Kevin Richardson - WHAT'S YOUR STORY?

How do you create a sense of urgency in a game so that a player feels compelled to play until the end? Though there are many ways to have players “attach” to a game without incorporating a story or characters, story and characters help—so long as the story is compelling and the player can vicariously live through the characters.

Story vs. No Story
One of the ongoing questions in the game business has been whether including a story in a game increases game-play or sales. You often hear that stories are a waste of money. “If it doesn’t sell more games,” so the argument goes, “why spend one dollar layering a story into the game?” Adding a story definitely costs additional money and time, but at the same time a good story can ground the design and get players hooked.

When I started producing games at The Learning Company, the games followed a spoke-and-hub model in which players would navigate to a new activity whenever they got bored with the one they were on. Though it drew a lot of groans, I dubbed it, aptly: Navigation by Boredom. Boredom was what stopped players in their tracks and made them want to return to the hub in order to click and play another activity until they got bored again. Little outside of boredom motivated the player to leave what they were doing and explore or re-explore another part of the game. However, thanks to games such as Pajama Sam and Putt Putt Saves the Zoo, we discovered through child-testing that if you wrapped a compelling story around those very same activities, added a sympathetic protagonist, and the story unveiled over time, players would attack the game with purpose for upwards of 30 hours to bring the story to its conclusion.

What Is A Story?
Every game has a story. And it even has three acts. They may not exist in the traditional sense, but because the player’s experience of life is a kind of story, the story is there. Even games like tic-tac-toe and solitaire can’t begin without the anticipation of playing and the hope of winning, which begins before the first ”x” or “o” is drawn. Once playing, there is a period of time in the middle where the ending is uncertain, followed by a conclusion, and a deciding last move, at which point the game is resolved.

Games have a beginning, middle and end, with emotional content at each phase:

Act I: The decision by the player to play the game in the first place, which leads to players facing the unique game challenge, like matching up three colored balls to keep the snake from going down the drain. Yikes!
Act II: Stuff in the middle, like power-ups, accelerating game-play, the twists and turns which become more complicated with each new level. The player may have self-doubt or get weary, but she coaches herself through it and musters the courage to go on. She rises to the occasion in her quest to be a hero and conquer the game. Even plunking down the 20 dollars is a kind of act of faith and courage, and the acid-test of a game being a hit. What if the rest of the game is awful? It’s part of her story.
Act III: She wins! She beat the game or her opponent despite adversity, and emerged the winner, with bragging rights and all the honors she deserves. She looks back at the experience with pride and a sense of accomplishment. But then, sadly, (following Joseph Campbell’s hero paradigm), she returns to her office job at the end! That is, until the next download. . . .

One Way to Evaluate a Story
Humans tend to be concerned about the future and what’s going to happen next. That’s why we like to volley around answers to life’s absurd questions and dilemmas at the water cooler. Answers soothe us. (Heaven, it has been argued, was created as a story to soothe our fear of death.) You might even say that it’s this kind of anxiety about the future combined with foresight that’s kept us alive through time. Little wonder, then, that the stories we care about hold our attention until their ultimate outcome is resolved.

Stories that grab our attention usually tap into the unique anxieties or challenges of being human. Jaws: Getting eaten alive. Twin Towers: Getting buried alive. Carrie the Caregiver: Caring for infants. Diner Dash 3: Losing everything you’ve worked for to greedy developers. A story often starts with an interesting question or dilemma that throws us off kilter. Unlike a novel, however, a game gives us some control over the outcome of the story, thrusting us into the heart of the action and giving us the opportunity to step in and make things right again. Stuff may go wrong along the way, but a player will continue playing in order to set things right again. The story problem combined with foresight makes the player want to get involved and find out how the story ends. When you play Diner Dash 3, you don’t want to let the bulldozer (and evil developers) raze the café, do you? Of course not! You’d better keep playing and find out what happens next!

So what are some things that make up a compelling story? One theory is that storytelling is all about presenting the audience with a series of interesting questions which eventually will be answered. Those promised answers, dangled ahead of us like carrots on a stick, hold our attention—we simply have to know the answer or we’ll go nuts. If the questions are sufficiently intriguing—like “Will the diner get bulldozed?”—then we’ll play and play until we get part or all of the answer. On the other hand, if the underlying questions in a story are not interesting enough—if we ultimately don’t care enough to find out the answers—we’re unlikely to keep playing for long. Characters similarly need to hold our interest, especially if a character we find sympathetic is in the crosshairs of the story problem.

The List
Several years ago I came upon a story writing analysis program called Dramatica (which, it turns out, remains alive and well in all its complexity on www.dramatica.com). From that program I developed my own subset of criteria which I use to evaluate the quality of a game’s underlying storyline. I call those criteria The List. The List helps me make informed decisions about game-play and art direction. It also aids in writing dialogue and executing animation. Put simply: I use The List to make my game stories richer—and to make sure there’s tension.

Granted, there is no “recipe” for a good story, as story decisions are subjective. But it’s important to know the main building blocks that separate good stories from bad ones:

Problem: What is the interesting problem that makes your story worth telling? The test lies in this question: If a player does NOTHING, what will happen to the world and characters in the game? If the consequence of inactivity is troubling enough to make the player rise to action, you’ve got a good story problem.
Solution: What is it that will make the world right again? Is the solution to the problem intriguing? Typically, the solution informs the game design by dictating the kinds of things the player will need to earn, win, or acquire through the game-play mechanic. Successfully completing portions of the game or acquiring stuff through successful game-play can either advance a portion of the story (if it has several acts), or resolve the story altogether.
Back-story: What happened before the game began? What led up to the current predicament? The back-story will often inform game and story decisions, no matter how benign—the game will feel more solid if something from the past got us to the first moment of game-play. Some ancient civilization is behind the magic of Zuma, for example. The back-story can be delivered upfront, or sometime later, and it can be strictly visual or felt. Surprise works, too. The back-story may catch up to us in a third-act twist in which everything we thought we were working towards gets messed up and our goal changes entirely!
Goal: What does the player need to do to set things right? Get the amulet? Match a zillion marbles together? Before you answer this, it’s important to decide just how closely you want the game mechanic tied to your story. The tighter the story and mechanic are, the harder it will be to get both right and to separate them later—it’s the simple rule of dependencies. But an independent story and mechanic (on the polar extreme) can lead to a contrived result—like matching marbles in order to save the diner. On the other hand, when the game and story are closely aligned, the results can be a very immersive and believable world, and a compelling player experience.
Consequences: This issue relates directly to the Problem: What will happen if you do nothing at all? Will the babies die or get sick (Carrie the Caregiver)? Will all of the Sproinklings make it to the surface (Sproink)? Will Tex Carter make it through the hall of doom (TriPeaks Solitaire To Go)? What is the consequence to the main story problem of never playing? And again, if the story problem is really strong, then the consequences of doing nothing should keep the player awake at night—and maybe compel her to plunk down $19.99 after slurping down some coffee the next morning.
Forewarnings: These are the things that let the audience know that the story consequences are real and exist. The water is rising. The ground is shaking. More beetles are taking over the city. More babies are coming into the baby ward. Your salon is so popular you need to add more chairs, but you better get more tips to buy them. These Forewarnings could be a quick look at a growing crack in the dam which no-one sees, or it could be a mad scientist installing the final component in his doomsday device. These are the reminders that the story is real, that players need to take the story consequences seriously and invest in the story solution.
Limits: The function of story limits is to create a sense of urgency for the player based on time or physical constraints. Without such limits, there is no urgency. (Imagine a game that offers unlimited time and resources: What would be the challenge? or the point?) Urgency holds players’ attention in their quest to keep the Consequences from happening. You can create an artificial “clock” that enables players to track where they are relative to the time and/or physical story limits. Maps are often used to show the limits of the meta game, for example, but the progress metaphor could just as easily have been a thermometer, a flagpole, a calendar, or the pieces needed to put the ancient idol back together. As players approach the maximum of each limit, the sense of urgency increases—and so does the fun.
Driver: Is the story advanced by actions or decisions? Is it physical or mental? Or both? Brainy games (trivia, for example) put the tension more in the player’s head, whereas arcade games rely more on hand-eye coordination. So what kind of story is best for your type of game? The hide-and-seek stories which involve the player’s ability to discern one object from another lend themselves to the slower paced mystery stories, whereas breakout games or games with arcade action might be better paired up with a frenetic story and physical jeopardy. There is no established rule-of-thumb here, however. Consider EA’s TriPeaks Solitaire ToGo, in which Tex Carter is subjected to every imaginable danger and punishment as you play. There’s peril in every move, and mounting tension in an otherwise slow game with no physics.
Outcome: Like every other element of your story, the outcome should be seen through the eyes of the player. Players will believe that following the established rules will result in a successful ending, with the story problem resolved. They just need to work hard at whatever you tell them to work hard at. Inside the assumed outcome lie story possibilities. Red herrings and third-act twists can force the story to change directions in a logical but surprising way. Imagine, for example, that everything a player has done during the front half of the game has actually been helping the antagonist. What if it turns out that the Developer in Diner Dash 3 also owns the distributor that supplies food to the diner? What impact would that have on game-play? or on the player? How would this drive game design?
Main Character Concern: In games, the main character can be the player or an avatar protagonist, or both. In the best case both player and protagonist are concerned about the story problem. But there are always decisions for the storyteller to make: Should the player be concerned with the health of the babies in the baby ward, or with getting fired if one of the babies gets sick? (Maybe it’s both!) Deciding what you want the protagonist to be concerned with at any given moment will drive different story decisions and how you develop your game assets. You may decide to have the protagonist concerned with the wrong things at first just to make an important story point. For example in the first act of Dead Rising, you’re told to run for the stairs—doh!—even though the storytellers know that’s going to get you attacked by zombies. How else are you going to learn you can’t win the game without the help of comrades?.
Obstacle Character Concern: The obstacle character can be the antagonist who is out to stop the protagonist (the player or the main character). It could also be the “contagonist” (a Dramatica term) who hinders the player or protagonist and can be aligned with either the protagonist or the antagonist. They (or it) are simply a nuisance. Whereas the antagonist might be the thing that can outright stop the player (the villain for example), contagonists could be tempting gems that give the player demerits while better, more valuable gems drop by the wayside.

Over the years, I have found this list to be extremely useful in evaluating stories for games and other media, strengthening the weak points and creating an overall cohesion and direction. Certainly, it offers the development teams a framework to have a coherent conversation about the story. It has also helped me consider how “full” a game experience is. At some level, players are always checking for answers to these questions, even if the answer is “there’s no story in this game at all.” Also, it’s not necessary to execute each story metric in literal terms. Much as music and art direction offer another emotional point of view for a particular scene or event, there are many devices at a game maker’s disposal to deliver story content without the need of text or comic strips. The main idea is to satisfy players’ emotional yearnings so that, while they play, they feel that they are participating in something larger and believable—and ultimately satisfying.

Needless to say, I did not include all of the story aspects from Dramatica. You will have fun going through the site and seeing if anything else could be helpful to your game and story development as you develop a List of your own.

* * *

Kevin Richardson is currently a consultant for the casual games business. He has produced over 30 “E” rated games, including the Family Feud games and several Hasbro titles at iwin.com. Kevin also worked as executive producer on numerous Reader Rabbit and ClueFinders adventures while at The Learning Company/Mattel Interactive. Kevin can be reached at krichardson123@yahoo.com or http://www.linkedin.com/in/kevinrichardsonproducer.

HOME \| LECTURES & ARTICLES \| GAME DESIGN \| WHAT'S YOUR STORY? What's your story? Creating a Sense of Urgency Kevin Richardson Casual Connect Magazine, Fall 2007 How do you create a sense of urgency in a game so that a player feels compelled to play until the end? Though there are many ways to have players “attach” to a game without incorporating a story or characters, story and characters help—so long as the story is compelling and the player can vicariously live through the characters. Story vs. No Story One of the ongoing questions in the game business has been whether including a story in a game increases game-play or sales. You often hear that stories are a waste of money. “If it doesn’t sell more games,” so the argument goes, “why spend one dollar layering a story into the game?” Adding a story definitely costs additional money and time, but at the same time a good story can ground the design and get players hooked. When I started producing games at The Learning Company, the games followed a spoke-and-hub model in which players would navigate to a new activity whenever they got bored with the one they were on. Though it drew a lot of groans, I dubbed it, aptly: Navigation by Boredom. Boredom was what stopped players in their tracks and made them want to return to the hub in order to click and play another activity until they got bored again. Little outside of boredom motivated the player to leave what they were doing and explore or re-explore another part of the game. However, thanks to games such as Pajama Sam and Putt Putt Saves the Zoo, we discovered through child-testing that if you wrapped a compelling story around those very same activities, added a sympathetic protagonist, and the story unveiled over time, players would attack the game with purpose for upwards of 30 hours to bring the story to its conclusion. What Is A Story? Every game has a story. And it even has three acts. They may not exist in the traditional sense, but because the player’s experience of life is a kind of story, the story is there. Even games like tic-tac-toe and solitaire can’t begin without the anticipation of playing and the hope of winning, which begins before the first ”x” or “o” is drawn. Once playing, there is a period of time in the middle where the ending is uncertain, followed by a conclusion, and a deciding last move, at which point the game is resolved. Games have a beginning, middle and end, with emotional content at each phase: Act I: The decision by the player to play the game in the first place, which leads to players facing the unique game challenge, like matching up three colored balls to keep the snake from going down the drain. Yikes! Act II: Stuff in the middle, like power-ups, accelerating game-play, the twists and turns which become more complicated with each new level. The player may have self-doubt or get weary, but she coaches herself through it and musters the courage to go on. She rises to the occasion in her quest to be a hero and conquer the game. Even plunking down the 20 dollars is a kind of act of faith and courage, and the acid-test of a game being a hit. What if the rest of the game is awful? It’s part of her story. Act III: She wins! She beat the game or her opponent despite adversity, and emerged the winner, with bragging rights and all the honors she deserves. She looks back at the experience with pride and a sense of accomplishment. But then, sadly, (following Joseph Campbell’s hero paradigm), she returns to her office job at the end! That is, until the next download. . . . One Way to Evaluate a Story Humans tend to be concerned about the future and what’s going to happen next. That’s why we like to volley around answers to life’s absurd questions and dilemmas at the water cooler. Answers soothe us. (Heaven, it has been argued, was created as a story to soothe our fear of death.) You might even say that it’s this kind of anxiety about the future combined with foresight that’s kept us alive through time. Little wonder, then, that the stories we care about hold our attention until their ultimate outcome is resolved. Stories that grab our attention usually tap into the unique anxieties or challenges of being human. Jaws: Getting eaten alive. Twin Towers: Getting buried alive. Carrie the Caregiver: Caring for infants. Diner Dash 3: Losing everything you’ve worked for to greedy developers. A story often starts with an interesting question or dilemma that throws us off kilter. Unlike a novel, however, a game gives us some control over the outcome of the story, thrusting us into the heart of the action and giving us the opportunity to step in and make things right again. Stuff may go wrong along the way, but a player will continue playing in order to set things right again. The story problem combined with foresight makes the player want to get involved and find out how the story ends. When you play Diner Dash 3, you don’t want to let the bulldozer (and evil developers) raze the café, do you? Of course not! You’d better keep playing and find out what happens next! So what are some things that make up a compelling story? One theory is that storytelling is all about presenting the audience with a series of interesting questions which eventually will be answered. Those promised answers, dangled ahead of us like carrots on a stick, hold our attention—we simply have to know the answer or we’ll go nuts. If the questions are sufficiently intriguing—like “Will the diner get bulldozed?”—then we’ll play and play until we get part or all of the answer. On the other hand, if the underlying questions in a story are not interesting enough—if we ultimately don’t care enough to find out the answers—we’re unlikely to keep playing for long. Characters similarly need to hold our interest, especially if a character we find sympathetic is in the crosshairs of the story problem. The List Several years ago I came upon a story writing analysis program called Dramatica (which, it turns out, remains alive and well in all its complexity on www.dramatica.com). From that program I developed my own subset of criteria which I use to evaluate the quality of a game’s underlying storyline. I call those criteria The List. The List helps me make informed decisions about game-play and art direction. It also aids in writing dialogue and executing animation. Put simply: I use The List to make my game stories richer—and to make sure there’s tension. Granted, there is no “recipe” for a good story, as story decisions are subjective. But it’s important to know the main building blocks that separate good stories from bad ones: Problem: What is the interesting problem that makes your story worth telling? The test lies in this question: If a player does NOTHING, what will happen to the world and characters in the game? If the consequence of inactivity is troubling enough to make the player rise to action, you’ve got a good story problem. Solution: What is it that will make the world right again? Is the solution to the problem intriguing? Typically, the solution informs the game design by dictating the kinds of things the player will need to earn, win, or acquire through the game-play mechanic. Successfully completing portions of the game or acquiring stuff through successful game-play can either advance a portion of the story (if it has several acts), or resolve the story altogether. Back-story: What happened before the game began? What led up to the current predicament? The back-story will often inform game and story decisions, no matter how benign—the game will feel more solid if something from the past got us to the first moment of game-play. Some ancient civilization is behind the magic of Zuma, for example. The back-story can be delivered upfront, or sometime later, and it can be strictly visual or felt. Surprise works, too. The back-story may catch up to us in a third-act twist in which everything we thought we were working towards gets messed up and our goal changes entirely! Goal: What does the player need to do to set things right? Get the amulet? Match a zillion marbles together? Before you answer this, it’s important to decide just how closely you want the game mechanic tied to your story. The tighter the story and mechanic are, the harder it will be to get both right and to separate them later—it’s the simple rule of dependencies. But an independent story and mechanic (on the polar extreme) can lead to a contrived result—like matching marbles in order to save the diner. On the other hand, when the game and story are closely aligned, the results can be a very immersive and believable world, and a compelling player experience. Consequences: This issue relates directly to the Problem: What will happen if you do nothing at all? Will the babies die or get sick (Carrie the Caregiver)? Will all of the Sproinklings make it to the surface (Sproink)? Will Tex Carter make it through the hall of doom (TriPeaks Solitaire To Go)? What is the consequence to the main story problem of never playing? And again, if the story problem is really strong, then the consequences of doing nothing should keep the player awake at night—and maybe compel her to plunk down $19.99 after slurping down some coffee the next morning. Forewarnings: These are the things that let the audience know that the story consequences are real and exist. The water is rising. The ground is shaking. More beetles are taking over the city. More babies are coming into the baby ward. Your salon is so popular you need to add more chairs, but you better get more tips to buy them. These Forewarnings could be a quick look at a growing crack in the dam which no-one sees, or it could be a mad scientist installing the final component in his doomsday device. These are the reminders that the story is real, that players need to take the story consequences seriously and invest in the story solution. Limits: The function of story limits is to create a sense of urgency for the player based on time or physical constraints. Without such limits, there is no urgency. (Imagine a game that offers unlimited time and resources: What would be the challenge? or the point?) Urgency holds players’ attention in their quest to keep the Consequences from happening. You can create an artificial “clock” that enables players to track where they are relative to the time and/or physical story limits. Maps are often used to show the limits of the meta game, for example, but the progress metaphor could just as easily have been a thermometer, a flagpole, a calendar, or the pieces needed to put the ancient idol back together. As players approach the maximum of each limit, the sense of urgency increases—and so does the fun. Driver: Is the story advanced by actions or decisions? Is it physical or mental? Or both? Brainy games (trivia, for example) put the tension more in the player’s head, whereas arcade games rely more on hand-eye coordination. So what kind of story is best for your type of game? The hide-and-seek stories which involve the player’s ability to discern one object from another lend themselves to the slower paced mystery stories, whereas breakout games or games with arcade action might be better paired up with a frenetic story and physical jeopardy. There is no established rule-of-thumb here, however. Consider EA’s TriPeaks Solitaire ToGo, in which Tex Carter is subjected to every imaginable danger and punishment as you play. There’s peril in every move, and mounting tension in an otherwise slow game with no physics. Outcome: Like every other element of your story, the outcome should be seen through the eyes of the player. Players will believe that following the established rules will result in a successful ending, with the story problem resolved. They just need to work hard at whatever you tell them to work hard at. Inside the assumed outcome lie story possibilities. Red herrings and third-act twists can force the story to change directions in a logical but surprising way. Imagine, for example, that everything a player has done during the front half of the game has actually been helping the antagonist. What if it turns out that the Developer in Diner Dash 3 also owns the distributor that supplies food to the diner? What impact would that have on game-play? or on the player? How would this drive game design? Main Character Concern: In games, the main character can be the player or an avatar protagonist, or both. In the best case both player and protagonist are concerned about the story problem. But there are always decisions for the storyteller to make: Should the player be concerned with the health of the babies in the baby ward, or with getting fired if one of the babies gets sick? (Maybe it’s both!) Deciding what you want the protagonist to be concerned with at any given moment will drive different story decisions and how you develop your game assets. You may decide to have the protagonist concerned with the wrong things at first just to make an important story point. For example in the first act of Dead Rising, you’re told to run for the stairs—doh!—even though the storytellers know that’s going to get you attacked by zombies. How else are you going to learn you can’t win the game without the help of comrades?. Obstacle Character Concern: The obstacle character can be the antagonist who is out to stop the protagonist (the player or the main character). It could also be the “contagonist” (a Dramatica term) who hinders the player or protagonist and can be aligned with either the protagonist or the antagonist. They (or it) are simply a nuisance. Whereas the antagonist might be the thing that can outright stop the player (the villain for example), contagonists could be tempting gems that give the player demerits while better, more valuable gems drop by the wayside. Over the years, I have found this list to be extremely useful in evaluating stories for games and other media, strengthening the weak points and creating an overall cohesion and direction. Certainly, it offers the development teams a framework to have a coherent conversation about the story. It has also helped me consider how “full” a game experience is. At some level, players are always checking for answers to these questions, even if the answer is “there’s no story in this game at all.” Also, it’s not necessary to execute each story metric in literal terms. Much as music and art direction offer another emotional point of view for a particular scene or event, there are many devices at a game maker’s disposal to deliver story content without the need of text or comic strips. The main idea is to satisfy players’ emotional yearnings so that, while they play, they feel that they are participating in something larger and believable—and ultimately satisfying. Needless to say, I did not include all of the story aspects from Dramatica. You will have fun going through the site and seeing if anything else could be helpful to your game and story development as you develop a List of your own. * * * Kevin Richardson is currently a consultant for the casual games business. He has produced over 30 “E” rated games, including the Family Feud games and several Hasbro titles at iwin.com. Kevin also worked as executive producer on numerous Reader Rabbit and ClueFinders adventures while at The Learning Company/Mattel Interactive. Kevin can be reached at krichardson123@yahoo.com or http://www.linkedin.com/in/kevinrichardsonproducer.