A conversation on the IF MUD (http://fovea.retina.net:4001/) got me started thinking about this topic. 'Bloodthorn' (aka Jesse) said:
"Okay, here's my biggest thing with the last game I wrote and the two that I am working on now. There is a lot of humor in two of them and a lot of subtle moments of revelation in the other. But it all falls apart if some things aren't seen or encountered before others. So, something have to come one after another but since (and particularly I have this problem in one game) the whole is a
giant picture, I'm having trouble saying okay, I guess the player can see this before that."
Let me see if I can break down this problem into forces. The main two seem to be:
- The author wishes to reveal his story to the player one layer at a time. In order to best tell the story, the layers are best revealed in a certain order.
- The player has complete control over their actions, and might reveal one 'layer' before another, thereby spoiling the story.
To a great extent, this is what puzzles are for. A puzzle requires the player to do something before something else is revealed. The author can put the first layer in the puzzle set-up, and the second layer in the puzzle aftermath.
Too much of this kind of thing, though, and you run into another force. To quote GrahamNelson, in his CraftOfAdventure?:
- "Being locked up in a long sequence of prisons, with only brief escapes between them, is not all that entertaining. After a while the player begins to feel that the designer has tied him to a chair in order to shout the plot at him."
Clearly, in order to bring about a 'peaceful resolution of forces', a balance needs to be reached. But is there a pattern here which can help? How have you seen this resolved in games you have played, or how have you resolved this yourself in games you have authored? Feel free to add your comments below.
--LucianSmith
Okay, it's bad style to talk to yourself, but here I go anyway.
In a conversation with Neil deMause & Dan Shiovitz on the IFMud, we further explored this topic. Neil pointed out that to some extent, it depends on what you're trying to accomplish: if you want to create a linear story, you have to work at disguising the linearity. If you want to create a world to be explored, you can have a lot of independent sections.
So, the question becomes: how do you disguise linearity?
One option is the tried-and-true prologue-middle-epilogue format. You allow the player to explore and do different stuff in the middle section, but constrain them before and after, so you can get your story in there.
Here's another Neil quote: "One trick to disguise linearity is to create the illusion of tremendous branching paths when the player is in the game, even if they never pan out. Properly placed 'red herrings' -- a tempting wall that you can never scale, for example -- can make the player feel like there are innumerable options even if there's just one. But it's important not to overwhelm the player with choices."
I asked, "So the player stumbles down the path, not realizing that there's only one path?"
Neil replied, "Right. Or better yet, the player thinks they're wandering across a field, not realizing they're actually taking the path that was set down for them."
He also brought up (appropriately enough, given where patterns came from) Frederick Law Olmsted, co-designer of Central Park, who was a master of working within a limited amount of space, and using properly placed trees and arches and so on to create the illusion of infinity.
We noted that one way of doing this is dividing up the story into discreet chunks, each of which is linear, like 'Jigsaw' or 'Trinity'. However, 'Jigsaw' felt too linear to some people anyway. 'Trinity' was believed to have succeeded because of the expansive central area, where you could do lots of stuff.
I-O was also cited as a game which, although it wasn't linear and had many paths, also contained the illusion of having many more paths than it actually did.
Three other 'tricks' were mentioned:
- Making the 'right' choice emminently more logical and attractive than the 'wrong' choice, so that the player never notices that you can't do the illogical things.
- Providing many options, but only having some of them pan out, so that if the player works on all of them, they'll stick with those that lead them somewhere new--until suddenly they find themselves at the end of the path you've laid for them.
- Getting the player so into the mindset of the character that if they deviate from the story, they blame themselves for it not going anywhere, since the things they were trying were not the types of things the character would do. 'Christminster' was cited as an example, with the specific example that you ended up feeling guilty for freeing the parrot, so you helped Ed get it back. The end of 'Trinity' was also cited. You knew what you had to do when you got there. 'Plundered Hearts' was a third example, where the genre told you what your character was supposed to do, and you wanted to do it.
If you want, you can see the whole IntFicMudDiscussion (slightly edited for clarity) from which these ideas came.
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(last edited August 20, 1997)
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