More stuff from Story
. Some interesting stuff about how story structure works.
To recap: Game story structure is similar in many ways to a screenplay, though there are some differences. Why the structure is not the same (or at least, should not be the same) is simply because a game is interactive. My viewpoint is that if you have an interactive story-based game then the story should also be interactive and dynamic; a linear plot constricts the gameplay and is a waste of a good game experience. That's not to say that a linear plot creates a terrible game but that there will be something missing, that it won't exploit what is unique about the medium. We don't really know what form an interactive story structure takes yet, it's not so clearly defined as for other media and we haven't had decades to perfect the format.
So in that case how can I say that game story writing is similar to screenwriting? Well, all forms of storytelling media share the same basic properties and they all overlap in certain areas. At the centre there's a sort of "pure story" at the centre - basic axioms that every medium must adopt to tell a story. Robert McKee goes some way towards classifying these in the second chapter of Story. I won't cover them all, but there's a bit of theory that I'd like to summarise.
Science bit
The story structure is a series of events in the lives of the characters that are connected together to make an emotional impact or life statement. There could be hundreds or thousands of these events. The author must pick out which events to use and work out how they fit together in order to make a coherent story.
While studying physics at school I saw a spark chamber that consisted of hundreds of charged metal pins in a sealed box. When a cosmic ray hit the spark chamber it would trigger a cascade of sparks that would leap from pin to pin away from the entry point but in the general direction that the ray was traveling. I see the sparks as tracing hundreds of plot lines between events (the pins), each of which might produce a valid story (valid, although not every plot traced would be equally as good).
A story event is a change (a flip from positive to negative or negative to positive) of part of a character's life situation (a change in value). The event will be triggered through some kind of conflict and must be meaningful in terms of the story. For example, if the protagonist's girlfriend is kidnapped that's a flip from one state to another (free->kidnapped), but more important is the change of values in the protagonist: happy->sad etc. (though hopefully a bit more complex than that). Later the protagonist might be distraught and feel helpless (negative) but gradually gain resolution and seek revenge (positive): another story event.
McKee says that each scene in a story should contain a story event. A scene may contain several events (meaning things that occur) but unless they contain some kind of change in value they're not story events but non-events. When your scene only contains non-events you have to look and wonder why that scene is in your story.
Several scenes can be grouped together into a sequence that when taken as a whole has greater impact than any of the scenes it contains. You can then combine sequences into acts that end in a climactic scene with greater emotional impact than any individual sequence. Then in turn you have the story climax, which is the grouping of acts - you get the picture.
Theory applied to modern games
A well-designed, linear, plotted game follows these rules to some extent. I think that this is partly to do with the script writers having being trained in conventional storytelling techniques, but also because gameplay rules are compatible to a degree.
For Halo, Bungie deliberately paced the action so that there were a few minutes of intense action every ten minutes of gameplay. The action-cooloff cycle is quite common in modern action games - the cooloff period provides a necessary change in pace by providing puzzles or exposition - but it also separates the gameplay into scenes. From a story point of view these scenes could be non-events, although the combat/puzzles would also provide some emotional feedback to the player (fun! frustration! relief! success!), if not the player's character. The sequences of these alternating action and cooloff scenes should close with a story event even if not all of the scenes it contains are story events. Quite often a game will position savepoints after every scene (Halo) or after one or more sequences (Prey).
The beginning of an act usually implies a change of scenery or new gameplay element. The transition from the reservation bar to the alien sphere in Prey, for example. Typically the central point of a game will be similar to Freytag's climax, providing a turning point for the plot. In Halo this is the discovery of The Flood, in others it could the the point at which the player as underdog becomes a threat to his oppressors and goes on the offensive.
I think that demonstrates the link between screenplay and game story writing, and how gameplay can tie in with that. The next step will be to think about how we can take these elements of storytelling and make them interactive.
