Story tools

I touched on story before. One of the major parts of it was to give players the ability to write the story. Look at it like reporters. Or bloggers.

You want story in your game. Not everyone will want story in your game, but you will want it there, for the simple purpose to tie it together, to give it coherence and alongside your design documents, an easier to digest feel. Also some players will enjoy reading about it. After all people still read books.

But games are not books.



Games are an interactive medium, they change and evolve. And people like to tell stories, inside your game. The hardest part is to let them.

The consensus seems to be to have a theme park ride experience. Look, don't touch. Keep your hands behind the rails at all times. But interactive medium goes against the grain. Touch, change, manipulate.

So now comes the challenging part, to which I don't have a solution either: Hand out the tools to your users. There have been a few interesting starts in that direction, but my current (unsatisfactory) solution is to write a history, not the future.

Simply put, hire writers that look at what happened in your game and put that into a story. Find out what people think about it, how they react and see if you could find ways for them to participate in that effort (wikis come to mind here). But writing real stories, others can experience, that will require a lot more time and effort to get it "just right (tm)".