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How classical stories move
There are a couple of very good reasons for game developers to know about classical story structure:
* It’s simple.
* It works.What I’m going to tell you is not something that will confine your creativity. On the contrary, if you keep this basic structure in your back pocket, it will save you loads of trouble throughout your creative process. And this is not merely a theory from Aristotle. This has been put into practice by story tellers of all kinds for thousands of years. You could say it has been thoroughly tested.
* First, there’s a protagonist, a hero.
* His or her world is thrown out of order by an inciting incident. (Look at the sabotaged dope deal in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City for a good example of this.)
* A gap opens up between the hero and an orderly life.
* The hero tries the normal, conservative action to overcome the gap. It fails. The world pushes back too hard.
* The hero then has to take a risk to overcome the obstacles that are pushing back.
* Then there is a reversal. Something new happens, or the hero learns something she didn’t know before, and the world is out of whack again. A second gap has opened up.
* The hero has to take a greater risk to overcome the second gap.
* After overcoming the second gap, there is another reversal, opening a third gap.
* The hero has to take the greatest risk of all to overcome this gap and get to that object of desire, which is usually an orderly life.http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20050727/sutherland_01.shtml
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Now, the notion that story doesn’t matter is worst with the industry old-timers. [/quote:2e6193aed3]
1) Some games are story driven, and need strong stories (Zelda, Final Fantasy)
2) Some games are not at all story driven, and thus don’t need stories. (UT, CS, Chess)
3) Many games fall between 1&2.Time and again I see articles/posts denying the validity of games that fall ‘too much’ into either 1 or 2.
If a game is in category 2, story really doesn’t matter.
Noone cares _why_ the White Queen wants to kill the Black King.
Why do people from one camp so often attack the legitimacy of the other? Are they scared? Perhaps it’s like the White Queen. -
She Obviously has a thing against men who wear hats with little crosses sticking out of the top thus causing this perpetual hat war that has been played out on table tops for years.
Of course the irony is she hasn’t noticed her own king in exactly the same attire. Hows that for a back story to chess
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Of course the irony is she hasn’t noticed her own king in exactly the same attire. Hows that for a back story to chess[/quote:b276ebb4dd]
:lol: :lol:
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Of course the irony is she hasn’t noticed her own king in exactly the same attire. Hows that for a back story to chess[/quote:455a49a94d]
It’s terrible!
You don’t even follow the principles mentioned in the article!My god man, you practically prove the article’s case in one go…
There’s no mention of the queens normal life.
Her status quo is an eternal state of conflict.You’ve gone and given a prototypical example of bad game back story, up there with ‘a badguy called quake attacks your world’.
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ok, give me some time. Its a work in progress, i am trying to tie in an affair with the black bishop and a side story with the white knight and a pawn.
and of course you could follow the path of another pawn as he questions why he is fighting the other pawns while attempting to overcome his inability to go backwards
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Supposedly, one pawn actually went backwards but there has been a whole big cover up, and it can neither be confirmed nor denied! :)
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