Story Design for Games as Experience/Emotional Design

Story Design for Games as Experience Design: How to make your games more meaningful and memorable Aki Järvinen Game Development, ITU Spring 2009

Contents
Techniques to design meaning into play
Stories
Goal structures
Characters
Metaphors
Examples & points of reference
How to translate these concepts into ‘Unreal’ terms?
Notes about your concepts’ story potentials

Meaning
Even if your game does not have something we could call a ‘story’, it will produce meaning
Games as systems ; as dynamic wholes with interacting parts – how is meaning generated?
Hermeneutic circle : one's understanding of the whole is established by reference to the individual parts, and one's understanding of each individual part by reference to the whole.
Thus, gameplay-related processes of understanding are fundamentally hermeneutical

Meaningful Play
"Meaningful play in a game emerges from the relationship between player action and system outcome; it is the process by which a player takes action within the designed system of a game and the system responds to the action. The meaning of an action in a game resides in the relationship between action and outcome.”
Salen & Zimmerman, Rules of Play

Elements of meaning in games
Analysis part: Unraveling hermeneutical circles; identifying their parts
Design part: Raveling them back together, with new combinations and realizations of parts
Using stories/gameplay to create the combinations, and deepen them

Story as Information
An aspect of game design is how to distribute information, e.g. about goals.
Structuring that information into a story is one way to do it.
There are other ways...

Information about goals

Story as embedded goal structure
Stories’ motivational function:
Propelling the player from one goal to the next
Rewarding the player with more information
Rewarding the player with narrative twists
Player’s progression in the formal goal structure of a game might be in contradiction with the diegetic progression of the character in the story:
An achievement for the player ( e.g. advancing to a location ) might be a setback for the character ( once location is reached, story throws character into jail ); rewards are asymmetrical

Story as ‘Texture’

Characters = Agents in a World

Emotional Game Design
Emotional game play experiences matter, since emotionally salient material is remembered better than neutral material.
Emotion creates memorable meaning
Emotional game design as a means to amplify meanings; to pepper the meaningful elements with emotions
‘ emotions depend on evaluations of what has happened in relation to the person’s goals and beliefs’
‘ emotions emerge at significant junctures in plans’
- Keith Oatley, Best Laid Schemes
-> consequences for design of player choices & conflicts

Events, Agents & Objects in a World
‘ emotions are valenced reactions to events, agents, or objects in a world’
- Ortony, Collins & Clore: The Cognitive Structure of Emotions
Designing emotional responses to gameplay is about building worlds with particular events, agents, and objects
… and designing the player’s relation to, and means to act in that world
Fable 2 : moral choices as emotional dispositions designed into each choice

Hemingway’s six word story
For sale: Baby shoes, never worn.
‘ For sale’: an action (prospect of a game mechanic)
‘ Baby shoes’: an object
‘ Never worn’: an event (/an attribute of shoes)
The emotional impact is in the implicit relations of these three; in an implied event: a gap
How does one (game) design such gaps?

Metaphors
‘ understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another’ – Lakoff & Johnson
metaphors support the experience of rules as game play
Examples:
“ Game as real estate business”
“ Game as war”
“ Game as geometry”
Metaphors help in communicating emotions

Metaphorical objects

Reading: Lens #69
The Lens of Weirdest Thing

Examples
...of appropriate scope:
Gravity Bone, made with Quake 2 engine
Ambiguous meanings can be puzzling in a positive way; they diversify player experiences and create discussions

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Story Design for Games as Experience/Emotional Design

by Aki Järvinen on Feb 27, 2009

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Story Design for Games as Experience/Emotional Design — Presentation Transcript