Saturday 22 August 2015

Conflict of narrative and mechanics

I believe Games are different then other forms of media in that the player is a part of the full product and they would incomplete without them. Other mediums like movies and books only need to focus on 1 area which is the story whereas games have to focus on 2 areas, narrative and mechanics to allow for the player and can lead to conflict between each other.

Story based mediums like movies and books always (with a few exceptions) have linear stories so when games decided to get involved with stories that were more complex then "I lost X so I need to do Y to get it back" games decided to borrow these kinds of stories.

The conflict

The problem with linear stories or multiple choice stories is they can have direct conflict with challenge or game play.
An example of challenge interfering with story is when the player is playing a game with an interesting story and suddenly has to do a tough challenge to continue which stops the player experiencing the story. This can force the player to grind through game play just to experience the story and start hating it.

Solutions

There are multiple solutions to solve the problems that occur from stories. Here are a few that I have seen:

Minimise challenge

Minimising challenge allows the player to not get stuck doing something they don't want to do just to progress and allows them to just experience the narrative. This has been done with some walking simulators like Gone Home and interactive dialogue select games like Telltales The Walking Dead and Life is Strange. The problem with this solution is that minimising challenge requires the game to minimise mechanics or to not push the mechanics to their full potential making this hard for some game genres to do without hindering the experience.

Player creates the story

Getting the player to create their own story from the mechanics of the game allows for an almost endless amount of different narrative experiences. This can be seen in the Sims and Animal Crossing. The problem with this solution is that it requires challenges that you can complete as you do other things and not challenges that get the player stuck where they can't experience the narrative mechanics of the game. 

Mechanics are the story

Making mechanics the story involves the interaction of mechanics being a metaphor for a system or experience and allows for mechanics and challenge to be embraced as a part of the story. The problem with this solution is that it can be incredibility hard to design larger games because the more content you add these games the harder it is to keep the metaphor stable and can break the story.

Final thoughts

To me games will always have problems with stories because traditional stories are cheaper to make and there is a lot more experience making them in the industry. But I believe some games don't need to have conflict with narrative and mechanics. 
And if you want to make a game based around challenge and want to avoid conflict with narrative and mechanics you can always settle for the old goal oriented stories.




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