This can sometimes make this technique unpopular with the cost accountants, who see
the creation of such assets as wasted money. What they fail to see is that if the branch-
ing story line is implemented properly, the gameplay payoff will be tremendous,
thereby making the game more popular and profitable.
Another technique that can be used to inject some non-linearity into the game’s
story is to allow players to determine the order in which different story components
occur. Suppose there are three sections of the story you need to tell. Perhaps the order
in which players experience those components is not so important. With a little extra
work, you may be able to give players the choice of which section to do first, which to do
second, and which to do last. If one thinks of this in terms of the “chapters” of a game’s
story, often designers find that, though the first and final chapters of the narrative must
happen at the beginning and end of the game respectively, the other chapters in the
game can happen in any order. Of course, issues with the difficulty of the sections may
arise, since ideally designers want the difficulty of their games to ramp up continuously.
This, however, is more of a game design question, and one that clever designers will be
able to solve. It also presents problems with the story itself, where the writer must
keep those plots discrete so that they can be experienced in any order and still make
sense. This may have the negative side effect that you cannot have each of these inter-
changeable story chapters build on each other in the same way as you could in a
completely linear story. Often this is not a problem, however, and the advantage of hav-
ing players craft their own experience outweighs the drawbacks.
Of course non-linear storytelling in games goes hand in hand with non-linear
gameplay; one can hardly imagine one without the other. Non-linearity is explored
more in Chapter 7, “The Elements of Gameplay.”
Working with the Gameplay.......................
One of the most important parts of creating a story for a computer game is to match the
story with the gameplay as much as possible. Earlier, in Chapter 3, “Brainstorming a
Game Idea,” I discussed how a game’s development might start with technology,
gameplay, or story/setting. If you are starting your game development process with
gameplay or with technology, these are going to directly dictate which kind of story you
can tell. If you try to fight the gameplay or technology with a story that is not suitable,
you are going to be left with a poorly told story in a poorly executed game. There are
infinitely many stories to be told, and infinitely many ways to tell a given story. Your job
as game designer is to find a story and a telling of that story that will work with the
game design and technology that you will be using. It is reasonable to alter the
gameplay somewhat in order to support the story you are trying to tell. There should be
a fair give and take between the two, but in the end you will need to remember that it is
a game that you are developing and that gameplay must almost always take precedence.
For me, stories seem to naturally fall out of gameplay. I seldom think of a story
independently and try to fit it into some gameplay. Instead, I see the constraints of the
world with which I will be working, and start thinking of the most interesting content
possible for that space. I do not see these constraints as a limitation on my ability to tell
a story, but more as guidelines or even sources of inspiration. For example, inDamage
Incorporated, long before the game had a story there was a technology and a game
design in mind. From the game design, which centered around players controlling
224 Chapter 11: Storytelling