Storytelling with Verbs: Integrating Gameplay and Narrative

[Music] welcome my talk is called storytelling with verbs integrating gameplay and narrative I also like to refer to it as why narrative designers and game designers should be best friends because we should be and so before I get into what that actually is hello I'm Caitlin Tremblay um some of you may know me I'm a writer kind of looks like this I've worked on a variety of games in a bunch of different genres including mobile a orgies escape rooms indie and triple-a I was the lead writer on a morticians Tale and I was a team lead narrative designer at Ubisoft Toronto currently though I'm a writer and narrative designer at Cappy games so if you know me you know I have one very specific women that I like to tilt that and it is that it's that I fundamentally believe narrative design is game design in the same way that we have specialized subsets of game design like combat design weapon design or system design I

approach narrative design like game design but focused on how we're telling story narrative design is designing stories from the building blocks of gameplay that's because at its core interactive storytelling is a combination of actions or interactions and narrative for me you can't begin to tell your interactive story if you don't know what your player is going to be doing what the player does directly determines how we can tell the story and what your player does is usually determined by your based mechanics actions are verbs you know the things that you're asking your player to do when starting the plan what a question be or what kind of story to tell in a particular kind of game I always ask first what is the player doing is the player fighting how with magic with weapons are they defending what are they defending are they running what are they running running from or what are they running - are they hacking are they

hacking individually or collaboratively because yeah that changes things or are they just talking or you know are they shooting things each of these while all in service of some kind of conflict carry different meanings for players even more passive verbs like talking imply something about a story and that's because all gameplay actions imply how the character you're controlling behaves they also tell us the rules of the world a world where guns exist and where characters are more willing to use them is a very different world where characters fight with sticks or were a monkey sight with knife it has different rules different stakes and it's a very different world and the way it shows how the characters respond to violence so like I said all game played verbs imply how that character behaves in the world because they dictate what that character does gameplay isn't maybe always giving a strict plot but it is giving us these early building blocks of character or world logic and story and gameplay can

contribute a storytelling because gameplay mechanics our story in the same way we plan major beats of a story through acts those beats are also composed of buckets of actions we're asking the player to perform and what the player does the character often does as well resulting in an inherent characterization of the playable character so in practice I find our two helpful ways of looking at this there's the literal story implied by the game mechanics and by this I mean it's the plot the theme the characterizations all that kind of stuff and then there's the emotional arc generated by the game mechanics and so this is kind of like the arc of emotions the emotional journey all that kind of player centric stuff so the first one is easier to talk about I find so for this let's talk about Assassin's Creed Assassin's Creed is a game about stealthily assassinating targets and the story that is being told is one of an assassin that makes a lot of sense so let's look at it this way here are the actions you talk

to a person who needs somebody killed you kill the target then you will be rewarded for doing so with money this sets up an immediate story that we can understand you are an assassin even if we never told you Cassandra was an assassin the gameplay tells you she is okay so with this we have the basic foundations for a story that is supported by and echoed in the game paper in the gameplay mechanics how does the story change on what other actions we ask the player to do what if we ask the player to kill with a blade versus something like again versus something like a gun that is also a blade what if this was this asking your player to use a sword or a knife versus a gun implies to potentially world to potentially different world states and how this character operates in both those versions of the world and I'm not even just talking about setting players will bring their own perspectives and thoughts on these weapons and what they mean about the world they're in a

character who kills with a sword is already going to be set up differently in your players mind than a character who kills with a gun even if we haven't even told them anything about story or setting it so these are the bones of the story once we know the implications were bringing to our game then we can write story and character on top of that so that's one way mechanics tell stories the second is still storytelling but it's not a traditionally designed story in the same sense and they also want to preface that's this next example isn't my own it's one that I heard from Emily Short and she's wicked smart and so I wanted to share with everybody here think of Tetris as you're playing you're rotating pieces setting up scenarios and waiting for the right piece to complete your lines as you're doing this you're experiencing an emotional range of an emotional range that is telling your player story so you might start off pretty calm and you still are kind of calm then you get excited and then you get a little anxious and then you get even more anxious as your blocks are growing and you haven't received an Astoria straight piece yet and then you

get frustrated when you fail to turn it properly in time and then finally you get the straight please piece you slide it over it drops everything disappears you feel catharsis in that moment and then you can return to your previous calm state but now with an added layer of pride relief tension some kind of emotion layered on top that's a story it's emergent and it's player-driven but it's still a story so while you're basically only doing a set of actions rotate drop clear there is a clear emotional arc that feels like a story there's conflict there's victory there's the feet and there are mapable tropes overtop of this such as an underdog win or total domination or undefeated champ so for tetris let's look at it this way anticipation leads to tension which leads to catharsis which guess what that's a story it's an emotional story okay but for now I'm less concerned with the emotional storytelling for this talk as

I am with the literal storytelling associated with game design because that's when we can kind of more concretely and traditionally designed for in a more traditional storytelling sense so let's go back to our initial question what is the player doing let's look at defend purely as an example because I think it contains some really neat story ideas certain actions like defend carry a very different meaning to players than verbs like attack even if the player defending looks a lot like attacking they still mean something different that meaning is where we find the kernel of story defend often invokes a sense of protection whereas attack can the more often implies aggression defending your home is a very different story than attacking somebody else's home even without getting into explicit character motivations so on one dev team we wanted a mechanic that was essentially about defeating ways of enemies we kept calling it defend even though that wasn't the name of the mechanic it was called something else entirely and to be honest I don't remember the sign and

it's because us as developers defeating ways of enemies inherently felt like we were defending something and we kept getting confused because whenever we said defend the next question was always okay so what are we defending and we just didn't have an answer sometimes so then more often than not felt awkward weary evaluated the mechanic in light of the space story we felt like it was telling to make it more aligned and therefore clearer to us as developers and to our players so if you haven't played it loud on plan next is the game I worked on where you play as musicians defending your stage from attacking aliens it's about protecting yourself in a hostile place as the player you didn't choose to go to this new planet you were forcibly taken there by the aliens so the musicians are defending themselves against the attacking aliens who in turn are just being dicks and attacking you because that's what they do so defend sure you can be defending by attacking like the musicians and loud but your primary motivation is to survive not kill compare this to the aliens and loud who are just attacking

without any sort of defense motivation at all for dev teams and for me in particular it's important to figure out what emotional response you want a player to have in that moment you want with the player to feel aggressive or do you want them to feel like they need to protect something be it themselves a place an idea answering those questions will help determine what the mechanics should actually be especially if members of your team disagree so for me we answer those questions in part by looking at what the emotional response we wanted to come out of the experience was and everything kind of fell into place after that so a quick disclaimer if I were to say something like defend is more often about protection and attack is more often about aggression this doesn't mean this is the only thing those two words and verbs can ever mean but what I'm trying to get at is that they do mean something to your players and it's important to try and recognize what that something is in order to get the best fit between the mechanics and the story of your game and not even just in a little narrative dissonance sense but just to get the best possible fit between player actions and story

essentially players will bring their own understanding of what certain words mean to the game and that in turn will influence the base kind of story the players are already being told okay so what about when you let your players decide which type of action to take letting your player choose between two actions changes character in really neat ways that can help though we can help guide as designers so let's look at Corvo from Dishonored so Corvo can either kill lots of people or kill no people or kill some people you know if corporate was being kind of non-committal about the whole thing dishonest KL system creates two entirely different stories of who Corvo is or just as importantly who Corvo feels like to the player one could be a more shadowy human more calculated a bit slower to act the other is maybe more brazen at grass aggressive perhaps more impatient because not with not killing when given the chance implies something about characterization so when players choose their route they're choosing a bit of who Corvo is as well dishonour would be a very different game and korva

would be an entirely different character if the choices were between say something like computer hacking and killing or befriending in kilee even if the plot was the literal exact same corvo's characterization changes either implicitly or explicitly if he kills or if he doesn't because what Corbeau is doing is determining who he actually is so when setting up two different playstyles for your players to use think about what the choices say about the character and how the character has changed in both contexts the changing context can be really powerful for characterization and emotional engagement and even shape the nature of the world your character is in a renegade femshep positions authority power and heroics very differently from a fully Paragon femshep because how they enforce their power in the world it's these basic gameplay blocks that set the foundation for us to tell the story and write characters and plot that feels good to the player it feels good and it makes sense and it's important to consider because gameplay is gonna be

part of the storytelling experience whether we want it to or not it just is so now I want to talk a little bit more in depth but some personal examples I've worked on in order to kind of show how I put this thinking into practice personally alright so let's talk about talking um I've written and designed a bunch of interactive fiction and interactive fiction often relies on talking as its main mechanic in most games talking is more than just conversing to gain information or to advance the plot the player then often has the potential to act upon the information given so what are the kind of actions we can give here with that question in mind for one game I designed an entire secret system we're players to receive secrets from other characters if the player to show if the player then chose to share that secret then the relationship of that character would change negatively obviously this secret system added an extra dynamic to building or destroying friendships in a bit game about trying to fit in I focus on the fact that

talking has reciprocal repercussions basically people are gonna respond to what you say to them that's kind of a talking is so usually talking as a you so using talking as a way to create combat combat like conflict made a lot of sense to me so if I wanted to use conversation as conflict I figured there were three important facets of that conversations are reciprocal there will be consequences conversations can build or destroy friendships and conversations already have all this inherent drama to them considering these points as my ways into building conversations as conflict led me to the whole secret system ultimately I was curious about what kind of drama already exists in the act of talking and making the act of talking with somebody even more dynamic and potentially full of conflict that serves a purpose beyond just plot progression because plot progression can be dramatic but nothing is more dramatic than preteen drama so then what about listening listening feels similar to talking in a lot of ways and that's the typical part of a

conversation before morticians tale we use listening a bit differently during the funeral portion of the game you can only listen to mourners verses navigating a conversation tree listening forces the player to take a backseat focusing on on listening instead of talking gave us the space to more fully explore the dynamic range of grief and how grief manifesting people the player isn't driving or guiding the conversation as they would in a conversation tree they're listening to learn essentially so if I wanted to present listening as learning I thought about emphasizing mourners experience not having best answers in a dialogue tree all which ended up preventing any sort of sort of gaming the system rather than trying to win a conversation by finding the best answers we focus on making the player listen to the mourner and in effect in an effort to more fully convey disparate emotional reactions to death so for me I focused in on this idea of listening as learning and the natural fall out of that thinking shaped how I wrote those bits of dialogue okay so now

instead of talking about games about destroying friendships and listening to mourners let's talk about cults I've been lucky enough to also work on escape rooms and energies in my career I'm the little one in this picture both escape rooms and I orgies focus on collaborative puzzle solving or deciphering puzzle solving or deciphering as an action tends to require an extensive and detailed knowledge of a very specific thing like codes languages numbers all that kind of stuff so I will say I learned so much about code breaking encryption and other really smart fancy number things while working on these kind of games that I've obviously all forgotten I've also never felt dumber in my entire lives because there's just so much stuff to know in the world there's just so much stuff and but luckily for people like me energies in escape rooms often capitalize on multiple players possessing the knowledge and importantly for gameplay purposes players like to share information with their team members or fellow players energies in escape rooms are so often successful because they don't rely on one person knowing everything but rather

because multiple people will know multiple things and then share that knowledge effectively everyone gets to be part of the big brain that solves the puzzle and wins the day so it's okay that I was dumb because other people were smart so rather than assuming one single person can and will have all the very specific knowledge needed to solve cypher puzzles we often designed around the idea of sharing knowledge or puzzle solving as collective power designing for puzzle solving as collective power give us a few things that we could focus on relying on knowledge sharing letting play at letting skilled players be ambassadors and support other players both which focused on encouraging collaborative puzzle solving and because sharing knowledge disperses power out to everyone who has it these games often became about working together to stop some sort of evil resisting oppressive governments and freeing the village from a curse where stories that actually came out of the mechanic of sharing knowledge as empowering everybody so with all these above examples we didn't create a gameplay system in a vac

instead we looked at the basic story behind the system and built the two simultaneously we designed what the player does in direct support with the story wanted to tell and vice versa so for my experience I'm working with a bunch of different teams on a bunch of different kind of games I have some tips that I generally try to use to encourage this kind of thinking and I especially use this one maybe not everybody is on board with the idea that narrative design is game design and that narrative deserves to be part of the pre-production process we do and we can help so to kick-start this process I run through a similar set of questions every single time what is the player doing what does this action mean how would a character behave in a certain situation and if you have a character already how was that character behave in this situation would they take the action you want your player to do if not what type of person would take this sort of action and how would that character behave if they were pushed to their breaking point because the way people respond to things changes based

on the context around that so these are super basic but they help set myself up in the proper direction before I get too deep into things like breaking stories so let's find characters designing systems etc this is all kind of first steps for me that I tried to do at the same time as these other things and I do this by working directly with the game designers I'm making them talk to me I'm making them answer all of my questions because I have a lot okay so cool right it is cool but why why does any of this even matter what do we gain from designing this way I mean you're probably doing this already whether deliberately or not but intentionally including narrative design alongside game design will help make development smoother I promise it will help it will also make our games better because it can support in so many ways it will help a story coherence allowing narrative to be on the ground level of game design will give your game greater story coherence ludonarrative dissonance has the reputation it does for a reason players buck when the story in games I

don't match or when they've been asked to do something they don't believe their character ever would evaluating the narrative context of gameplay verbs and actions will help cut this out this dissonance right from the very beginning but the reverse is true too well the player does is understood largely through the story attached to it asking your players to do something without providing context will often leave players feeling confused and unmotivated and that's because story provides motivation in context for gameplay mechanics because yeah context is narrative if you've asked your player or to cut down 12 trees every week but never told them that you need to do this in order to get wood to start a fire your survivalist campsite the the motivation for doing so can become lost or maybe the player will be angry at doing the quest that feels too repetitive they don't understand why they're doing it it's important story attaches meaning and motivation to mechanics that might otherwise be confusing or lack player motivation if gameplay a narrative our design simultaneously than the player experience is less likely to be dissonant or confusing and the player is more likely to be motivated to complete quests or even the game and all this is

becoming even more important as the types of games we make change with multiplayer and live games we have less space to tell linear stories as players and we have even less space to communicate the story to players letting the gameplay verbs we employ do some of the heavy lifting gives us another storytelling tool when we often don't have the full range of traditional storytelling tools at our disposal so one example of this that I really like in a multiplayer live game is debye daylight in debye daylight the survivors need to prepare generators power exits they must also avoid the killer who's trying to kill them and they can do this by using flashlights using maps to find the exit and healing themselves in others but they can never attack rather than relying on cutscenes our character dialogue that is likely to be skipped almost entirely in multiplayer context the game communicates the survivors are trapped are not powerful enough to defeat the killer and must escape all through the gameplay mechanics themselves we know the story through the actions the players make the characters do and just like dialogue and

environmental storytelling gameplay mechanics become one of our tools for telling story so yeah let's design together when you design with narrative on the ground level from a space of understanding that the actions you're asking your player to do implies some sort of story then you can better capitalize on this relationship to create a more cohesive experience it creates more fulfilling gameplay and more seamless stories with greater coherency for player motivation it will also help development because all stakeholders are present to identify potential problems and work on solutions together before they actually become problems I mean after all we're all working on the same game so why would we not designed together thank you so much [Applause]