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The Use of Story in Game Design
Daniel Cook has a great article on Gamasutra.com called The Watery Pachinko Machine of Doom. Cook reports from a game designer’s conference on their efforts to find new ways to use story in games. While the conference was for video game designers, some of the discussion applies to board games as well. Here’s an excerpt:
| We believe that game designers are in the business of experience creation rather than that of storytelling. The story that is generated through gameplay is the player’s personal story that has been mediated by the game systems.
This is a rather substantial shift from the concept of the auteur sitting down and penning a tale of love and despair. Instead of writing about passion, our goal is to help the user experience passion. Instead of describing fear, our goal as game designers to is cause fear. We construct systems, whirling social and mechanical environments that lead, poke, prod, react, connect and encourage the player to reach, out of their own free will, a peak physiological and mental state. |
Posted by W. Eric Martin on Jan 21, 2008 at 02:00 PM in Game News, Boardgame News / 408
