Digital Game Storytelling, by Han Hye-won

In my last semester at university, I was sending out applications and wondering whether I could turn my experience with games into a reason for a studio to hire me.

I applied to several studios and reached the final interview at CJ Games, part of CJ E&M, before being turned down.

Finding a way into storytelling

By that semester I already had enough credits to graduate. I still took an interactive storytelling design class in the UX program, out of curiosity about how stories could respond to the people experiencing them.

That was how I came to read Han Hye-won’s book. It had been out since 2005, and I picked it up in 2012. I thought the technology might have changed faster than the questions she was asking about stories.

Is a game a narrative?

The book opens by asking how a story in a game differs from one told through a novel or a film.

Han surveys several definitions of games. Rules, outcomes, conflict, and voluntary participation recur across the accounts she discusses.

Where does storytelling belong in a game?

Tetris and Pac-Man need little plot to make someone want another turn. Other games give their players an elaborate world to explore. Looking at those differences makes it hard to talk about a single relationship between games and stories.

Another way to think about a game is as a simulation. On that view, rules, representations of characters, and the actions the system allows form a model the player can test.

Three forms a game story can take

Han separates three forms of story to make it easier to see what the game supplies and what the player contributes.

1. Backstory
2. A designed sequence of episodes
3. An emergent story

Backstory can use techniques familiar from films or animation. An opening sequence or cutscene can set up characters and events and follow a conventional dramatic arc.

A designed sequence of episodes can use quests to keep the player moving through smaller stories. Han connects this to the experience of flow and to games that keep creating a reason to continue.

The sensation that time has slipped by may come from being drawn into that rhythm. Han suggests that a game able to develop after release may hold a player’s interest differently from one whose story is finished at launch.

Emergent stories come from what players do together. An encounter in a massively multiplayer online role-playing game can give people a story to tell even if no one wrote it in advance.

Interactivity

One distinction concerns where the player stands in relation to the fictional world.

• Internal interactivity: the player acts as someone who belongs to the world.
• External interactivity: the player directs events from a position outside it.

Another distinction asks what the player can change.

• Exploratory interactivity lets the player move through material in different ways without altering the larger plot.
• Constructive interactivity lets the player’s choices change what happens.

Combining the two distinctions produces four possibilities.

1. External and exploratory
2. Internal and exploratory
3. External and constructive
4. Internal and constructive

Michael Joyce’s hypertext fiction afternoon, a story is one example of an external, exploratory experience. A reader can choose a path through the text, though the freedom to choose does not necessarily create the sense of living inside the story.

Han uses Tomb Raider as an example of an internal, exploratory approach. In games like these, the character matters to how the player experiences the world. The book also looks at how the Tekken series develops its characters and their visual presentation.

Sports games such as Winning Eleven, FIFA, and the ESPN Major League Baseball series give another way to think about play within a defined setting.

External, constructive interactivity is visible in games such as SimCity and The Sims. Han also discusses StarCraft from this angle.

StarCraft gives the player a commander’s view and leaves room for different strategies. What happens can reflect a player’s ability to anticipate an opponent rather than a chance event.

For internal, constructive interactivity, the book turns to online role-playing games. Han singles out Nexus: The Kingdom of the Winds for creating a version of Goguryeo informed by Korean cultural traditions. Ultima Online, EverQuest, and Guild Wars offer other examples.

Heroes and antagonists

The book introduces a twelve-stage model of the hero’s journey. It is a way to trace a familiar pattern through characters who otherwise have little in common.

1. The hero begins in the ordinary world.
2. An event calls the hero into an adventure.
3. The hero hesitates.
4. A mentor helps the hero prepare.
5. The hero crosses into an unfamiliar world.
6. The hero meets allies and enemies and faces tests.
7. The hero approaches the place where the hardest challenge awaits.
8. The hero faces an ordeal.
9. Surviving the ordeal brings a reward.
10. The hero confronts the question of how to return.
11. A final test puts what the hero has learned at stake.
12. The hero returns with something of value, and another journey may begin.

An antagonist can stand opposite the hero in several ways.

1. A demon or monster
2. A villain whose beauty makes the threat more striking
3. A figure divided like Jekyll and Hyde
4. An enemy whose role depends on where the player stands

In one pattern, the enemy takes the form of a demon or monster. The player can fight it without the game asking the same questions a human adversary would raise.

The demons in Diablo are one example.

A second pattern gives the antagonist human qualities, including beauty or charm that makes the character more unsettling.

The Jekyll-and-Hyde pattern puts benevolent and destructive impulses in one figure.

The last pattern, named for Cao Cao in the book, changes who appears to be the villain when the point of view changes. In a story about the Three Kingdoms, that depends on which side you are on.

In World of Warcraft, the Alliance and Horde can see the same conflict differently.

What makes a game story different?

Han is interested in storytelling, particularly in what changes when the audience can do something inside the world being described.

That question is what keeps the book useful even as its examples grow older.

John Carmack once made a widely circulated comparison with adult films to explain how secondary he considered the plot of a game at the time.

Games give designers a choice about how to present a story. Some of what a novel puts into description can be made available in a world the player explores and acts on.

Skyrim is a later example of a game that gives players substantial freedom while offering many stories and a world with a long history.

StarCraft and Warcraft also gave people characters and conflicts to follow. Part of what made those stories memorable was encountering them while trying to do something in the world.

Han’s examples belong to the period in which she wrote. Her distinctions still help explain which parts of a story come from the designer and which parts come into being through play.

Book details

Digital Game Storytelling

Author

Han Hye-won

Published

August 1, 2005

ISBN13

9788952204196

View the book on YES24

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