Exploring stories in games and the art of telling tales

SAM BARLOW

Narrative choice skeptic? That’s me. Yes, I love characters with inner lives, and stories with subtext, but when the game mechanic involves literally printing that stuff up on screen as text I struggle to suspend my disbelief. My instinct is to grok the mechanical consequences of the choice rather than really live the story. But choices don’t need to be about action and consequence. There’s a rich seam of choices that function essentially as personality quizzes for the player. I feel affection for those bits in Mass Effect where players eavesdrop and then pass judgement on a range of moral quandaries. I particularly like games that use this data to personalise themselves for their players. I did, in fact, make a game built around this idea. It scored 6 in this venerable publication (in the industry, this is known as an upside-down Edge 9). The biggest challenge we had there was that we gathered the player’s data throughout the game. Wouldn’t it have been more effective to have the player’s vitals right from the start?