Setting and story

[Kaj Sotala]

So, we don't really have any good grasp on what the setting and story should be like, yet. I suggested some sort of magical realism thing, but that's still very vague, and would need an actual plot.

But magical realism in general would seem to have some clear benefits:

• Allows situating the game in a mostly-contemporary setting, making its lessons feel more relevant to real life, and also interesting players who'd have difficulty relating to a pure fantasy setting
  
• Regardless allows the incorporation of fantasy elements which help attract players who found a purely realistic game boring, lets us use the fantasy elements as interesting things to explore where we can make up whatever is convenient.
• Making the main character non-human allows us to make the belief network diegetic, if the character can actually see the contents of their own mind and the history of their beliefs, even within the fiction. This is more of a nice plus than anything really obligatory, but I have an intuition that it might allow for some nice extra possibilities story-wise.
  

Best of both worlds, I think.

But what should the actual plot be about? I'm still very unclear on that, though ideally it would somehow support the general theme of the game, and hopefully be appealing to players of all sexes. Probably the game should end when the player reveals the answer to "the fundamental question" which would mean something specific within the game, but I'm not sure, what - maybe something about the nature of experienced reality as a mental model?

[Mitchell Owen]

I'm under the impression that game development works better when you can focus on the mechanics first and figure out the story they naturally tell, rather than trying to force a story into the game.  It is easy to get caught up in love of a good story without that story being fun as a game; or at least this is what they said on the relevant episode of extra credits:

http://www.penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/bad-writing

-Mitchell Owen

UC Santa Cruz

[Jolima]

I think that goes both ways though. A good theme and story can give inspiration for great mechanics which supports it. You just have to be prepared for a lot of iteration back and forth until you find a good match for story and mechanics.

I agree that magical realism seems like a good setting. Not sure about not making the main character a human though. That seems like it would be harder to relate to, and you could achieve much the same diegetic result by giving him some gadget or non-human ally who can visualize it for him. This also has the benefit that you can disable (parts of) it more easily if needed.

The best I can think of for plot right away is that some kind of new-to-the-world magical effect is happening and you have to figure out why and how. In the progress probably finding out surprising things about how the world actually worked prior to this new change (if it even is a real change).

[Mitchell Owen]

This is all just reminding me how curious I am about the world's backstory in adventure time.

-Mitchell Owen

UC Santa Cruz

[Kaj Sotala]

On Tue, Feb 19, 2013 at 8:26 PM, Mitchell Owen <magf...@gmail.com> wrote:

I'm under the impression that game development works better when you can focus on the mechanics first and figure out the story they naturally tell, rather than trying to force a story into the game.  It is easy to get caught up in love of a good story without that story being fun as a game; or at least this is what they said on the relevant episode of extra credits:

http://www.penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/bad-writing

Thanks for the link, that was a good talk. I kinda took the opposite message from it, though. :-) After all, "writers being brought in late and being forced to work within the constraints of an already-established mechanic" was one of the very first reasons for poor writing that they identified in the talk. I agree with Jolima's points that story and mechanics should be developed simultaneously and iteratively, so that they can be made to support each other as much as possible.

Actually, it's three things that should be developed in parallel to support each other: story, mechanics, and aesthetics. (Some also separate "technology", i.e. the game engine or whatever it is that realizes the mechanics, as an independent fourth item here, though that's maybe more of an issue with games that are very resource-intensive.)

On Tue, Feb 19, 2013 at 11:49 PM, Jolima <john.l...@gmail.com> wrote:

Not sure about not making the main character a human though. That seems like it would be harder to relate to, and you could achieve much the same diegetic result by giving him some gadget or non-human ally who can visualize it for him. This also has the benefit that you can disable (parts of) it more easily if needed.

You may be right. I just really like faeries though, and think it'd be cool to have the main character be one. ;-) Though they might have been adopted by humans or something.

[Desrtopa]

It's been a pretty long time since anyone pitched in on this, but I might as well add my input here.

I personally lean towards a setting which is physically and historically distinct from our own world, but not actually fantastical. The setting should be unfamiliar enough to be novel, but I think the game may feel most applicable to the real world if all natural laws are implicitly the same as in our own world.

One plot which I've considered for such a setting would be to have the main character start out training as an investigator in a culture with unusual standards with respect to honesty and truth-seeking (which accounts for the early game being much simpler, to ease the player into the mechanics,) which happens to be a colony of a much larger imperial power, with technology and culture perhaps comparable to the British Empire. The main character eventually travels to the homeland of the colonial power, where he's at first received as uncultured and unsophisticated, but eventually builds a reputation for being an investigator par excellence, and attracts the attention of the crown.

From there, the narrative splits into branches. The main character can throw his weight behind the empire, to bring their culture and technology to parts of the world which still languish in primitive conditions (imperial branch,) he can oppose them, and try and restore self-rule to their colonial holdings, including his homeland (rebel branch,) or he can try to create a cultural revolution through which countries around the world can elevate themselves to a level above what the empire currently occupies (philosopher branch.) All the branches should be written so that at least some subset of players will feel like they're doing the right thing.

[Kaj Sotala]

I really like this! The previous setting we'd been playing around with felt a little too ordinary to really hold my interest enough, but this one seems quite cool. (We could bend the "all natural laws are the same" clause a bit, to allow for some steampunkish elements...) There is the issue that having several major narrative branches is a lot more work, but we can see how that goes.