General Gaming Story 6
Game.play Story.telling: A Meta-essay for TalkStrategy.com
by Hitbyambulance
Storytelling and game play are, on the surface, antagonistic. Whereas stories are plotted and linear, usually by a third party, game play represents, in its purest form, an experience that is determined by a first party's choices and risks. However, storytelling can and does result from a well-executed game play experience, as a way of sharing an immersive experience and relating it to others.
I've long felt the most important factor in facilitating a storytelling experience is immersion, which results from a mixture of freedom, interactivity/causality and emergent game play - the player has to feel able to accomplish the things they want to do in the game world (within reason), be able to interact *meaningfully with that game world, and as a tangible result of those actions, produce outcomes that reward the player for their intelligent choices.
Naturally, there is usually some element of hyperbole involved - the player is 'larger than life' and will be able to affect changes that are highly unlikely or impossible in real world situations. Emergent game play relies on 'probable randomness', which should mirror the laws, physics, behaviors, etc of the natural world. This is instrumental in breaking down the border between the real and the virtual – one is transported from playing software entertainment application necessarily defined by a finite, structured code base, to living in this world where Anything is Possible. This is the key goal of any virtual world - an alternate possible (perhaps even plausible) life in which to fully immerse oneself in.
Immersion is what keeps the player enthralled - they want to reside in this alternate world, and the closer that world mirrors the real one in terms of natural laws, the greater the suspension of disbelief. It doesn't matter whether the representation tends toward the abstract, or the natural. Realism is more eye-candy and interesting to observe, and tends strongly towards emphasizing 'simulation'. By definition, however, modeling real-life conditions takes a large amount of effort in order to 're-create' the natural world with all its nuances and variables. The amount of work required scales greatly as more realism is desired. Abstraction, on the other hand, allows large numbers of systems to be resolved with a more minimal set of calculations, and tends to encourage a purer game play environment with a more manageable set of boundary conditions. Imagination is allowed a much greater role, as the mind must fill in the details (much like a narrative in a novel would do.)
When the conditions are right, the realness of the experience impels the player to want to share the extraordinary events that they've observed or personally experienced. The 'high' of realizing those 'unpossible' actions, and seeing 'brought to life' what was only imagined or dreamed about, provides the stimulation that fuels the creative process for later reconstruction and retelling to an audience.