about the above, and instead focus on computer games as a unique medium. However, it does bother me, when I'm up late at night, my mind is wandering, and I think about how great it would be to take a break from my usual work and spend time writing a computer game.
All my favorite computer games have significant storytelling, but it seems like a zero-sum tradeoff sometimes -- the more you constrain the outcome and guide the player along a small number of paths, the more effectively you can tell the story, but the game becomes less interesting by equal measures. Maybe there's some art to finding the right balance.
(By the way, this was from 1991, not 1981, as the HN title indicates.)
> the more you constrain the outcome and guide the player along a small number of paths, the more effectively you can tell the story, but the game becomes less interesting by equal measures. Maybe there's some art to finding the right balance.
It's a fascinating idea, to have a story that is shaped by the players actions, incorporating them as significant plot points in a story - so that whatever the player does is given meaning in the story. Sounds nice... but to do it, you some kind of a "grammar" of stories, and a way to recognise player actions (not to mention actually getting it to generate a story, a sentence of the grammar).
Perhaps one way to recognise player actions is with a constrained world, such as a point and click (or text) adventure, with pre-defined nouns and verbs.
So, you pick something up, and it becomes the solution to a puzzle; whoever you meet becomes a mentor, ally, enemy, depending on what the story needs at that point; you do nothing, and things come to you; you go somewhere and it becomes a threshold to a special world; you do something difficult (e.g. it takes a few steps to get to it), and it yields a greater reward. The player seems to be trying to achieve something (how to detect that? Things seen in the distance, or mentioned, or written or implied, with directions, and the player goes that way), you make it more difficult.
Such things usually turn out obviously cookie-cutter, because it is by definition without creativity. But perhaps with a sufficiently large database and orthogonal grammar, it would be no more derivative than many popular films/novels.
Thanks for the tip; I should check out Portal 2 sometime. If it's anything like Portal 1, it achieves the balance by constraining the dynamic gameplay to discrete puzzles, each of which, when solved, moves the player along the storyline.
Mr. Sterling goes on to recommend not worrying about the above, and instead focus on computer games as a unique medium. However, it does bother me, when I'm up late at night, my mind is wandering, and I think about how great it would be to take a break from my usual work and spend time writing a computer game.
All my favorite computer games have significant storytelling, but it seems like a zero-sum tradeoff sometimes -- the more you constrain the outcome and guide the player along a small number of paths, the more effectively you can tell the story, but the game becomes less interesting by equal measures. Maybe there's some art to finding the right balance.
(By the way, this was from 1991, not 1981, as the HN title indicates.)