Story Structure | Line Hollis

Game Change: Minigames and Narrative Arcs

March 13, 2013 / 2 comments

Often, experimental games differ from longer games by exploring a single idea in depth. Many well known art games, from Every Day the Same Dream to QWOP, use a limited set of verbs and give the player just enough time to feel their way around them. A subgenre of experimental games takes the opposite approach:…

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Moral Incentives and Story Structure

October 12, 2011 / 12 comments

There are a lot of ways you can classify the structure of a story, and many of them have been applied to games in one way or another. One that caused some discussion recently is based on a lecture by Kurt Vonnegut in which he describes stories in terms of the fortune of the protagonist…

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A screenshot from Storyteller, showing two panels of a fairy-tale-like comics story in 8-bit style.

Pieces of Story

July 19, 2011 / 0 comments

Telling good stories in games is hard. Interactivity screws up a lot of the things we associate with good storytelling, such as pacing, control of the audience’s knowledge, and and suspense. This fact, though generally agreed upon, provokes a variety of reactions. Some argue we’d be better off not telling stories with games altogether; others,…

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Back and Forth

June 13, 2011 / 0 comments

Why do we replay games? In some cases there are easy answers to this question. Some games we replay because the basic mechanic is fun and doesn’t get stale with repetition. Sometimes we replay games for the same reason we reread books or rewatch movies: because we enjoy the experience and want to go through…

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