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Original post by superpig
Check your granularity. Sure, if you look at the storyline from far enough away, it's going to be a line between start and end. But if you truncate that line halfway, then you may see multiple 'endings.'
I see what you are saying here, I think. Indeed you will have multiple endings, and each of them may have different levels of satisfaction and closure for the player whose expectation of outcome was set up by the beginning you specified. But structurally, as a story, you are technically talking here about not one story with multiple endings, but several stories with individual and unique endings, each of which shares many similar elements with the stories in parallel to it, but is not the same story because it ends differently. This would also be the case if you were truncating and looking at multiple beginnings and one single ending.
Having identified that we now have multiple stories within one gameworld (even though the same character and many of the same elements in scene in action in antagonism are involved), in order to find out which methods of telling story data will be a function of a plot analysis of
each plot.
Likely, the exposition method may remain the same for each plot analysis in the majority, but will change for the differences between plots.
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Well, you don't *have* to get back to the same point of progress. A properly branching storyline could, in theory, have the player make a choice in the first 5 minutes of the game which puts them into a completely seperate storyline tree, with seperate endings from the rest of the game.
Then, you could identify all similar elements of the multiple plotlines, and eliminate any changes to the exposition tools you've devised that work already, and reduce the amount of work you have to do devising new exposition choices for the differing plot's sequences that arose as a result of the player's choice that changed to a new plot.
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But where the hell did linearity come into this?
Well, each plot that is uniquely developed as a result of a player's choice in the game creates a new progress path for the plot, and since satisfaction with media in general is primarily dependent on closure in the mind of the observer (or interactor), no matter which plot is implemented by the choice. Unless the player thinks that fun is going back where they came from all the time back to the beginning is fun, no matter which plot you switch to, it's going to come to a conclusion. So no matter what ending of what beginning, a relatively sane person (as opposed to the psychotic fragmented personality that interprets the fun in gameplay as going back to the beginning everytime you make a little advancing movement) is going to get to the end of any chosen plot. That's linearity, isn't it?
Now, some sick, perverted, twisted, cruel, henious, evil and generally slacking game designer could theoretically design a game where every advancing movement compelled you to go back to the beginning, over and over, but then, you'd probably have a wildly selling title, and people would say they thought only George Lucas could make money telling stories backwards.
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What I'm asking about is more.. how to stage the story.
To me, having worked with directors in theatre and film, but not having actually done any directing myself except for a few music videos of a very small scale, I can only offer one perspective of opinion. As a writer, that is a function of the motif. Theme always guides presentation. Stand back far enough from each plot, and you are going to say, "oh, this is about this. The best way to stage that is from this array of choices of POV on this theme." You can stage a greek tragedy of the Gods Olympus on a very small stage if the scale of the clouds and Mt. Olympus is right.
Sounds to me like some perusing of Production Design textbooks and some Script Breakdown books would be useful to your choice criteria, and I also would say you could rely on some rather classic and specific techniques to represent where to bring in story via staging, but every director knows that no matter what they choose, they have to put their thumbprint on it, and that is a function of deep and intimate familiarity with the story.
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But I'm thinking, there's got to be more than those four techniques.
There is. These types of staging techniques are found in Production Design and Directing for the Stage and Story into Production Values breakdown texts. Go get some, and I bet your answer is there.
The thing is, superpig, it's your game, and it's perfectly within the perview of any creator in any medium to build the tools that satisfies them artistically, because at the back of your mind all the time, whether you know it or not, you are constantly thinking about your player, just as when I am working on a script of novel, I am thinking about the audience. After a certain point in knowing the rules of staging, you can break them. Ibsen did it all the time, and now we have a hard time not appearing like him because what he did was so amazingly revolutionary. The chances are very high that if something you create really jazzes you, it will do so also for your player. You have to expose it to a criticism process of constructive feedback after the fact to make sure you weren't just mentally mastubating, whick I find a lot in the writing and film game, but another set of eyes (actually lots of them) will really, really help you find what does and does not work with any expositionary element, whether interaction, graphical, audial, dialogue or textual.
Since the process of creating visually and dramatically is so organic to me, and I have been educated as well in it, I can't really say anymore, this is the list of abcdefghijk things you can do. I could if I were going to write an article on it, but like you, I am a doer and not a teacher. What I do know is that when I make a choice from the array of tools that I've learned, I can say, "nah, that doesn't work, I need to do something else, or, that works for me, I dig it." Even then, I still go and get another opinion, so I couldn't help you more unless I was looking at the story in front of me.
[edited by - adventuredesign on July 7, 2003 11:52:51 PM]