10 by 10 room

From Zak Arntson, both an rpg author and video game developer, comes this fantastic essay: Story Now in Game Design.

At its simplest, Story Now in a video game would be the following:

1. Present an emotionally compelling situation which allows for a response.
2. Accomodate different responses.
3. Allow these responses to have different effects on ensuing gameplay.

This is really a fantastic article, and it’s worth reading the whole thing if you have interest in game design in any field, digital or acoustic. There’s even detail about how to make the algorithms work to implement “Story Now” concepts into video games.

“The game world [of World of Warcraft] benefits from the ambiguity. What it lacks, unfortunately, is a way for players to make meaningful moral choices.” — Lydia Leong’s comment on Terra Nova, “The Horde is Evil”.

While I think that the Horde is not accurately “evil” (not moreso than the Alliance), there’s still a good point about the moral consequences of simply playing “evil” acts without taking some responsibility for what’s going on. There can be a mature gaming allowing for depiction of “evil” choices, but only within a framework that allows players to adequately separate themselves from what’s going on, and also be reflective about what’s happening. In other words, you need to play the rise of Darth Vader as the fall of a flawed hero into moral wrong, and not as a fun opportunity for griefing Alderaan.

‘So summing up “a scene, plus some conflict” as “bickety-bam, narrativism” seems to me like summing up “you have a plant, it grows” as “bickety-bam, salad.”’ —the arguably vegetarian Ben Lehman on Clinton’s story thread.

“A story is a linked series of events which contains one or more conflicts.” – Clinton R. Nixon on “the most important post ever on my weblog”.

We almost have a sensible, non-objectionable answer to the question What Is A Story?, at least relative to the kinds of stories we want from of our games.