teammates in an FPS environment, sprung the idea for the different teammates that
would accompany players, and how each one of them would have a distinct personality.
What sort of men would be in the Marine Corps of the 1990s? How would they react to a
combat situation? What would their reaction be when they saw their commander
killed? These were the questions that ended up driving the development of the game’s
story. And these questions arose directly out of the limitations imposed by the game
design.
Similarly, inThe Sufferingwe wanted to keep the player as immersed in the game
as possible, and therefore wanted to have a continuous game-world where the player
ran through every inch of it on foot. We also wanted a space where the player could be
reasonably constrained without it seeming contrived. Thus setting the game on a rela-
tively small island made perfect sense and acted as a natural and believable physical
limitation to where the player could go. In writing the story, I used this to my advantage,
building up the mythos of the game around its island setting, to the point where, from a
story standpoint, the game is inconceivable anywhere else. Similarly, since we were
building an action game, we knew we had to have a fairly large body count, and thus the
game’s fiction was written to support an endless supply of hideous creatures springing
forth from caves beneath the island’s surface. In the end the creatures and the island
seem to be a natural and appropriate part of the story, but originally they were decisions
that were fully dictated by the gameplay.
TheDream..................................
One could say that the goal of gameplay is to allow for different player strategies to lead
to variable types of success, to reward player experimentation and exploration, and to
empower players to make their own choices. All of these factors allow players to craft
their own unique stories when playing your game. If in addition you want to tell a more
predetermined story through your game, it is important to do everything possible to
make players feel that it is their own unique story. Players should feel ownership over
the actions in their game, and thereby ownership in the story that is being told.
Chapter 11: Storytelling 225
Damage Incorparated’s
story was created to fit
around the gameplay
and technology.