The Story of Story on Designing Virtual Worlds

Narrative

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The way that both film and computer games handle this is through narrative. Film is the more structured: The scenes in a screenplay link causally to tell a story (generally in a classic, three-act form). Syd Field’s famous analysis ¹ of script form puts act I at pages 1–30, act II at pages 30–90, and act III at pages 90–120. Around pages 10–15 will be an inciting incident that knocks the initially stable situation out of balance; around pages 25–27 will be a big event that gives the protagonist a goal; around page 60 will be a pinch point where the protagonist becomes fully committed; around pages 85–90 will be a crisis point where all seems lost; the resulting showdown lasts until about page 115, then the story wraps up with a realization section where the audience can see how events have grown the

Why Story Arcs Don’t Work

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Most narrative art forms are passive, in that the audience doesn’t participate directly in their creation. An author may be creating a novel to speak to a particular group of people, but can only estimate how they will respond, and thus how the novel should be changed as a result of this imagined response. In virtual worlds, the audience can in theory participate to the point of collaboration. Are they part of the work? Are they part of the production? Are they neither, or can they be both ¹?

The Koster-Vogel Cube

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

At the 2001 Game Developers Conference, Raph Koster and Rich Vogel introduced ¹ their well-received storytelling cube as a model for describing the various ways by which players can experience virtual world event sequences as narratives. The following year, they explored it in more detail ². Their model classifies the elements that make up narratives along three binary dimensions:

Control. Is the story told by the designer, or does it arise from player interactions?

The Place of Narrative

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Virtual worlds are places, not stories. You can have a story about New York, or a story set in New York, and New York can have a history, but New York is not itself a story unless you stretch the definition of “story” so far that it loses all meaning ¹. The same applies to virtual worlds: Trying to impose a story on the inhabitants of a virtual world is as sensible as trying to impose a story on the inhabitants of New York. You can impose events, but not stories; people make their own stories.