Game Stories

 Week 10

Game Stories

This week is on the topic of stories in gaming, A good story in a game can be one of its defining factors and will make its players recognize and remember it for years.
A good story with a satisfying ending can leave a great impression on the player and if there are going to be sequel games it's going to make them want to buy the next game more, this is because of the performance from the last one.
Having a good story can also engage the player and they will ender a flow state where they are hooked and want to know more about the game, this will keep them playing or even have them play the game start to finish multiple times.
If the game is single-player there is a big pressure to make it good because it's the story that's driving the whole game. It needs to have a good story in order to sell copies.
One of the most popular ways of storytelling is the interactive narrative. This is so popular because the player gets a say on how they play the game, most interactive narrative games would be ones that offer the player to control the choices of the situation in games, this would be common when your player and another NPC are in a conversation and they'll ask you something and what you respond with will decide what happens. These types of games are interesting because most of them lead to different outcomes or endings so most players would replay the game and make different decisions to see if they would get a different ending this time. The fact that this way of storytelling is so interactive is the reason they became so popular today.


The thing that can make these interactive narratives look bad is some of these franchises that create them make them very gimmicky some of the choices that you make don't even make a difference to the outcome in the end. The character you choose to save ends up dying anyway, when you choose to help someone over another person the two people end up having the same dialogue, why choose between them in the first place if they're going to be the same person either way? Having these things in an interactive dialogue doesn't really make the player feel like they're in control of their character's story, this will lead to them thinking that they aren't playing the game they thought they were. ON first play it will be a great experience but as they play again to see the differences they will quickly realize that they didn't have any control over the story in the first place.


There is another style of game storytelling that makes things a lot more simple, this is having no story that sticks out at all, instead, there's a journey that you have to take that will leave it up to you to come up with the lore itself. Nothing will be completely concrete in the story except the clues you're given. One of these games that use this style of storytelling is "Hollow Knight". This game is very successful for its story and the world it offers, but there's no proper story given to the player. How does this work? Well, the player will explore the underground world of Hollownest and will find old grave markings, statues, shrines, or even talk to other NPCs, all these achievements result in the player learning more about Hollownest and what happened to it over the years. This style of storytelling is more show don't tell because it's up to the player to interpret what it is.  

There are many different types of storytelling in gaming and these are just two check out everything you need to know about stories here: 


Here is an article a bunch of developers did on the story of Mass Effect:


I'd highly recommend checking out Hollow Knight take a look here:


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