Upcoming Panel at SCAD Gaming Fest

Hi!  If you missed it, the SXSW Online 2021 panel, Creating Touchstones in Emergent Narrative, is still up on-demand for pass holders. 

I'll be speaking on a panel, Screenwriting for Games: The Challenge of Choice-Based Narratives, next week at SCAD Gaming Fest along with Patric Verrone and Marianne Krawczyk. This high-powered event was organized in collaboration with the Writers Guild Foundation. SCAD stands for Savannah College of Art and Design.

Here's the panel description:

Title: Screenwriting for Games: The Challenge of Choice-Based Narratives

When: Friday, April 9, 2021

Time: 2 PM Eastern Time

From huge triple-A games to interactive online novels, engaging storytelling requires the right mix of imaginative prose and strategic writing. Join successful game writers as they talk about pitching and writing choice-based narratives, how the writers' room in a game company differs from television series or films, and the various ways writers are utilized in the game development process.

SCAD Gaming Fest will feature Q&A's, presentations, and panels, featuring industry professionals from Blizzard, EA, Google, Magic Leap, Microsoft, Ubisoft, 42 Entertainment, Skillshot, and more. This year, it's virtual and open to all, not just SCAD students and SCAD card holders.

Join me and other industry leaders this April 9–10, and get exclusive content on game design and development, animation, visual effects, and more. See you there!

The Evolution of Digital Storytelling

In this article, game designer Sande Chen reports on Sam Barlow's presentation at PLAY NYC, in which he describes how the digital world is transforming the art of storytelling.

Speaking at PLAY NYC on August 11, 2020, Sam Barlow, the mastermind behind the award-winning games Her Story and Telling Lies, explained the sweeping changes that have occurred in storytelling in his presentation, "The Death of the Container: What TV and Movies Should Learn from Video Games."

The line between television and movies is blurring, he said, with the increasing variety of new program formats. Content creators can no longer package neatly wrapped story content, i.e. a container, in this digital world. With smart TVs and access to streaming, consumers don't tune in at a certain time to watch programs. Instead of Must See TV, the operative word is now "binging," in which viewers watch through several episodes at once. That's a lot like putting in the hours on a game. Personalization, which used to be limited by genre categories in a video store, is commonplace. NetFlix even personalizes thumbnails for you based on algorithms. 

But television and film are still limited in choices. The viewer choice boils down to: Do I continue watching or do I stop?

Video games are known for player choices as well as self-expression and exploration. "Stories," said Barlow, "are information with emotion. Can we explore them?" Like the digital newspaper that assumes its readers won't read page by page, video game stories are unbounded, allowing players to replay, rearrange, and watch again while looking for new context. Video games purposefully acknowledge player participation. Players are allowed to explore with curiosity, usually in an open world, and feel immersed. Moreover, players are the main driver of the story. Players create a rich, full story in their heads and it's not only due to the order in which they came upon the story.

Barlow cautioned content creators not to get too excited about branching narrative and popular story choice apps, which he said only gives an illusion of a system with cause and effect. He finds that players want to go deeper, not broader, which is to say that the Why is much more important than the What If. To him, emotion comes from specific emotional moments, which requires an understanding of the story, and not from exploring different story branches.

In summary, Barlow offered up this analogy. The audience is saturated with storytelling. They've eaten a lot of pie. We shouldn't offer them mini pies and think that's special. A smart chef would offer a deconstructed pie. Similarly, he said, "To cater to the information overload generation, we must deconstruct stories for them so they can experience them fully again."

Sande Chen is a NYC-based writer and game designer whose work has spanned 10 years in the industry. Her credits include 1999 IGF winner Terminus, 2007 PC RPG of the Year The Witcher, and Wizard 101. She is one of the founding members of the IGDA Game Design SIG.

A Vision of CYOA Future

In this article, game writer Sande Chen reports on Gary Whitta's vision of what would be a compelling choose your own adventure experience.

At the GamesBeat Summit in April 2020, Gary Whitta, screenwriter of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, laid down his vision of the future of interaction fiction in an interview session called "Choose Your Own Adventure: The Evolution of Storytelling through the Next Generation." Unfazed by the uncanny valley, he wished games weren't limited by technology and were more lifelike.

Whitta has written for The Walking Dead game and said that game designers try to include a player decision every 26 seconds, but if it were really true-to-life, he mused, decision-making would be every second.

Speaking of role-playing games, he hoped that in the future, NPCs would include more adaptive AI so that their responses would sound more improvised and less scripted.

He marveled how it would be if a player could talk to any NPC and not just the ones with ! on top of their heads. A player could end up getting involved in numerous stories within one game world.

But he did concede one difference between reality and interaction fiction that would have to remain: A game story has to be logical out of fairness to the player.  In the real world, life is unfair and illogical, but in a game, players don't want to invest time to find out it made no difference at all.

Sande Chen is a writer and game designer whose work has spanned 10 years in the industry. Her credits include 1999 IGF winner Terminus, 2007 PC RPG of the Year The Witcher, and Wizard 101. She is one of the founding members of the IGDA Game Design SIG.

Second Annual Interactive Fiction Creator's Conference

Hi!  I'm pleased to share with you that I will be a keynote speaker at the Second Annual Interactive Fiction Creator's Conference, presented by Decision Fiction.  I will be talking about game design and interactive fiction on Saturday September 28th at 11 AM.  The conference is free to attend and online.  Simply sign up at the link.

I hope you will tune in to hear what writers, technologists, and game developers have to say about the state of interactive fiction. The theme is "Interactive Fiction For Everyone!"

I am especially delighted about this event because this will be my second time as an remote speaker. I'm certain it won't be as complicated as the last time when I used an avatar in a virtual world to present a lecture about how technology is changing storytelling. There was no Microsoft Powerpoint in that virtual world, lol!

the details! 

Second Annual Interactive Fiction Creator's Conference
When: Saturday September 28th & Sunday September 29th
Where: Online!
Sign Up Here: https://www.crowdcast.io/e/second-annual/register?session=1

About Me:   

Sande Chen is a writer and game designer with over 15 years of experience in the game industry.  Her writing credits include 1999 Independent Games Festival winner Terminus, MMO Hall of Fame inductee Wizard101, and the 2007 PC RPG of the Year, The Witcher, for which she was nominated for a Writers Guild of America Award in Videogame Writing.  She is the co-author of the book, Serious Games: Games That Educate, Train, and Inform, and was a contributor to Secrets of the Game Business, Writing For Video Game Genres, and Professional Techniques for Videogame Writing.

Preview: Decision Fiction

In this article, game writer Sande Chen gives a preview of the upcoming choice-based story app from Decision Fiction.

Now that the TV viewers have experienced interactive choices on NetFlix's "Black Mirror: Bandersnatch," start-up company Decision Fiction is hoping it's time for prose lovers to fall in love with choice-based stories.  The app will be available on iOS, Android, and messaging services.

Unlike other companies in the CYOA marketplace, Decision Fiction's focus is not on visual storytelling or even gamers, but on writers and readers. Writers don't have to write cinematics or learn scripting. They can submit in Twine or whatever is easiest for them. Meanwhile, readers have Avatars and are guided through the interactive fiction experience by gamification.  There will be Missions, similar to Achievements, that can unlock special badges. Artifacts, a type of power-up, can be bought, won, and used in-game. One example of an Artifact is the Reverse Motion Potion, which allows a reader to undo the last decision. Avatars can be dressed up with costumes, which can also be bought or earned in stories.

While gamification to an extent has been used before in reading communities such as Goodreads, Decision Fiction aims for more than just lists and reviews by the addition of these virtual goods.  This approach is unique among the reader-centric apps.  Even Galatea, which brands itself as "immersive fiction" or "addictive fiction," does not require virtual goods because its interaction consists of ARG-like character text messaging, sound effects, and visuals.

Decision Fiction considers itself an aggregator and distributor of interactive fiction gamebooks. It's a space not quite visual novel and not quite novel. Among its ambitions, Decision Fiction aims to be the one to create a new literary genre for mainstream readers.

To do so, Decision Fiction will include analytics so that writers can see what's working and what's not working for readers. This ecosystem of writers and readers is of utmost importance to the company.

This philosophy comes from a collaboration between an interactive fiction writer and technologists. Last month, I had the opportunity to speak with Sir Robinson and Tejas Bhatt about the genesis of Decision Fiction.  Bhatt had never heard about interactive fiction before meeting Robinson in an Internet chatroom, but was excited by the idea of building a platform that would solve this question: How can interactive fiction be monetized successfully?

Decision Fiction's route of gamifying interactive fiction and using virtual goods may be the answer.

Sande Chen is a writer and game designer whose work has spanned 15 years in the industry. Her credits include 1999 IGF winner Terminus, 2007 PC RPG of the Year The Witcher, and Wizard 101. She is one of the founding members of the IGDA Game Design SIG.

Storytelling with Game Consequences

In this article, game designer Sande Chen reports on Jason Rohrer's session at the 2019 Taipei Game Developers Conference, in which he gave his thoughts about storytelling in games, games as art, and how his game design processes have evolved.

Independent game developer Jason Rohrer, best known for his game, Passage, debuted an open source image selector (available on GitHub) at the 2019 Taipei Game Developers Forum on Thursday, July 11, 2019 to go along with his non-linear, spontaneous presentation about storytelling in games, games as art, and the evolution of his work.

His latest effort, One Hour One Life, is a multiplayer online survival game in which players can spawn either as a helpless baby, a woman, or a man, and as the title implies, one hour corresponds to one lifetime. Cooperation is key to survival. 

Rohrer took a roundabout approach in explaining why permadeath was necessary in the design of his game. He wanted the players to feel like their choices had real game consequences and so if players allow babies to die, then there's no Undo or Rewind. There will never be a playthrough where the babies live and the players will never know what would have happened if the babies had lived. Since it's multiplayer, all the players are witnesses to the babies' deaths.

One Hour, One Life

Rohrer explained that storytelling engines haven't quite advanced to the point where he didn't feel like the storytelling was forced or fake. They either take the branching narrative approach or AI a la Facade. He's skeptical of AI ever producing great creative works and jokingly asked if we wanted HAL to tell our stories. As for branching narratives, even when there are a multitude of options, he still felt that because the player can replay the choice, the consequences don't feel impactful.  

Rohrer acknowledged that he's usually associated with the genre of games known as "art games," or games with artistic purpose. He thinks about what it is that games can uniquely do and how games can tell stories. None of his games are like Choose Your Own Adventures (CYOA). With Cultivation (2005), it was about building a mechanical system that allows the player to make and reflect on choices within that system. With Passage (2007), the game mechanics are metaphorical as if they were lines of a poem. He continued in this mode until he began to feel like this was like a high school English class where students write essays about what something means. No one goes to the movies to look for symbolism, he pointed out.

Now he thinks about creating "unique aesthetic experiences" that can only occur within video games. For instance, Inside a Star-Filled Sky is an infinite, recursive shooter. One can enter a monster and find another world with monsters and enter those monsters and find another world, etc.  It creates this feeling of diving in so deep that one forgets what one was doing in the first place.  

He mused about whether or not the game industry would ever produce that "Citizen Kane of games" a game so powerfully meaningful it's a transformative experience. He argued that there hasn't even been a game equivalent to the film Titanic, let alone Citizen Kane. He put up a list of games like Shadow of the Colossus, the first Zelda, and Metal Gear Solid II and said that even these amazing games paled as culturally relevant experiences when compared to masterpieces like the novel, Lolita.

Whether or not games are culturally relevant has been a subject of debate for more than a decade.  A watershed moment occurred in 2009 when industry watchers proclaimed with great fanfare that the video game industry had surpassed film because Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (CoD: MW2) had earned over a billion dollars.  Yet, as Rohrer showed in a graph, CoD: MW2 only sold around 20 million units whereas the film Avatar sold 360 million, Titanic sold 400 million, and the classic Gone With the Wind moved a billion units.  Therefore, the average man on the street probably knows Gone With the Wind or Titanic or Avatar, but what about CoD: MW2?  Even if that average Joe were to go play CoD: MW2, Rohrer argued, that person would not say, "OMG this experience has enriched my life! I'm in tears because CoD: MW2 has so deeply changed my life forever."

Rohrer acknowledged that there was a skill barrier to beating and winning at video games. Perhaps, he said, this barrier is so great that video games will never be as accessible as movies, books, and other mainstream media and therefore, cannot achieve cultural relevancy.  Another issue is that as technology marches on, classic games are no longer available, since the hardware becomes obsolete. This didn't occur with other media. Analog TVs still work with converters. CDs from 1983 still work, but a game like Quake was originally designed for specific hardware and emulators don't always capture that original experience. Rohrer had no doubt that engineers could make gaming systems backwards compatible if it were an industry expectation.  

For about 15 years, Rohrer has been creating games that are insightful and innovative. Mainstream media press have found his work to be deeply moving and complex, even tear-inducing. Despite his intellectual ponderings on whether or not video games can be considered masterpieces of art, others have already decided that Rohrer's work fits that description. In 2016, he became the first video game creator to have a solo retrospective in an art museum.

[Jason Rohrer's recorded session will be available on IGDA Taiwan's YouTube channel soon.]

Sande Chen is a writer and game designer whose work has spanned 15 years in the industry. Her credits include 1999 IGF winner Terminus, 2007 PC RPG of the Year The Witcher, and Wizard 101. She is one of the founding members of the IGDA Game Design SIG., 

The Love Triangle

In this article, game writer Sande Chen discusses the necessity of interesting choices in the realm of romance.

In the book, How Games Move Us: Emotion By Design, by Professor Katherine Isbister, discusses the dating sim Love Plus at length as an example of emotional design with non-playing characters (NPCs). Love Plus traces the journey of a budding romance, but unlike in real life, there's no fear of actual rejection. The player will always end up "loved" because the NPCs, even when snippy, are always in love with the player.  As in romance novels, lovers rejoice after many trials and tribulations.

The player has a choice of 3 different girls, who will react differently according to their personalities. During the initial phase, the Friend Zone, there may even be Jealousy Events as 2 girls discover they both share affection for the same person, the player.

Alas, this brings us to that popular conflict in the realm of romance, the love triangle.

Within the mindset of "a series of interesting choices," we wouldn't want each potential lover to be the same. We want a fulfilling love but not the same one. Each branch of the narrative should lead to love, but because of who we are and our personalities, the journey is not the same. I wrote about this relationship distinction in Interchangeable He And She when discussing a hypothetical change to replace all female pronouns with male ones to include a gay romance option.  If the story doesn't lead to love, then it's a tragedy, but one that should be brought forth by clear decisions driven by character traits.

Otherwise, the ending feels forced. The author hadn't taken the care to find a logical means for breaking up the love triangle without making someone act out of character or become a sudden, unmotivated asshole.  In the world of linear storytelling, I feel cheated out of a good story when the prince who had been such a caring and devoted childhood friend suddenly becomes a backstabbing fiend so that the girl can fall in love with that other guy in the last 10 pages of the novel.

I find the most interesting love stories are when I'm not sure where the story will go.  Both potential lovers are good choices and therefore, it's a very hard choice for the protagonist.  I'd be equally happy with either choice as long as it's understandable.

That's often the problem with OTP (One True Pairing) stories. There may be a love triangle, but there's no comparison to the OTP. The other person is such a bad, bad choice that who in their right mind would prefer that person? We start to wonder what's wrong with the protagonist that he or she can't see the obvious. By recasting the protagonist as player, it's easier to see that we would want each potential love affair to be a serious potential love affair.

Sande Chen is a writer and game designer whose work has spanned 10 years in the industry. Her credits include 1999 IGF winner Terminus, 2007 PC RPG of the Year The Witcher, and Wizard 101. She is one of the founding members of the IGDA Game Design SIG.

Podcast: Game Design Tips from Sande Chen

A few weeks back, I did an interview with AppMasters. Their podcasts are full of valuable information intended to help you succeed in the mobile app business.

Link to the Podcast: Game Design Tips from Sande Chen

Listen on to hear about the issues with designing for VR, educational game design, narrative design, and about transitioning into the game industry as a writer.

Podcast Description

Today’s guest is one of the Game Industry’s Top 100 Most Influential Women and she shares her tips on educational and VR game design. You will also discover her process for writing game narratives and how freelancing while at her full-time job allowed her to be completely on her own.

Sande Chen is the co-author of Serious Games: Games That Educate, Train, and Inform. As a serious games consultant, she helps companies harness the power of video games for non-entertainment purposes. Her career as a writer, producer, and game designer has spanned over 10 years in the game industry. Her game credits include 1999 Independent Games Festival winner Terminus, MMO Hall of Fame inductee Wizard101, and the 2007 PC RPG of the Year, The Witcher, for which she was nominated for a Writers Guild of America Award in Videogame Writing. She has spoken at conferences around the globe, including the Game Developers Conference, Game Education Summit, SXSW Interactive, Serious Play Conference, and the Serious Games Summit D.C.

Interactive Stories for the Masses

In this article, game writer Sande Chen delves into the history of interactive movies and how kids today might benefit from interactive stories.

In the 1990's, DVDs and laserdiscs made full motion video (FMV) interactive movies possible, but they never really caught on as mainstream entertainment.  In Tender Loving Care and other titles, a character would stop and ask the audience a question, which would help determine the course of the story.  Such scripts were much longer than regular scripts and no doubt, most of the footage was never seen.  Flash forward to today.  NetFlix has just announced interactive adventures for kids.  Based on existing animated kid shows, the new episodes will allow kids to dictate the direction of the story, like a Choose Your Own Adventure book.  As seen in the video, the protagonist directly addresses the audience and asks for input.

Mobile titles like Choices and visual novels also champion choice in stories but usually without FMV or even 3D.  There are interactive Twine stories that are more text-driven.  I think these interactive adventures will more closely resemble the short interactive films from eko or YouTube interactive stories made possible through creative use of the annotation function and video linking.  They are not necessarily games, though some people would call interactive movies games.  I know when I plotted out my YouTube interactive, "The Wish," I simply thought of the video sections as narrative fragments.  There were choices, but it wasn't a game. 

For instance, the first video in "The Wish" was an introduction whereby the protagonist met a genie and was urged to make a wish.  This led to many possibilities.  However, whatever wish was chosen would backfire spectacularly so that all of these videos always included a choice for a do-over.  This would lead to a third video, which would lead to the list of possibilities again.  Obviously, there could be a great deal of looping until the viewer chose to stop asking for wishes.  In that case, the viewer would get the outro video to end the story.

I don't think of these new interactive adventures as games, and they don't have to be games.  I'm interested in seeing how kids take to it and I applaud NetFlix for starting this venture.  I think since these interactive episodes are shorter and using licensed properties, they probably have a better chance than the interactive movies of yore.

Sande Chen is a writer and game designer whose work has spanned 10 years in the industry. Her credits include 1999 IGF winner Terminus, 2007 PC RPG of the Year The Witcher, and Wizard 101. She is one of the founding members of the IGDA Game Design SIG.

Danielle's Inferno: To Hell and Back

In this article, game designer Sande Chen takes a look at the game, Danielle's Inferno, from One More Story Games.

Greetings!  So sorry for the delay.  I was not among the souls who boarded Flight 666 bound for HEL on Friday the 13th, but I did get to visit a personal hell of sorts. The 9 levels of hell, to be exact, depicted in Danielle's Inferno, the game adaptation of the short story by Olivia Rivard. Released last December by One More Story Games, Danielle's Inferno was adapted by William Hiles and Blair Leggett using the company's proprietary software, Story Stylus. Luckily, I already had some experience with existential journeys from visiting the Ten Courts of Hell at Haw Par Villa, a Singaporean theme park about Chinese mythology.

Pudding the hellcat

The quirky vision of hell's circles portrayed in Danielle's Inferno is not as gruesome as the Ten Courts of Hell, which (students beware!) vividly prescribed eternal evisceration for exam cheaters and plagiarists.  Rather, aided by no-nonsense spirit animal Pudding, the player descends into the 9 circles of hell of Limbo, Lust, Gluttony, Greed, Anger, Heresy, Violence, Fraud, and Treachery, featuring demon waiters with Poors Light, the Lucifer-approved beer of Hell, and upwardly mobile demon workers ho-humming through BDSM whipping, gluttonous force-feeding, metamorphosing sinners into shit, your basic flaming pyres, and the like. The player must solve a puzzle and get through fart and elimination jokes to get to the next level.

It's a point-and-click adventure, but I would call Danielle's Inferno point-and-click adventure lite, because so much of it is text instead of AWSD action.  It's the next step after a visual novel and seems geared to players who are taking the leap from linear to non-linear media.  For instance, the limbo level gently guides the player through a hidden object clickfest to introduce the basics of what players need to do in further levels, but to the more savvy player, this is rather tiresome, especially when the interface with its inventory and Combine Items functionality clearly indicates that the platform has a lot more potential than a hidden object game.  There is mostly branching narrative that goes to the same outcome no matter the choice, but new conversations open up based on player actions and the branching does lead to additional dialog.  The key to Danielle's Inferno is exploration and that's really where the game shines.

So much of the enjoyment of Danielle's Inferno is from reading item descriptions.  Click on rocks, signs, clouds, whirlpools, oil slicks, etc. The background is full of new surprises. The limited sound effects and music also add ambiance.  I especially enjoyed the puzzle where I had to find Cerberus' doggy toys.  I played detective as I badgered demon waiters for clues.  In a later level, there is a logic puzzle. 

While Danielle's Inferno does not showcase the interactive dialog or the combine items puzzles of a traditional adventure game, the Story Stylus platform has that potential and indeed, there are other games from One More Story Games that go in that direction. Danielle's Inferno is more simple in story structure and may have more text than necessary, but what it does, it does well. For players who enjoy visual novels or point-and-click adventures but want a short complete game to play in an afternoon's time, Danielle's Inferno fills that void.

I would also add that I don't think Danielle's Inferno is appropriate for children. Even though it's mostly text, there are sexual themes and violence. And Hitler.  It's rated age 13+, but parents should play through first and decide.

For teachers who may be interested in using Story Stylus in classrooms to teach Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, check out One More Story Games' pilot program. Games in Ye Olde Classroom.

[Disclaimer:  I received a download code for the game from the developer as a gift. I was not obligated to provide a review. The above is my unbiased opinion. I may have future affiliation with the developers since I am evaluating the platform for my own game development purposes and may be listed on the site as a storyteller.]

Sande Chen is a writer and game designer whose work has spanned 10 years in the industry. Her credits include 1999 IGF winner Terminus, 2007 PC RPG of the Year The Witcher, and Wizard 101. She is one of the founding members of the IGDA Game Design SIG.

How Games Can Elicit Emotional Stakes

In this article, writer Joshua Castleman addresses how game designers can reduce ludonarrative dissonance in linear action games to produce gameplay tied to emotional investment.

I recently read a post written by Sande Chen that discusses how the nature of videogame playing undermines the emotional stakes in linear storytelling. Referring mainly to AAA linear narratives found in 8-12 hour campaigns, she outlined some of the difficult challenges facing game designers and writers to compel the player to feel more emotionally attached to the character in the game than to their own experience as the player. Of course we as players want to achieve victory but designers and writers strive to deliver the emotional impact often found in Hollywood blockbusters.

Sande raised many excellent points that got me thinking about the problem myself. A large part of the issue is the linear railroading of a story, more specifically a game’s inability to allow failure. When a player fails and restarts at their last checkpoint, suddenly there is a disconnect where the protagonist character in the game is fine, as if nothing ever happened, but the player has taken a hit and suffered a setback. In a difficult part of the game, where the player has to try numerous times to get through a zone but story-wise the hero is essentially unscathed, there’s a dissonance between the player’s experience and the character’s experience, not to mention the player is going to care more about his/her own experience as the frustration builds than the player cares about the experience of the character.

One game that I thought worked somewhat was the first Tomb Raider reboot. Some of the death scene animations were so gnarly and gruesome that I wanted to do well and avoid those because I felt so bad seeing Lara writhe in pain as a river impales her on a metal pole! Even though I as the player then started over at the last checkpoint and Lara is safely in one piece, the memory of her violent death was still fresh in my mind.

At this point, it is easy to simply say, “Make a game that allows for failure.” But this presents the age-old problem of making a branching game that can turn a different direction for failure, which is suddenly no longer a linear story and also two to three times more expensive to make. As a writer myself, I understand the strong allure of a linear story that I can control as the creator. It allows for more specific nuance and depth in the story. Maybe the real challenge is finding a way to tell a linear story that can also accept failure in some way without resetting. I’m sure there are some elegant solutions out there, both mechanically and story-wise, that have yet to be discovered.

Another partial solution, or at least a step in the right direction, is creating strong characters. Especially a dynamic villain. I have noticed that a truly despicable villain helps a player invest emotionally in the story. Games like Far Cry 4, Bioshock Infinite, and Borderlands 2 (to name a few) have great antagonists, which helped me empathize with the heroes more. Even if there were times where I was jostled from the character’s POV emotionally, I still shared their emotional drive to defeat the vile bad guy. Fleshing out the villain’s character can present its own challenges. Villain scenes work best when they’re from the POV of the hero so the player shares the experience with the hero character. Be careful to not give the player insight into the villain or conflict that the protagonist does not have, or suddenly there is another disconnect.

A challenge most action games face is desensitization to violence, which can hamper any story based on violence and death. As Sande questioned, how can a player feel any emotional pull during a cut scene of someone’s death when the player just spent hours ending hundreds of other lives? Certainly something to consider when creating a story amidst a sea of blood, but I would again point to the creation of strong characters. Just like in war movies or books where there is death around every corner, it is critical to create those characters that players care about, and give them clear-cut goals they want and challenging conflicts in their way. There are characters that, even if they are soaked in blood, you don’t want them to die. (You Game of Thrones fans know what I’m talking about.)

What no one has tried yet (that I know of) is a complete paradigm shift. The way games are made is still heavily influenced by the history of video games. The player is faced with a challenge and they must overcome it or fail and try again. As the industry matured, designers put more story into the game, fleshing out fully-imagined world and characters, with an eye to Hollywood cinematic cut scenes and structure. But they still shoehorn the story into the same game mentality of trial and error. It’s like if in the middle of a showdown fight scene in a movie, someone stopped it and skipped back to the beginning of the chapter. We’ve all had that experience when someone accidentally sits on the remote. It jars you and the fight scene loses so much of its power and momentum.

Game designers are often focused on creating the ultimate challenge above creating an amazing story. The way most game designers define a good gaming experience is much different than the way a Hollywood director would define a good experience.

But what if they designed a game without the ability to restart at a checkpoint or die at all? What if fight scenes were built in a way that the player could take a beating, maybe lose some gear or status or something but never actually die? I know many gamers are rolling their eyes at the idea because many of us are so programmed that that is how games work. I have a confession: I’m one of those gamers that plays story-centric games on normal difficulty. I sacrifice the challenge aspect to preserve the flow of the story and the oh-so-fragile emotional empathy. Unfortunately, games are not built to reward that style of play, so yes, I run into times feeling where the game is too easy (though sometimes I get crazy and bump the difficulty up for awhile until I feel a miniboss fight coming). The trade-off is worth it to me to engage the story more than the challenge and triumph element.

Games will only ever reach a certain level of emotional investment with the current model. Maybe it just needs a small shift to, say, a story with a hero that reincarnates from set points in his life so that the ‘restarting after death’ plays into the story. The hero can even have little meta-esque quips about having to experience the same crap all over again. Or maybe it it will take a completely new approach, a full dedication to story over challenge.

All I do know is that Sande is correct. There is a strong disconnect between players wanting to beat the final boss for the sake of the protagonist and the story, or for their own mastery of the controls over the cleverness of the programmed obstacle. The points I mentioned in the beginning are ways to help align those two goals better, but they will be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to fully overlap as long as game makers continue to think of story as merely a way to get players to move from Challenge A to Challenge B. No, not everyone needs to change. But I wouldn’t mind seeing someone try it out.

Original Article: http://gamedesignaspect.blogspot.com/2016/10/how-games-undermineemotional-stakes.html 

Joshua Castleman is a sci-fi/fantasy writer, voracious reader, and gamer. He is currently working on a D&D-inspired deck-building adventure game with Vigilant Addiction Studios.

Learning to love the narrative puzzle

In this article, Professor Clara Fernández-Vara argues that narrative puzzles don't need to be convoluted, but rather, they require a more conscientious and responsible game design strategy.

One of the recurring questions in narrative design is how necessary puzzles are, since they seem to be the staple of adventure games since their inception. There are plenty of examples of how adventure games may not need puzzles. Game makers such as Telltale Games or Choice of Games have explored how to engage players through choice design, while indie darlings such as Dear Esther, Gone Home, The Stanley Parable or Kentucky Route Zero show how exploration can also become satisfying gameplay. Some advocate leaving puzzles behind and focusing on problem solving.

Thing is, solving puzzles is problem solving. Puzzles get a bad rap because of years of players facing puzzles that only make sense to their designers, and the infinite patience of players who kept trying random things until they bumped into the hyper-contrived solution. Examples of bad puzzles are legion while, when a good puzzle is good, it is often seamless because it makes sense, so most players do not notice there ever was one. See for example how game critic John Walker mentions how the puzzles are perfunctory in Act 1 of Broken Age, pointing out that he may have expected something more complex but that the puzzles are there to help the narrative. Half of his review of Act 2, however, is a tirade against the tediousness of the convoluted puzzles.

We don't need to banish puzzles from our games. They can help us learn more about our world, set up character, and get the player to be in a specific place when we need it. What we need is conscientious and responsible puzzle design, understanding the range of what works and what doesn't.

Puzzles are problems that require a solution (hence invoking "problem solving" as an alternative may not be that useful), and most of the time there's only one valid solution. The issue with narrative puzzles is that they often have only one way to get to that solution, even if the player can think of multiple ways to tackle the challenge. In game design terms, we designers can follow three strategies:

• Offering players more than one way to solve the puzzle: since puzzles in general have more than one way to achieve the solution - there are different strategies to solve mathematical and logic puzzles, jigsaws or crosswords. So why don't we try to provide more than one way to get to the solution? Games like Deus Ex or more recently Dishonored are famous for taking this design approach. Thing is, the challenges that the player faces tend to be physical problems; challenges that involve human behavior and psychology, for example, are out of the question. Puzzles that are more grounded in the narrative that have multiple paths are still a challenge. A glorious example of how multiple paths can backfire is Zack McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders, the one LucasArts game nobody remembers because it does offer several ways to complete it, but it does not tell the player that if you solve a puzzle a certain way, other paths will be locked out.

• Setting up the puzzle so that solving it seems an adequate challenge: the key to satisfying puzzles is that the player achieves insight at the moment of solving them. Some puzzles feel invisible because their solution feels natural to the player; there is a problem but the solution seems logical. This was the case with most of the puzzles of Act 1 of Broken Age, for example. There is set of questions that will help us set up each puzzle: 
•  How can the player tell there is a puzzle that they need to tackle? 
•  What information does the player need to solve the puzzle? 
•  If it's not information that relates to everyday life (such as opening a door, or doing an economic transaction), where in the world is that information? 
•  Is the information available in one place or several? How close is it to the puzzle itself? Can the player revisit the information? The more pieces of information the player needs, and the further they may be from the puzzle (whether it is in terms of space or time), the more difficult the puzzle is. 
• How can the player tell that they have found the wrong solution to the problem? Does the player get more information to solve it?  
• How can the player tell they have solved the puzzle?  
• What does solving the puzzle mean in the game? Does the player learn about the world / story? Does the player obtain something out of solving the puzzle? (I've talked about this topic before at length; you can watch one of my presentations here.

• Design an esoteric puzzle for hardcore puzzle solvers: there are games that are geared towards hardcore players who want their puzzles to be extremely challenging. If you use the checklist above, it turns out that hardcore puzzles are missing one of these elements, from letting the player know that there is a puzzle, to requiring esoteric knowledge to solve it, for example. The line between a badly designed puzzle and a hardcore one is very thin; the definition depends on the audience. The rule of thumb is that the logic of the puzzle must still be there. You still get insight if you check the solution. That's why omitting elements can be okay, because it's up to the player to fill the gaps. When the puzzle feels random, unjustified, or the challenge consists of reading the designer's mind, then the puzzle falls apart. Examples of games with difficult narrative puzzles are The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Maniac Mansion or, more recently, Device 6. The puzzles in Broken Age Act 2 aim at being hardcore (perhaps because some players thought the puzzles in Act 1 were too easy), but often the logic seems absent: at one point, I had to go to a location in order to trigger a cut scene that allowed me to obtain an object, which is the kind of random access to information that infuriates players.

There may be other design options that technology may facilitate in the future. For example in the games Symon and Stranded in Singapore, we used procedural generation, so that whenever you started a game the puzzles would be different. Our method of generating the puzzles was not particularly complicated, so there was still one single way to solve each puzzle; perhaps in the future we can have AI that can create and check multiple paths. What worked in the design of Symon (a bit less so in Stranded) was that the game design focused on creating a system of relations between objects, rather than just specific puzzles. Players could not look up a walkthrough that gave details on each puzzle. Instead, they had to figure out the relationships between objects according to specific qualities, thus showing the potential to understand the world as a whole, rather than puzzle to puzzle. What I want to highlight here is not that future technology will solve our design problems - although it will probably help - but we that we need to change our paradigms and the way that we design narrative games. We need to shake off our nostalgia a bit and start pushing for new design patters - a sentiment that I'm not alone in sharing.

Puzzles in narrative games are just a part of the design lexicon, and we need to expand the vocabulary of narrative in games. The possibilities of choice and exploration are now gaining popularity - although they have been around for a while - and the future of narrative in games looks bright. But let us not completely dismiss narrative puzzles yet. We should banish badly set up puzzles with unsatisfying convolutedness that do not help the narrative. The solution is realizing puzzles also require game design.

Clara Fernández-Vara is a game scholar, designer and writer, and she is an Associate Arts Professor at the NYU Game Center. Her area of expertise is narrative in games and how it can integrate with game design, which she has explored both in games for research and in the commercial sphere. Her first book, Introduction to Game Analysis has been published by Routledge.

IGDA Webinar: Interactive Fiction - An AI Based Overview

In this video, writer Emily Short reviews different ways to provide player choice in interactive fiction and how AI can be part of this process.

Interchangeable He and She

In this article, game writer Sande Chen explores the role of gender or lack of gender in branching narrative.

After all the protest about the amount of work to animate female characters, it appears that female characters, like Assassin's Creed III: Liberation 's Aveline de Grandpré, can use animations created for male characters.  As Aja Romano points out, this works out especially if animators decide not to oversexualize the movements of female characters.  It's also a production issue, since interchangeable male/female animations would have to be the plan from the beginning.  Interchangeable animations, along with a couple of gender-specific ones, would save both time and money so that there could be male and female playable characters in the game.

  These animations weren't so interchangeable...

But say, it's not the beginning, what I might call the pre-production phase, but at the beginning of crunch time hell, or even worse, at the end or after the game is released?  Then, sure, a development team may find it hard to provide a fix.

All of this reminds me of a thorny problem a video game company presented to the game writers Facebook group.  This video game company created romance games (in text) and after a game was released, customers asked why there wasn't a gay romance option a la Dragon Age 2.The company wondered if a solution could be found by simply replacing all of the love interest's pronouns by the opposite gender. 

Would that work?

I have played a Choose Your Own Adventure (CYOA) game that did something similar and I truly felt cheated because my choice of gender was as meaningless as the selection of eye color in the game.  OK, the story was supposedly set in an enlightened (yet vaguely RenFaire) society in which men and women were treated equally and men had even achieved pregnancy, but I still felt cheated.  I can see that this might work in a different game, but not one that was all about relationships.  And a romance game is all about relationships.

I understood that the author had very cleverly done this to avoid writing whole sets of branching narrative.  Yet, I couldn't help but feel that the whole fun of choosing a female or male character in a romance game had been taken away from me.  If I had a female character, what would happen here?  How would people react differently?  Might I be able to succeed as a female character but not as a male character?  I feel that even if writers do create enlightened societies, we are still viewing their world from the present.

In our flawed and unenlightened world, females don't always act and talk like males and hence, the need for female-specific animations and dialog.  Female relationships are different from male relationships.  I believe that the experience of growing up as a female is special and worth exploring.  When this informed background isn't there, then the relationship feels hollow.  To me, all the romances, including the gay ones, in this CYOA game were somewhat shallow.

In the end, the video game company with the problem decided that a quick switch of pronouns would not be respectful to the gay community.  Gender would not be a meaningless string variable. 

Sande Chen is a writer and game designer whose work has spanned 10 years in the industry. Her credits include 1999 IGF winner Terminus, 2007 PC RPG of the Year The Witcher, and Wizard 101. She is one of the founding members of the IGDA Game Design SIG.

Narrative Analysis of Way of the Samurai 3

In this video, game researcher Arthur Protasio describes how "narrative reincarnation" in Way of the Samurai 3 represents a series of branching narrative paths.

For an in depth analysis of the game’s narrative structure, click here.

Arthur Protasio is a writer, narrative designer, and game researcher. He runs the Rio de Janeiro IGDA chapter and believes in the equal importance of studying, criticizing, and developing games as means to understanding them as a medium of expression. His essays and games have been internationally praised and you can find him online at LudoBardo, his web series focused on game narratives.

True Intelligence: Player-Led Narrative Design

In this article, writer and indie games developer C.Y. Reid describes a recent experiment with player-led branching narrative on Twitter and invites you all to explore the richness of impromptu branching narrative.

When considering how to lay out a branching narrative structure, it can sometimes become difficult to choose just how many parallel universes one wants to appear in the finished, playable world. However, one of the easiest ways to circumvent this, and indeed to establish which areas of each scene are the most interesting points of focus, is to allow players themselves to branch your narrative for you.

Last week, I tweeted the following:

“You are in a dark room. There are two doors. One is red, and one is blue. Which door will you open?”

I had almost ten responses within a minute or so. Out of those, five led the story through to its conclusion, but what was interesting was the variety of responses. One chose blue, one red, one turned the lights on, one opened an orange door, and so on. I responded to each by giving them a new room, a new set of objects to explore and people to talk to.

As the tweets continued, I began to interweave their stories. One player was trapped in a large iron room, and another had the key to a safe. Eventually, player two’s curiosity was peaked and they opened the safe revealing player one. Allowing their stories to mesh caused them to worry. Many of the players did not follow each other, and as a result, they were usually completely ignorant of the coming interweaving of their respective narratives.

It was exciting, both for me as a writer and for them as players. In giving them complete freedom of choice and acting as dungeon master for what became an interactive text adventure. Their story ended and all of them were happy, sated. “That was awesome,” said one, not long after they had been cast as a murderer and had the other four players turned against them. It was exciting to watch: Would they judge them, or would they check each other’s timelines and discover my manipulation of them into interesitng situations?

What I did afterwards was ran all their tweets through Storify, and I’ll soon be inputting their choices and the resultant scenarios I gave them into Twine, a text adventure engine available for Windows, Mac and Linux. Its visually straightforward flowchart and Wikipedia simple code allow even the most inexperienced game designer to output deep, complex adventures full of branching narratives, each easy to follow.

In a sense, I cheated the Twine writing process. Rather than coming up with which areas of the story to offer to the player as new roads to walk down, I gave players the option to point out which areas of each created scene they wanted to explore. It’s a lot faster than endlessly putting yourself in their shoes, and you’ll find it’s no different to level design.  You’ll only truly learn what innocent minds will want to see in your created universes once you watch them explore. Your omniscient knowledge of your own built narratives are the fatal flaw in learning where to take people next, if you’re aiming to reward someone’s curiosity.

Branching narratives are intricate, fickle things that can sometimes be the genesis of many a headache. At the same time, they’re also exciting ways to explore the mind of the player. So give it a shot, jump onto Twitter, throw out a starting scene and see where your followers take you. Perhaps follow your own path first and see how theirs diverges from yours. Don’t forget to invite me into the tale @failnaut - I wouldn’t mind doing a little less storycrafting on a social media platform, this time around.  

C.Y. Reid is a writer and indie games developer living and working in London. He has written games journalism for IGN UK and The Escapist, and has made games such as Hug Marine and Grindstar. You can find him at @failnaut or at failnaut.com.

May 2013: Branching Narrative

I recently spoke at the Writers Guild of America, East on a panel about Writing for Videogames.  And there it was, again:  the topic of branching narrative.  It struck me that this is what people think game writers do, once you make it clear that you don't actually program the game.  A PBS exec once said to me, "How in the earth do you do it?  I can't even imagine how that would be like."

Personally, I feel Branching Narrative can be a nightmare.  I was working on an ambitious game with branching narrative.  In the process of development, the game got whittled down and key portions were cut.  I remember re-writing the entire game 3 times.  If anything, I want to avoid branching narrative or at least limit it so that it doesn't become unwieldy.

Moreover, some games are actually linear stories, with the interactivity solely in the gameplay.  And some branching narrative aren't even what I would call games but interactive fiction.  Browsing through a couple Twine stories, I noticed the interactivity amounted to a Click to Proceed button since there was only one choice given to the reader (other than to quit reading the story).  Even when the interactivity is confined to small mini games interspersed in the story, I still feel unfulfilled when the gameplay is limited and doesn't advance the story.  It's like reading a chapter of the book, then playing a game of Peggle, then reading the book again.

What are your thoughts on branching narrative and meaningful game choices?  There are certainly games that focus directly on this.  How do you do this well?

I invite readers to submit an article on this topic.  Please read the submission guidelines first.  Thanks!