Narrative theory and games

WRITING A GAME :: GAMING A STORY

STORY VS. GAME?

SHIRALEE SAUL :: A-WEBSITE.ORG :: 2010 : Media Cultures 1


GAME MECHANICS ARE THE
VEHICLE FOR MAKING A
GAME FUN

BUT WHAT IS
FUN?



Fun comes from learning and
mastering new experiences.
Just as any game is composed of smaller sub-games that need to be
mastered, so can any activity be broken up into sub-activities, all of
which can be made more fun.

Some of the elements of fun are

• how you complete an activity should matter,
• it should be hard enough that there’s a chance of failure,
• you should be able to get better with practice, and
• context should be provided and should matter for every action.


Compare:

Shopping on Amazon vs. shopping on eBay.

V.
On Amazon, it’s a straightforward, consistent
experience.

On eBay, you can learn tricks that make it easier to
succeed, there is risk and possibility of failure, and
there are different ways to approach the same
action.

As a result of these and other fun features, people
become much more involved in an eBay purchase
and have more fun doing it.



WHY DO PEOPLE
STOP PLAYING A
GAME?
People quit when it’s too hard to win
People quit when it’s too easy to win

WHY?
It’s all in the way that our minds work...



Humans take in vast amounts of information and
chunk it into smaller pieces
• Humans can see up to 72 frames per second
(60 is adequate)
• Humans can distinguish millions of colors
(women 30% more than men)
• Can recognize image (afterblurs) even at
1/220th of a second
• 100M neurons in the retina
• The eye processes 10 Million point images/sec
• Brain holds about 100M Megabytes
Yet, we are always taking mental shortcuts



Brain has three levels of thought:

1. Conscious thought – logical, mathematical, list-based
2. Intuitive, associative, integrative – chunking, no words
3. Autonomic nervous system – whole sets of decisions

CHARACTERISTICS OF THE HUMAN BRAIN:
• It fills in blanks.
• It notices more than we think it does.
• It cuts out the irrelevant bits.
• It actively hides reality from us.
• Most of us never actually learn to SEE what is in front of us.



INUNDATED
WITH DATA...
To fight this huge onslaught of data, we chunk and create “icons” and
patterns:
• Interface standard – Only give 3-7 options.
• Most people can only make judgments about 4 things at once.

People dislike chaos, they prefer ordered, chunkable patterns...

BUT there is a thrill of delight when you get it, and discover the pattern.

Noise is any pattern we don’t understand...

Practice is building a library of chunked skills and decisions.



OUR BRAINS
REALLY REALLY
LIKE LEARNING
NEW THINGS


Why, then, do some people not think learning is fun?

FUN ONLY
EXISTS IN
CONTEXTS WHERE
THERE ARE NO
REAL
CONSEQUENCES.



Fun is about our
brain feeling good
Brains release endorphins into our system...
Our brains are on drugs all the time

There’s a chemical release when we master a task:
Our “moment of triumph” is rewarded by the brain.
Notice someone always smiles when they “get it”
Needed for survival of the species



Boredom is the
brain looking for
new information
It happens when there are no new patterns to absorb
• When a game stops teaching us, we feel bored
• When a book is dull, it’s failing to show a captivating
pattern

Don’t underestimate the brains desire to learn
• The brain craves stimuli
• Not necessarily new experiences, just new data to make
patterns
• Experiences force new chunking (because,
paradoxically, the brain doesn’t like to do more work
that it has to... That’s why it chunks in the first place!)



Games must
navigate between
boredom and
overload
Watch out for:

Noughts & Crosses – “Too easy”
Sport stats. – “Fun but not worth my time”
Don’t see any patterns – “Too hard”
Patterns shown too slowly – “It’s too repetitive”
Patterns shown too quickly – “It got too hard too fast”
Players mastered the pattern – “I beat it”



Play, Games, Sports
• All about recognizing goals and patterns, BUT usually have
different risks and rewards.

Games are exercise for our brains
• As we learn the patterns, more novelty is needed.
• Practice can keep a game fresh, but soon we’ll “grok” it.
• Games are thus disposable, and boredom is inevitable.

Formal games are very susceptible to this
• They usually don’t have enough variables to be interesting.
• The pattern is too easily figured out.
• The more formally constructed a game is, the more limiting it
will be.
• Adding physics, psychology, multiplayer all add variables.



SO WHAT DO
PLAYERS WANT?
Players want a challenge
Players want to socialize
Players want a dynamic Solitaire experience
Players want bragging rights
Players want an emotional experience
Players want to fantasize



Players expect:
• A consistent world (one that they can “chunk and grok”)
• A world with understandable bounds
• Reasonable solutions should work
• Direction towards success… goals
• Accomplishment of tasks incrementally… subgoals
• Immersion
• to fail
• a fair chance
• not to need to repeat themselves
• never to be hopelessly stuck
• to do, not to watch



Eight Kinds of Fun. AND SO
Sensation
Game as sense-pleasure

Fantasy

WHAT IS A
Game as make-believe

Narrative
Game as unfolding story

Challenge
Game as obstacle course GAME
MECHANIC?
Fellowship
Game as social framework

Discovery
Game as uncharted territory Game mechanics are rule based
Expression
systems / simulations that facilitate
Game as soap box and encourage a user to explore and
learn the properties of their
Submission
Game as mindless pastime
possibility space through the use of
feedback mechanisms.



#1 • Player performs an action.

• The action causes an effect within the game world. The
simulation contains public and private tokens and the
causal rules that affect the states of the tokens. The
player rarely knows all the rules and is highly unlikely
to be able to instantly describe the complete possibility
space described by the rules. The unknown portion of
the simulation is a “black box” that the player must
attempt to decipher.

• The player receives feedback.

• With new tools and information in hand, the player
performs another action. Using what we’ve learned, we
pursue additional pleasure.

This model is based on posited natural human desire and
pleasure from learning.



BUT a system alone is not a game.

A dump of information is not a
game.

A system that encourages
learning through strong feedback
mechanisms and fun is a game.



#2 Simpler division between
mechanics and rules, which
breaks down into two things:

Mechanics are the actions you
can perform

Rules determine the outcome

And gameplay is derived by
balancing these two things.



Tetris
The mechanics of Tetris are
• Turn a block
• Drop a block fast
• Destroy blocks by creating a line

The rules of Tetris are
• Gravity, which accelerates in a stepped fashion
according to score
• Score, which increases in a stepped fashion
according to created lines
• Pile reformation, which determines the effects of a
destroyed line on the blocks above.
• The lose condition of whether the pieces reach the
top
• The next piece determinant, which selects what
new piece will show after the previous one has
landed.



SO WHAT IS THE POINT OF NARRATIVE IN A GAME?

The simplest and most compelling theory is narrative exists to help
the player continue playing the game. Narrative does this by
encouraging the player to have an emotional investment in the story,
by tying together a series of potentially unconnected events and
places (the ice level, the fire level), and giving perceived value to
repetitive actions.

This overarching function of narrative at any point in the game has
two immediate goals: telling the player what actions they need to do
next, and reminding the player what they have already done.

Telling the player what they need to do next can take the form of a
quest diary or journal that a player can refer to at any point.

It becomes increasingly important as the complexity of games
has increased.

The difference between traditional narrative and games is that with
games the player is not only required to read the narrative, but must
make decisions to propel it forward.


Narrative theory and games

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