Designers allow stories to be told.
Game design shouldn't actually be telling stories. The difference is a little nuanced but crucial. Game design is the discipline that allows players to interact with the game. It's about mechanics, dynamics, actions and outcomes. They can be linear, or not, depending on the design of player agency, or consequences of their actions.
Stories, on the other hand, are usually, non-interactive. It is an account of people, places and things and how that creates meaning from cause and effect. It's the linear telling of ideas. The story is told by the writers, the game, and more often than not these days, the players themselves.
Yet the goal is the same, evoking emotions in the audience.
So this isn't to say that Game Designers can't be storytellers, we absolutely can, and we absolutely should be.
But we have to understand the difference between the two crafts to really understand how the intersection of design and story works, for it to be really effective at our common goals.
So let's dig a little, and understand what story is, and how Design works with it, and around it.
Story: A Basic Definition
Someone who wants something badly, but is having a hard time getting it.
- Frank Daniel
I'm really partial to this explanation. It's simple, effective, and can easily describe any story ever told by anyone, anywhere. It ranges from multi-season television series, (HIMYM: Ted wants a wife, can't seem to find her.), to songs, to books, to that anecdote you tell you friends about really wanting a late night snack but none of the shops are opened.
But it's also a really effective description of a core gameplay loop.
A player wants something, but has a challenge in front of them to get it.
The designer in this case is setting the objective (really wants something), and providing the gameplay, (has a challenge), and thus letting the game tell the story of if the player has gotten it, or not. Or the Player telling the story of how they have gotten what they want, or not.
This defines story as a simple structure, and it's a short step from here to creating a philosophy that can help understand how story works, and how it can be applied to what game designers can do when designing. Since Game Design loves pillars, they help in designing. So let's pillarize story in its most basic form.
The 4Cs pillars of Storytelling.
Character
Conflict
Change
Context
And because I'm pedantic, I also like to break down the various terminologies when discussing stories, because STORY is too large a term, and too vague to be specific about the process and mechanism of actually writing and crafting one.
Definitions of the Storytelling as a medium
Story: The Whole of it.
Narrative: The Method
Plot: The events
Character: The People
Theme: The meaning
Tone: The Style
World: The Setting
So what Design does is to lay out these foundations, to provide the canvas and verbs that the story can be told, by the writers, by the players, by the audience.
Thus design allows stories to be told.
Currently Playing
Still Elden Ring.
It's my third go through, this time NG+ with my dual wielding Katana Dex/Int char in order to really platinum those trophies. This might be one of the very few games I've ever platinumed for the sheer sake of it, and might even play more. There's something about the combat Dynamic FromSoft has engineered in their games that has me lulled into a near zen like state of gaming comfort. Many will comment that these games are hard, and yes, they are a strong challenge of player's skill, but the satisfaction I get from beating bosses, from even just swinging through trash mobs and exploring the gorgeous vistas and intricately designed worlds amidst the elegiac poem of FromSoft's worldbuilding is more than I ever get in many other games. I play FromSoft games to relax (Except you Sekiro...) because I just fall into their rhythms, deaths or no deaths.
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