Some people like to keep things simple.
How boring.
What constitutes
a story? Each element opens up possibilities for emotion.
Almost every element or component of a game's story (assuming it has one) offers an opportunity to evoke emotion. But to understand how to use story elements to brainstorm emotional game experiences, we first need to define what a “story element” is.
Not long ago I was addressing the collective faculty at a large arts college in San Francisco. The subject of discussion was, “What creates a feeling of 'story' in a two-dimensional image, even an abstract one?”
I gave my theory, explaining that more than 150 elements are commonly found in stories. Some of these elements are necessary, and many, if not most, are optional—but not uncommon. Some occur in a story just once, some several times, and some recurrently.
If you were to take a slice of a story at any of the points where these elements exist, and made an image of that cross-section, you'd have an image that implies or evokes a “story” in progress.
For instance, opposition is common in many stories. A picture that portrays two opposing people or forces—even an abstract image that conveys this feeling—will feel like it “has story” and will be emotionally engaging.
Competition is another common story element. You could have such a element in a football game, even though there's no story in the traditional sense.
Indeed, when sports announcers sum up a football game or even an Olympic ski jumping event, their summaries sound like exciting stories.
Each story element can be scrutinized to see if it can be made more emotionally engrossing or more emotionally complex. “Engrossing” and “complex” may seem to be unrelated terms, but more often than not, they're strongly tied.
Let's take a look at an example: In Star Wars—Episode IV, Luke's final struggle to shoot a missile through a small hole to blow up the Death Star seems to be both engrossing and simple. A young man in a spaceship blows up the Death Star. Not very complex, right?
But, upon closer inspection, we can see that this event isn't simple at all. Here are some of the layers of complexity that make that scene of Luke making his final run more emotional:
We identify with Luke because of various Rooting Interest Techniques. For instance, when his family is killed near the beginning, that's Undeserved Misfortune, which is a Rooting Interest Technique. We identify with the climactic Death Star scene because he's in Jeopardy (a Rooting Interest Technique), as are countless others who depend on him.
This scene completes Luke's Character Arc: From not knowing who he is at the start of Episode IV, to knowing he is a Jedi knight. In fact, he makes that shot in the end by relying on his Jedi intuition of The Force, not by using his targeting scanners.
He's able to make that shot because he's got back-up in the form of Han Solo, who is busy completing his own Character Arc. He has gone from being a loner to being willing to be part of an ethical group.
Luke is not there by himself. Not only does he have R2-D2 and Han Solo helping out, but even the disembodied Obi-Wan plays a role. So there's a statement being made about the power of a group to combat evil.
Luke uses The Force to aid in aiming his missile, while Darth Vader, on the Death Star, uses The Force for evil. And so the moment is the culmination of a story full of spiritual undertones—which is a Plot Deepening Technique—and opposing plot-lines, which is another Plot Deepening Technique.
Luke, using his Jedi powers to aim that missile, represents the rebirth of the Jedi. At the beginning of the film, the Jedi had supposedly all died out, with Darth Vader being their one relic-gone-bad. Obi-Wan had thrown in the towel and was in seclusion. With one shot, Luke revives the Jedi and revives hope.
In summary, we have numerous story-lines converging in this one scene. They belong to:
Luke
Obi-Wan
Han Solo
The Jedi
The Empire
The convergence of these factors makes Luke's final run to blow up the Death Star anything but simple.
If game designers aren't aware of how such factors work together to create emotionally gripping moments, or aren't able to create such complex and impactful emotionally layered situations, then their games will lose out on countless opportunities to be more emotionally engrossing.
Let's take a look at a few of the many possible story elements, and see how they can be used to brainstorm emotionally complex and engaging game experiences. Then we'll ask, “What can be done to make these story elements more emotionally complex?” I call this process Complexification.
To demonstrate this technique, I chose a strange assortment of story elements, picking some that occur in many stories (like “danger”) and some that would appear in a much smaller selection (like “racing”). The example story elements are:
An enemy
Danger
Racing
A mystery
Tension
Spying
Good guys/bad guys
Let's see how emotional complexity can be injected into these elements.
What if it's an espionage game, and the top enemy spy you've got to kill was a close friend of yours earlier in the game?
The illustration provides another example: Our hero fights another version of himself, who has returned from the future. His future self says his younger self has to die, for the good of humanity.
If you're playing the younger character in the game, this would be a very emotionally complex moment, especially if you believe that your future self is both sane, and sincere, and possibly accurate.
You're a soldier in World War II, and your commander is your uncle—a man who has already saved your life on two occasions. You volunteer for a dangerous mission, but he doesn't want you to go. You go anyway, but upset him in the process. You've hurt someone you care about, in order to do the right thing.
In a street racing game, what if the guy who fixes up your car—your mechanic and ad hoc pit boss—is the best in the business, but he has a disgusting personality, at least some of the time. He's only helping you build and maintain your car because you both share an enemy—the other great street racer in the city. So you feel different layers of feelings toward him (Admiration and Loathing), either at different times, or perhaps even or simultaneously. (This topic was discussed in Chapter 2.13, “Player Toward NPC Relationship Deepening Techniques.”)
Here's another example: You race a crazy street course a number of times, splitting whenever the cops show up. The game itself tracks your score. You have two friends who help keep your car in top shape with all the latest upgrades.
Your two friends are kidnapped by your rival. The kidnapper will kill them all if you don't beat your own best score by 10 percent.
In effect, you're now competing against yourself, and the lives of your crew hang on the outcome. This is an Emotionally Complex Situation (see Chapter 2.15).
It's also a Plot Deepening Technique (see Chapter 2.17), in that the plot doubles back on itself in an interesting way. That is, your own high scores now come back to haunt you in an unexpected manner. However, there won't be much feeling of depth here unless:
You care about those two friends who've been kidnapped, and
When you made that earlier high score, it was an exciting, big deal—a big deal to you, and to your (now kidnapped) friends, who helped you celebrate the triumph.
Thus, we have now have the irony that the victory they helped you celebrate may now cause their deaths. The plot has circled back on itself in an interesting (and emotional) way.
You begin a game by walking down a street in Chicago. Suddenly, with no warning, you find that you're in an office on a large, fully operational space station. And everyone seems to know you. Indeed, you look around your office and find evidence that you've spent considerable time here.
Rochelle, a young woman who's a technician on the station, quietly approaches and asks you to help her. She says she's in danger—the same danger you're in. And she's sorry for wiping out your memory. Suddenly guards are firing at her.
Do you help her or not? This tough decision is a First-Person Deepening Experience (see Chapter 2.21).
(I develop a similar plot-line to a much greater degree in Chapter 3.2, “Chasm.”)
This example is a kid's game: You defend a weird animal realm from its enemies.
You've built a large machine that spews out (funny) magic wands. Each wand performs a different function. One reverses gravity and makes your enemies fly up into space. Another one makes an enemy laugh (literally) to death. Another turns an enemy into a large carrot.
Each wand can only be used twice, so you need to keep your machine producing new ones. But 1 out of every 20 weapons is defective and blows up as soon as it's ejected from the machine, all but eliminating your health points.
You could have built a machine that created only perfect wands with no defective ones, but that would have taken much more time to assemble and would have left you vulnerable to your enemy, whom you need to fight with these wands.
As you wait by the machine, you don't know if you're about to get blown up and injured by the next weapon that emerges, which in turn would put you out of commission for a while.
The fear that you'll get a defective wand creates tension as you wait to see what comes out of the machine, but still, there's nothing emotionally complex about it. So how could we add emotional complexity?
Let's say various other life-forms have come to depend on you—turtle-bears (bears with shells); cowraffes (cows with long necks like giraffes); and rabbicats (rabbits with cat heads and paws). These animals will die if you get injured and can't protect them from your mutual enemy. Suddenly, we've added some emotional complexity to the situation.
A new game: By boat, you've hunted your enemy and pursued him to a small but thickly wooded island. On the way here, you got caught in a storm and barely survived. Your boat was damaged. There are many dangerous creatures on the island.
Now you spy on your enemy, and, oddly, he's carefully repairing the small boat you took to get here, allowing you to escape from danger. There's no trick; he's not secretly sabotaging you. Why is he helping you? Is he secretly on your side?
This makes your enemy more complex, of course, but it also takes a story element like spying and adds to it emotional complexity.
We looked at the illustration on the preceding page and its accompanying hypothetical game in Chapter 2.25, “Motivation Techniques.” You play the detective who has just discovered your police chief paying off a mobster. If anything, you had expected to find the mobster paying off someone in the police department, not vice versa.
In that chapter, we discussed this kind of mystery as something that can motivate a player to continue on through the game. Let's go further and see how we can take some of the story elements here and Complexify them.
In this example, we've Complexified not just “spying,” but also “good guys and bad guys.”
For as the game goes on, things will only get more complex regarding these two characters you're observing. You'll learn, in the following order:
That the city government had lost a fortune by purposely overpaying contractors on some city construction projects—with kickbacks going to the top government officials who hired the contractors.
Because of that corruption, now the city is broke. So the mayor and city council intend to save money by cutting the size of the police force—which would be a disaster for the citizens. Another reason they're doing this is to punish the police chief (the one you're spying on), because he was investigating the corruption in city government.
To keep the police force at its current size, the police chief has decided to manufacture an “emergency” that will make his force seem obviously needed so that the public will rally behind him. So he's paying this mob boss to engineer a riot that the police force will then come in and quell.
The chief feels terrible about this, but he's doing it for the greater good—that is, for the citizens.
The mobster who is taking the money has made a trade. For helping engineer the riot, the cops will leave his group alone for three years.
However, even with that arrangement, the mobster is disgusted by this deal. He has always taken pride that, in all his thefts, control of unions, and fights with other crime organizations, the citizens of the city haven't been physically harmed. But, in starting this riot, innocents stand a chance of being injured. This goes against everything he stands for.
This is our unfolding list of Reveals. By the time you, the player, have learned all of them, you'd see that the situation here is anything but black and white. Who are the good guys? The bad guys? You might, at the end of the day, put all the characters in the game somewhere on a scale from good to bad, but certainly the people and the situations are emotionally and morally complex.
Who would you fight in the game? At different times you might fight some friends of the police chief—the mobster and his men—and the mayor and his bodyguards. Alliances will continue to shift as you gain information and continually reassess who is good and who is bad.
The point here isn't that games are improved by seeing if there's a way to make every story element more emotionally or morally complex.
This chapter merely suggests a way to brainstorm methods of making a game more emotionally engaging: You can examine all of the game's story elements and decide if you can Complexify them in a way that enhances the game.