Interactive Storytelling Summer 2022

The difference between game story and general story

Fiction is the form of narrative storytelling that places the most emphasis on storytelling expression among literary subjects that use words as a vehicle. Narrative stories are generally described or written in words. Any language, the essential tool for communication and exchange, is the most basic and common form of storytelling, so stories are created using basic tools.

The game story is an interactive story. It is the introduction of the “interactive” point that makes the game story so different from other types of stories.

The player’s behavior drives the game’s story; if the player chooses not to undertake the game’s journey, then the story stops and does not continue. Secondly, in more and more game genres, the player’s behavior directly affects the unfolding of the game story, going in different directions. Even in some innovative game genres, some game developers try to have no fixed main storyline at all, which means that at each restart, the unfolding of the game story will be affected by the player’s different behaviors, thus producing a different development direction.

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One response to “The difference between game story and general story”

  1. hayden.ockey Avatar
    hayden.ockey

    “The player’s behavior drives the game’s story; if the player chooses not to undertake the game’s journey, then the story stops and does not continue.” I was exploring this the other day and talked about it in one of the sketchblogs I posted earlier today (or yesterday? It’s 2:24am.) The idea that the player can “stop” the story simply by refusing to progress is interesting because in order to do this in another medium it takes a different action to stop the progress. For film you stop watching or pause, for books you stop reading. However, even then the movie still plays out the same way on the TV’s of others who didn’t pause, and the words on the book still end the story in the same way. You could argue that the game is the same, the code will spit out the same events and narrative as the player progresses, but you can also (in many situations) move backwards and explore or otherwise stall the progression while still “living” in that world. You can’t really get the same effect by reading the same line over and over or rewinding a scene in a movie.

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