A hero needs context, to be as much a part of the story as the story is a challenge for him to overcome, but players bring their own context. Where in a dramatic arc the viewer is watching and empathising with the on-screen heroes and villains, in a game the player does not become that hero. But it also brings the player’s personality along with it. In video games it operates via remote control of on-screen dolls, allows us to project into a world and discover it. Play is taking action, overcoming obstacles, creating, learning and other activities. It’s essential that control is in the hands of the player. The audience gives itself to the storyteller, and in exchange he gives them something arresting and impactful with which they can empathise, but not control. They have empathy for the characters, and want to see to them succeed, but at the same time there is nothing that the audience can do to prevent their fate. The audience is powerless, either turning the pages of a book or sitting quietly in a darkened room and watching events unfold on stage or screen. The other essential aspect of an impactful story is the inevitable outcome. The masterful aspect of storytelling on this scale is the way that arcs are weaved in and out from one another, connected and resolved in unison, and the structure magnifies impact. Some are episode-length, others season-length, and arguably one or two last for the entire life of the show. A television series like The Shield has many characters engaged in their own arcs. The arc provides a framework of plot into which character development, inevitability and the unfolding of the story can happen. And yet the structure of the dramatic arc is largely unchanged.Ī tale like The Usual Suspects conforms to the dramatic arc just as much as a Sherlock Holmes story, and even an apparently-backwards story like Memento is still a dramatic arc moving forward. In more sophisticated stories, however, we often see chronology that jump back and forth. Stories are usually told in a straightforward A-to-Z fashion, so the dramatic arc is commonly the same as the chronological series of events. The basic unit of that structure is the dramatic arc. Story, as screenwriter William Goldman said, is structure. It’s the arrangement of those bricks into a specific structure which conveys more than the sum of its parts. While both linear and interactive stories could be said to be object based ( as Chris Crawford believes with his Storytron project), what makes a story a story is not the bricks. The problem is that the metaphor is inaccurate. The implication is that the interactive story has the potential to be a much richer experience than the linear one, and that is a powerful idea. Pictorially it might look something like this: The theory goes, therefore, that a story is a line of events that happen one after another, whereas a game is a tree, with many branches and choices. In order for game storytelling to theoretically function, the two need to seem to have some sort of relationship. It all starts with the difference between linearity and interactivity.
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